A thoroughly researched panegyric to a man and an era.
A loving reanimation of the 1884 baseball season, during which Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn won 59 games and hurled his team into the first World Series.
As Providence Journal deputy editorial page editor Achorn dutifully notes, 1880s baseball, flourishing before motion pictures and audio recordings, is a game both familiar and surpassingly alien. Preserved in sometimes skimpy, and always biased, newspaper accounts, the achievement of Radbourn, the Providence Grays’ ace pitcher, is indeed astonishing. Well before the introduction of relief pitchers, the starters were expected to play the entire game and to pitch often, sometimes on consecutive days—and sometimes even both ends of a doubleheader, as Radbourn did on Memorial Day, winning both. He won the next day, too. Achorn digs into Radbourn’s Illinois background and follows his ancestors back to England. Little Charles learned to love hunting, purebred dogs, baseball and later on, Carrie Stanhope, the legendary woman who ran a Providence boarding house and eventually married Radbourn. The author charts Radbourn’s swift rise in an era when pitchers flamed out quickly because of arm injuries; Radbourn and his colleagues lived with continuous pain. Achorn pauses occasionally to portray the pitcher’s rivals and teammates and to identify the differences in yesteryear’s game. The fielders used only their bare hands—even catchers had but minimal protection; foul balls were not strikes; a single umpire, often corrupt, called each game. The author also supplies needed cultural history—e.g., the train ride from the East Coast to Chicago took three days; Buffalo Bill arrived in Providence that same season. An unabashed fan, Achorn occasionally drifts into excess and cliché (catchers needed “dauntless courage”; the Chicago team “ate weaker clubs for breakfast”), but he capably delivers an entertaining story.
A thoroughly researched panegyric to a man and an era.Pub Date: March 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-182586-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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