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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
An inspiringly intense memoir for readers of adventure lit.
A much-honored climber’s exciting story of the death-defying feats that led to rock-climbing superstardom.
Honnold showed a predilection for climbing when he was still a small child. At age 5, he managed to scramble 30 feet off the ground at a climbing gym within just a few minutes. Later, he entered climbing competitions all over his home state of California. After his father died, Honnold dropped out of college and chose to live out of his mother’s minivan while climbing mountains. This book—which alternates between narratives by Honnold and writer/climber Roberts (Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest, 2015, etc.)—focuses on that remarkable and unconventional life and how Honnold, a quiet man who climbed purely for the joy of adventure, became “the most famous climber in the world” in the span of seven years. In his early days as a vagabond climber, he learned how to free solo, a form of climbing that relies on strength and skill alone. Not long after that, Honnold began attempting climbs—such as Half Dome in Yosemite and Sendero Luminoso in Mexico—that veterans of the sport believed were too difficult to do without gear or a partner. His notoriety spread quickly among rock climbers. Rapidly, Honnold became the subject of several documentaries and was receiving sponsorships that allowed him to travel the world and push the boundaries of his sport to extreme new heights. His dedication to the sport of rock climbing had its costs, however, including the painful end of a long-term relationship. Yet celebrity status also reinforced his belief in the importance of living simply. In 2012, he established the Honnold Foundation, which sought “sustainable ways to improve lives worldwide.” The humility, pioneering spirit, and courage that are the author’s personal hallmarks are both refreshing and invigorating. His account ultimately reminds readers how genuine fulfillment comes only when engaging in life fully and without fear.
An inspiringly intense memoir for readers of adventure lit.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24762-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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