Essential for all students of sports history and of photography and a fine gift for buffs as well.
Superb anthology of sports photographs, coupled with an illuminating text exploring the making of images both iconic and unknown.
Of the iconic imagery, most readers of a certain age can conjure in their minds a facsimile of, say, Olympic athletes raising clenched fists on the podium, Muhammad Ali smacking Joe Frazier, or American women’s soccer player Brandi Chastain raising her jersey to celebrate her team’s World Cup victory. “The missing link…is the photographer,” writes photo curator Buckland (History of Photography/Cooper Union; Who Shot Rock & Roll, 2009, etc.), who remedies that by including biographical and critical sketches of the photographers behind the lens at those climactic moments. Some of her choices are comparatively unknown, however, such as a wonderful image of two young players, shrouded in dust, sliding into home plate in the 2006 College World Series. If carved into marble, it might have been a study for the Laocoön Group, but as it is, Damian Strohmeyer’s photograph is a perfect capture of bodies in motion, shot “high enough to show the gradations of color, textures, and markings on the field, but close enough for the viewer to feel part of the action.” That photograph is followed by one just as impressive, this one taken by “the only official Austrian photographer at the 1936 Berlin Olympics,” Lothar Rübelt, who preceded that accomplishment with a stunning image of Jewish runners crossing a finish line in a 1921 contest. There’s also a great shot of a young Cassius Clay emerging from the ocean like Poseidon, caught by Flip Schulke, a Sports Illustrated photographer who never caught on that Clay/Ali couldn’t swim. This is a collection of superlatives, with both subjects and artists in the finest of forms; it’s difficult to single out highlights, therefore, but one surely is David Burnett’s diving photographs, some taken with an old Speed Graphic camera “like the press photographers of yore used.”
Essential for all students of sports history and of photography and a fine gift for buffs as well.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35223-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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