A heartfelt slice of time, twining Gillespie and his father’s love for each other with their love for the game of golf.
Canadian author Gillespie makes his US debut with a pleasing, personalized tour of one of golf’s woolly precincts, the links in the Scottish town of Gullane.
In the mid-1980s, Gillespie was a graduate student at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland; as a member of the varsity golf team, he got the opportunity to play some fabled courses. Having sampled their elemental pleasures, he knew that his father, a stalwart working man who enjoyed golf for the pleasure of the game itself, would likewise revel in the play, but it was not to be: his father died of a stroke before they could walk a round in Gullane. Here, we travel through the year that Gillespie spent in Gullane with his wife and daughters in the company of two veterans, Jack and Archie, who between them have a century’s experience on the town’s course. They’re guys who consider 15 rounds with the same ball to be standard practice. They also have much to say when the club is considering going public; the author himself has decided opinions about those who think golf ought to remain the private reserve of the well-to-do. From his father’s canny card playing, Gillespie learned the art of reserve and a touch of humility when it comes to acknowledging one’s shots. But he can’t share with Dad the pure and utter beauty of the linksland: wind-wracked, swelling, grassed-waved, the sea just there, green and gold and full of sky, blue or gray. Gillespie endeavors to take the course’s measure, but its hoariness keeps him at arm’s length. In the end, he is just happy to have had the time there with his family and to have imagined how his father would have addressed the links, and his son’s life.
A heartfelt slice of time, twining Gillespie and his father’s love for each other with their love for the game of golf.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5223-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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