An engaging trip around Major League Baseball’s bases that may inspire readers to go on their own ballpark odysseys.
Debut author Kabakoff chronicles his quest to visit every major league ballpark in this cheerful travelogue.
The author grew up attending games at Yankee Stadium with his father, but in 2001, at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, he met a man intent on visiting every baseball park with a major league team. The idea nested in the back of Kabakoff’s mind, and over the next several years, he took in games at New York’s Shea Stadium, Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium, Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field. On a 2005 vacation in Southern California, he watched the Anaheim Angels battle the Boston Red Sox, and Kabakoff’s game was on—he vowed to visit every major league ballpark himself. From August 2005 to September 2011, Kabakoff traveled to every major league city in the U.S. and Canada, not only to watch the hometown teams, but also to explore the ballparks, sample the concessions, visit the halls of fame and meet local fans. Throughout this chatty book, he recaps memorable games, spars with mascots, collects oddball souvenirs and receives frequent sunburns. He also expertly summarizes several team and ballpark histories along the way. There’s nothing scientific about the way he compares stadiums’ retractable roofs or evaluates fans’ enthusiasm, but his casual metrics will likely make indelible impressions on readers nonetheless. His writing style is boyish and agreeable, informal and full of occasionally silly wit. Serious fans won’t find many historical tidbits that they don’t already know, but there are a few odd gems, such as the reason why Honus Wagner’s baseball card is so valuable and what was unearthed during the construction of Denver’s Coors Field. Kabakoff brings his baseball narrative full circle as he describes how his childhood delight in discovering baseball reappeared in his young cousin Rachel, and he expands upon this legacy of shared experiences in the book’s final pages.
An engaging trip around Major League Baseball’s bases that may inspire readers to go on their own ballpark odysseys.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989547208
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading...
A maddening, well-constructed tale of medical discovery and corporate coverup, set in morgues, laboratories, courtrooms, and football fields.
Nigeria-born Bennet Omalu is perhaps an unlikely hero, a medical doctor board-certified in four areas of pathology, “anatomic, clinical, forensic, and neuropathology,” and a well-rounded specialist in death. When his boss, celebrity examiner Cyril Wecht (“in the autopsy business, Wecht was a rock star”), got into trouble for various specimens of publicity-hound overreach, Omalu was there to offer patient, stoical support. The student did not surpass the teacher in flashiness, but Omalu was a rock star all his own in studying the brain to determine a cause of death. Laskas’ (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Hidden America, 2012, etc.) main topic is the horrific injuries wrought to the brains and bodies of football players on the field. Omalu’s study of the unfortunate brain of Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, who died in 2002 at 50 of a supposed heart attack, brought new attention to the trauma of concussion. Laskas trades in sportwriter-ese, all staccato delivery full of tough guy–isms and sports clichés: “He had played for fifteen seasons, a warrior’s warrior; he played in more games—two hundred twenty—than any other player in Steelers history. Undersized, tough, a big, burly white guy—a Pittsburgh kind of guy—the heart of the best team in history.” A little of that goes a long way, but Laskas, a Pittsburgher who first wrote of Omalu and his studies in a story in GQ, does sturdy work in keeping up with a grim story that the NFL most definitely did not want to see aired—not in Omalu’s professional publications in medical journals, nor, reportedly, on the big screen in the Will Smith vehicle based on this book.
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading it.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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