Instructive reading for every coach and every player in every sport—and fun, too.
An exploration of how to rebuild a professional basketball team.
For those still marveling at how the once-inconsequential Golden State Warriors won two out of the last three NBA championships, look no further than Bay Area basketball reporter Malinowski’s lively book, which documents the many-moving-parts project of rebuilding the Warriors, very much as Michael Lewis’ Moneyball did so for another hapless Oakland squad, the A’s. When new owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber, bringing venture capital and Hollywood money, came onto the scene at the turn of the decade, they initiated massive changes, firing a hapless front office with a knack for losing talented players while overpaying mediocre ones and bringing in basketball legend Jerry West to work with the players. What no one had appreciated, writes the author, was that they had one key ingredient to success and didn’t really realize it—namely, Wardell Stephen Curry II, who was drafted by the team in 2009 and “was seen as a scrawny college star who performed feats that couldn’t be replicated in the pro game.” Wedding Curry’s skills to solid coaching provided by West, Steve Kerr, and a host of lieutenants, the Warriors began to show their stuff. At the same time, those strategists began to pull together other elements of success, including “an improved and retooled defense” and, yes, lots of number-crunching that gave them uncanny insight into who ought to be on the court at any given moment: “With [Kevin] Durant sitting, Golden State shot 13 percent better from the floor and a whopping 29 percent better from three,” Malinowski writes, good reason for Kerr to be constantly mindful of moving his roster in and out of the game depending on who they were up against. Obviously, it worked.
Instructive reading for every coach and every player in every sport—and fun, too.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5819-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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