A wide-screen feast for Cubs fans and a quick-witted standard for sportswriters.
From sportswriter Wojciechowski (ESPN: The Magazine), the story of a year spent with Wrigley Field as home base, with trips radiating out into the surrounding neighborhoods (and to away ballparks).
In some circles, it was thought that 2004 might be the year the Chicago Cubs would snap their 95 consecutive seasons without a World Series win. So, to position himself for a particularly good story, Wojciechowski attended each of the team’s 162 games to chart its quest for glory. Victory didn’t arrive for the ball club, but Wojciechowski came up with gold. Each game is an opportunity for a story, sometimes as sweet and distilled as condensed milk; others are spun out over a few pages, still others take a more serious tack—poring over the murder of a fan outside the park, in one terrible instance. Lesser but still hurtful passages include rude trades and declining talents. The author recounts discussions—sometimes as interviews, sometimes as quick prose pieces—with radio announcers, or with the guy who sings “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or the one who muffed throwing in the first pitch, with the umps, the park organist, the fans who wait outside the park for homerun balls, and the scouts. There are admiring, low-key tributes to writers like Mike Royko and Ron Shelton, who penned the screenplay for Bull Durham. And there are the ballplayers themselves, from the bench-sitters to the Hall of Fame prospects, including Greg Maddux, seeking his 300th win as a starting pitcher, and Sammy Sosa, swinging for the fences but suffering a slump year. Wojciechowski works the ironies and the absurdities of throwing in your lot with a baseball team, and he conjures the special pleasures of Wrigley Field, its lack of commercialization, its greensward, its ivy walls.
A wide-screen feast for Cubs fans and a quick-witted standard for sportswriters.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51300-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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