by Bill Simmons ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2009
Like stumbling across Roadhouse on late-night cable: It may induce the occasional wince, but it’s nearly impossible not to...
ESPN columnist and pop-culture maven Simmons (Now I Can Die in Peace: How ESPN’s Sports Guy Found Salvation, with a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank, and the 2004 Red Sox, 2005) strives to write the definitive NBA retrospective.
Longtime fans of the wildly popular, sometimes controversial Sports Guy will find a new wrinkle in his magnum opus—an overutilized freedom to indiscriminately use expletives. Otherwise, this doorstop of a book functions as an (extremely) extended version of the author’s column: a hodgepodge of basketball minutiae, brazen but insightful and occasionally contentious declarations and 1980s movies references. Passion drips off the page like beads of sweat as the author presents topics ranging from a breakdown of why 11-time champ Bill Russell was superior to stat machine Wilt Chamberlain (his 20,000 bedroom conquests notwithstanding), to a proposal for a pyramid-shaped NBA Hall of Fame. Throughout the 700 pages, Simmons displays an impressive acuity for cogent analysis and proves himself the undisputed champion of killing jokes so many times over that they ultimately become funny again. The HOF pitch constitutes the book’s centerpiece, with stars past and present meticulously assigned to echelons of increasing prestige based on their talent and achievements. By judging players on whether or not, in his estimation, they understood “The Secret”—a desire to sacrifice personal statistics for the sake of team success and championships—Simmons sets himself up for a round of backlash from fans and players alike. However, even if readers take umbrage with his rankings or irreverence, there’s no denying that he has achieved exactly what his hypothetical HOF would set out to do—honor the league’s colorful history and pay homage to the players (some pioneers, some selfish and self-destructive, some transcendent icons) who made professional basketball a global phenomenon.
Like stumbling across Roadhouse on late-night cable: It may induce the occasional wince, but it’s nearly impossible not to get sucked in and keep coming back for more.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-51176-8
Page Count: 736
Publisher: ESPN Books/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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by Margot Page ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1995
A rare woman in male-dominated waters, Page, editor of The American Fly Fisher, is more interested in ``the light on the water'' than on the size of fish, in ``inspiration, not data.'' Although she was a latecomer to the fishing mania, Page's essays show that her eventual infection was inevitable, given her family heritage and her marriage to Tom Rosenbauer (The Orvis Fly- Fishing Guide, not reviewed). The granddaughter of Sparse Grey Hackle (a.k.a. Alfred Waterbury Miller), who wrote Fishless Days, Angling Nights (1971), she grew up around fishing but, unlike the boys, was not encouraged to participate. The family passion did, though, land her a job with Nick Lyons's New York publishing firm, whose daily concerns focused on angling (Lyons provides this volume's foreword). In 1984, promised a canoe ride in Vermont by Rosenbauer, Page finally tried her hand at casting and became hooked. Her first casts, she writes, ``are better forgotten,'' but she vividly, if minimalistically, recalls her first trout: ``A silvery little fish, and it was wee.'' These essays find Page fishing in Vermont's Battenkill River, off a small island near Cape Cod, and in Montana, where she's astonished to find trout in the Missouri River ``in grouped pods...like a herd of porpoises leaping against the current.'' But it's the little rivers—``the jewels of the outdoor experiments''—that most capture Page's fancy. She writes of trying to balance her career, marriage, and motherhood (she and Rosenbauer named their daughter Brooke) with a lust for wild trout. In one funny scene, a pencil-less Page, suddenly struck by literary inspiration, must negotiate a field of cow flops and electrified fences while wearing wet, sagging jeans. Deftly shifting gears in the same essay, she recounts her mother's slow death. Page adds a touch of light poetry to a genre little known for graceful writing. (12 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55821-367-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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by Bear Grylls ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001
Occasionally breathless and clunky, this is a vivid and inspiring read all the same, sure to find a large audience among...
Another stone added to the growing mountain of Everest adventures.
Newcomer Grylls was serving in the British army in 1996 when he suffered a parachuting accident that left him with three broken vertebrae and a badly bruised spinal cord. In the months of physical therapy that followed, this avid climber rekindled a childhood dream to climb the world’s tallest peak—a feat that very few mountaineers younger than 30 have ever managed to pull off. “Everest is no place to prove yourself,” the author admits. “The likelihood of reaching the summit is so slim that you’re inevitably setting yourself up to be disappointed.” Even so, he talked his way into a slot on a 1998 British expedition led by a tough-as-nails ex-Marine commando who urged his teammates through the icy, windswept hells that Grylls describes quite effectively. For instance, he tells us that one area of Everest, the Icefalls, is so named because great spears of ice break off the sun-warmed slope in mid-afternoon, sharp and heavy enough to kill anyone standing “deep within the jaws of the overhang”; his account of the party’s race across the region is a fine set piece that doesn’t compare at all badly to the best Everest narratives. Against all odds, the author endured the Icefalls, the Lhotse Face, and other challenges the mountain threw up along the way, eventually arriving at the aptly named Death Zone, where, hyperventilating, he communed with the body of Rob Hall (whose death stands at the dramatic heart of Jon Krakauer’s 1997 account, Into Thin Air) and then took the summit—all at the tender age of 23.
Occasionally breathless and clunky, this is a vivid and inspiring read all the same, sure to find a large audience among outdoor-adventure and climbing buffs.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58574-250-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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