An astute if youthful take on a violent, timeworn subject.
Entertaining if glib account of a neophyte journalist’s year on the boxing circuit.
Jones’s prologue recounts how he started writing on a whim at age 25, covering boxing for a new Canadian newspaper, the National Post. Such insouciance informs this narrative; Jones adheres to the greenhorn’s tactic of inserting himself unnecessarily into the action (as at Muhammad Ali’s birthday reception: “He casts his wide eyes toward me. ‘Happy birthday, champ,’ I say. Even though he can’t hear me, I’m sure he feels the reverence. My present to him”). Fortunately, Jones’s prose moves crisply in this spare volume, and often registers clever or darkly amusing hits, as in his interpretation of boxing’s corrupted priorities: “Break a man, that’s good. Break a rule, that’s bad. . . . [Mike Tyson] can fall as far as he likes, because his woe makes for stories that sing.” Jones is at his best when examining the sport’s many overlooked or over-the-hill contenders, like Trevor Berbick, a rough-hewn 48-year-old journeyman who seems washed up, yet knocks out Shane Sutcliffe in a brutal Canadian championship. Jones covers seven major fights during his year of boxing journalism, and detects an unsavory pattern in which soulful, dedicated athletes are doubly undermined, by the sport’s physical toll and by the chicanery of promoters like Don King (whom Jones even questions, about whether he’d rigged the first of two contested Lennox Lewis–Evander Holyfield bouts). He’s also attuned to the sport’s uneasy multiracial future, represented by “Prince” Naseem Hamed, a grandstanding Yemeni-English featherweight who fights Mexico’s Cesar Soto in a blasted Detroit, once a major boxing town, now dependent for an economic boost on this infrequent bout which turns “disappointing, brutish, and inelegant.” Overall, Jones offers crisp portraits of contemporary boxing’s noirish desperation (he even finds the fellow who recovered Holyfield’s ear after Tyson’s infamous chomp), but is too often preoccupied by the lesser personal dramas of a young reporter on the road.
An astute if youthful take on a violent, timeworn subject.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-621-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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