The literary equivalent of a mid-July baseball game: a few highlights but largely forgettable.
A collection of anecdotes about some of the worst players, managers and owners in baseball history.
Bloopers are an enduring baseball tradition; fans never fail to appreciate watching some of the best athletes in the world stumble, bumble and trip over themselves. In attempting to import such ineptitude from the Jumbotron to the page, however, something gets lost in translation. New York Daily News columnist Bondy (Chasing the Game: America and the Quest for the World Cup, 2010) does his best to craft compelling accounts of horrendous hitters like Mario Mendoza (for whom the infamous “Mendoza Line”—a .200 batting average—is named), poor fielders like Chuck Knoblauch (who inexplicably lost the ability to make a simple throw from second base to first base) and terrible teammates like Rubén Rivera (who once stole one of Derek Jeter’s gloves and sold it to a memorabilia dealer for $2,500). Unfortunately, these player sketches quickly become monotonous, as there are only so many ways to describe ineptitude or outright mediocrity. Chapters on the worst cheaters and oddest ballplayers of all time fare better, highlighting some of the game’s most eclectic characters (including pitcher Joe Niekro, who was caught using an emery board to doctor balls) and intriguing athletes (including Chuck Connors, who would go on to TV stardom in The Rifleman). The author intends the narrative to be humorous, and he succeeds in places—primarily in the captions of the pictures that appear sporadically throughout the book. Too often, however, the most interesting tidbits aren’t related to terrible on-field performance, but rather to the colorful characters themselves, which would have been a far more interesting focus than using advanced sabermetrics to definitively identify players whose weak traditional statistics speak for themselves.
The literary equivalent of a mid-July baseball game: a few highlights but largely forgettable.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-53612-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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
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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