A comprehensive biography of one of the more accomplished, if unexciting, players in major-league history.
From baseball historian Alexander (Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era, 2001, etc.), a detailed history of one of baseball’s greatest centerfielders.
Although Tris Speaker (aka “Spoke” and “the Grey Eagle”) may not be known to many sports fans, he was for years one of the best players in the game. In a career that spanned more than 20 years, Speaker was one of the game’s most consistent producers, eventually becoming baseball’s career leader in doubles, and was in the top ten in career hits, triples and runs, eventually retiring after the 1928 season with an incredible .345 lifetime batting average (fifth best all-time). Speaker began his career with the Boston Red Sox, where he earned a reputation as a defensive standout with a strong arm and tremendous speed, an asset he also used to great advantage on the base paths. While never a prodigious power threat, Speaker was one of the best contact hitters in baseball. He won a batting title in 1916, briefly breaking Ty Cobb’s stranglehold on the honor. His accomplishments weren’t limited to individual accolades, however. Speaker won two World Series championships with the Red Sox before concerns about his age and salary led the team to sell his contract to the Cleveland Indians, where Speaker won another World Series title five years later. Despite his athletic success, Speaker was not a tremendously interesting figure. Alexander attempts to explain this away by saying that “the private lives of ballplayers in his day generally remained private,” a sentiment that fails to account for the fascinating private lives of Speaker’s contemporaries Cobb and Babe Ruth. Although Speaker traveled with the notorious Cobb on off-season hunting trips, and faced controversy when he was forced to retire as a manager after being accused of fixing a game, Alexander is less interested in these episodes than in reciting the individual games and statistics that cemented Speaker’s reputation as a member of the inaugural class of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
A comprehensive biography of one of the more accomplished, if unexciting, players in major-league history.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-87074-517-1
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.
A disjointed debut memoir about how competitive swimming shaped the personal and artistic sensibilities of a respected illustrator.
Through a series of vignettes, paintings and photographs that often have no sequential relationship to each other, Shapton (The Native Trees of Canada, 2010, etc.) depicts her intense relationship to all aspects of swimming: pools, water, races and even bathing suits. The author trained competitively throughout her adolescence, yet however much she loved racing, “the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn’t motivate me.” In 1988 and again in 1992, she qualified for the Olympic trials but never went further. Soon afterward, Shapton gave up competition, but she never quite ended her relationship to swimming. Almost 20 years later, she writes, “I dream about swimming at least three nights a week.” Her recollections are equally saturated with stories that somehow involve the act of swimming. When she speaks of her family, it is less in terms of who they are as individuals and more in context of how they were involved in her life as a competitive swimmer. When she describes her adult life—which she often reveals in disconnected fragments—it is in ways that sometimes seem totally random. If she remembers the day before her wedding, for example, it is because she couldn't find a bathing suit to wear in her hotel pool. Her watery obsession also defines her view of her chosen profession, art. At one point, Shapton recalls a documentary about Olympian Michael Phelps and draws the parallel that art, like great athleticism, is as “serene in aspect” as it is “incomprehensible.”
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.Pub Date: July 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15817-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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