Pensive and shrewd.
A thinking person's collection of sports essays.
“Sports and politics have always been, for me, in curiously close conversation, alliance, overlap, competition,” the always stimulating Shields (Enough About You, 2002, etc.) writes. That means he feels free to range over a panoply of topics, from racism to tattoos (this theme gets a whole chapter of dense paragraphs strung together like pearls) to the weird vibe in the broadcast booth, “shadowed by the homosexual panic implicit in the fact that it consists for the most part of a bunch of out-of-shape white men sitting around talking about black men’s buff bodies.” Even more than politics, Shields is powerfully drawn to myth and metaphor, to sports figures of composure and grace like coach Phil Jackson (“if Buddhism, a fundamentalist childhood, and political idealism are the building blocks of his leadership style, they're also the ingredients of his spookily hyper-rational perfectionism”), the Seattle Mariner Ichiro Suzuki (“against the bottomless hype and megalomania of contemporary sports, Ichiro's strut-free sanity seemed strange and new”), and San Antonio Spur Tim Duncan (“absolutely imperturbable, Buddhistically detached, cool beyond cool”). Is a Duncan even marketable anymore? Shields wonders. Not that he favors gangsters, but, he admits, “I’m not sure we go to the NBA Finals to witness the peace that passeth understanding.” Yet the author is a mild, reflective man who suspects there is a strong element of resurrection and salvation in sports (and sport movies: not Raging Bull, but Field of Dreams), who can dissect Charles Barkley straddling the line (“Barkley’s race-anger is exactly the amount of race-anger we can process, which is to say: not that much”), and who can cobble together a fluid chapter out of sporting clichés: ten pages that sound either like wacky Shakespeare or a whole lot of ironic license plates tied end-to-end.
Pensive and shrewd.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4774-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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BOOK REVIEW
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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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