The book doesn’t quite hit the insightful levels of those by Scott Eyman or David Thomson, just as the film isn’t quite The...
An everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about look at a cult movie whose reputation has grown in the four decades since its initial release.
Entertainment Weekly film critic Nashawaty (Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B Movie, 2013) ventures that Caddyshack (1980) first took shape as a kind of lesser entry in a flurry of films born of the nexus of Saturday Night Live, the National Lampoon, and massive piles of cocaine: The Blues Brothers, Meatballs, Animal House, etc. It was also a more pointed exercise in class warfare at the outset than when it eventually emerged, many drafts later, to critical indifference. Putting on his Peter Biskind hat, Nashawaty connects this subversiveness to more serious films such as Mean Streets and Easy Rider while seeing it as a generational repudiation of comparatively treacly fare such as Clint Eastwood’s orangutan comedies and the Smokey and the Bandit franchise. Though born of the free-wheeling, madcap cohort of fledgling director Harold Ramis (who called the movie his “$6 million scholarship to film school”) and writers Brian Doyle-Murray and the doomed Doug Kenney, Caddyshack was thoroughly vetted by studio hacks—fortunately, no one listened to them. Nashawaty steers readers through now-familiar scenes, such as Bill Murray’s near-lethal wielding of a pitchfork and Chevy Chase’s suave twitting of the uber-rich Ted Knight, brought to warp speed with the arrival of Rodney Dangerfield. What is constantly surprising, and most pleasantly so, is how these scenes could have been very different had other roads been taken—e.g., had the overburdened Bill Murray not found a spare few weeks to film and not been given free rein to improvise or had the casting director been able to land Mickey Rourke in the place of Michael O’Keefe for the central (though, in the final product, somewhat diminished) role of Danny Noonan.
The book doesn’t quite hit the insightful levels of those by Scott Eyman or David Thomson, just as the film isn’t quite The Maltese Falcon. Still, Nashawaty provides an eye-opening pleasure for Caddyshack fans.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-10595-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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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