A striking collection of images that ably spotlight the balletic artistry of board sports.
Skateboarders and surfers defy gravity on a California beach in this vibrant photography book.
Averill, a photographer, surfer, and skateboarder, collects 10 years of his photos from the Venice, California, beach, which hosts an iconic surf culture as well as a thriving beachside skateboarding park (which, alas, is currently buried in sand because of COVID-19 restrictions). The setting offers a wealth of resonant visual juxtapositions. The ocean pictures feature surfers riding roughly 4-to-12-foot waves that curl into translucent green-blue pipes amid gorgeous beachscapes, where sea and sun mesh to drape the hills in a golden mist. The skateboard park is a riotous sea, frozen in stone, shaped in curves and undulations, and surfaced in perfectly smooth, gray concrete; it’s a terrain that looks simultaneously austere and sensuous through Averill’s lens. (A few photos cover excursions to grungier Los Angeles skateboarding sites, including a giant drainpipe and an abandoned swimming pool.) In part, the photos are an engaging fashion catalog; the surfers seem somewhat buttoned-down in their neoprene wetsuit uniforms, but the skateboarders feature a profusion of long hair and dreadlocks inside no-nonsense helmets and bulky padding on top of floridly tattooed skin, open to the sky. (Bridging the divide is a classic California tableau of a blond-haired woman in a bikini gliding along on a skateboard—while carrying a surfboard.) Still, there’s much commonality in the athleticism of surfers and skateboarders as they thread their ways along vertical surfaces and rocket off of them. Averill’s skateboard photos are particularly vivid in their portraits of elegant aerobatics; he captures the skaters high in midair, sometimes sideways or upside down, clinging nonchalantly—or not at all—to their flimsy boards. Their postures are crouched and twisted with spindly arms flung out for balance, yet poised and perfectly at ease. The result is a captivating vision of grace.
A striking collection of images that ably spotlight the balletic artistry of board sports.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73337-370-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The Hesperium Group, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
A convincing case for the societal benefits of sports fandom.
A Fox Sports executive and the founder of a consulting firm explore the social value of fandom in this nonfiction book.
Chicago Cubs season ticket holder Nick Camfield’s fandom “runs at least three generations deep,” and every trip to Wrigley Field “transports” him back to his childhood experience of watching games with his father. In conducting interviews with the Cubs enthusiast and others for this well-researched work, Valenta and Sikorjak came across dozens of individuals like Camfield whose emotional well-being and favorite memories revolved around sports—from Little League coaches and fantasy football leaguers to local fan club members and season ticket holders. In addition to anecdotal oral histories, the authors (self-described data geeks) convincingly deploy a host of statistical data to back their argument that not only do sports fans “have more friends,” they also “exhibit stronger measures of wellbeing, happiness, confidence, and optimism than non-fans.” Not only does fandom bring families closer together, the volume argues, but it is also an essential tool—for instance, it is used by immigrants to find a welcome home in new cities or countries. And as much as rivalry is central to the world of sports, fandom, the book contends, can actually “soften the hardened boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ ” Valenta, the senior vice president of strategy and analytics for Fox Sports, and Sikorjak, the founder of an analytics consulting firm and a former executive with Madison Square Garden, combine their career insights into American sports with a firm grasp of data-driven analysis that is accompanied by a network of scholarly endnotes. At times their prose can revel in the sappy nostalgia of sports history, which may alienate more objective sociologists while gripping the average fan. Still, their writing effectively blends keen storytelling with erudite statistical analysis that will appeal to both scholars of human behavior and lifelong sports enthusiasts. The book’s readability is enhanced by an ample use of full-color charts, graphics, diagrams, and other visual aids that support its overall message that the value of sports goes far beyond its mere entertainment value, as its “social power” has the potential to “heal an ailing world.”
A convincing case for the societal benefits of sports fandom.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9858428-1-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Silicon Valley Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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