A fine collection by a much-missed writer who was just rising to the top of his game.
An assemblage of journalism by the late sportswriter.
Just 49 at the time of his death in December 2022, Wahl, author of Masters of Soccer and The Beckham Experiment, was far more than an ordinary sportswriter: New Yorker editor David Remnick deemed Wahl’s college-journalism profile of Vietnam War correspondent Gloria Emerson “among the very best student papers I’ve ever seen.” Emerson was one of Wahl’s mentors; another was the legendary sportswriter Frank Deford, “a hidebound soccerphobe.” Yet Wahl, who concocted phrases such as “an angry parabola” to describe a particularly noteworthy kick, did more than any other writer to elevate soccer in the national sports conversation, having learned the game as an exchange student in Argentina. Wahl was just as good at writing about basketball, and he was one of the first to recognize the genius of a teenager named LeBron James, who “exists in a weird netherworld between high school student and multimillionaire, between dependent child and made man.” His writing about the world’s game was equally prescient—e.g., he discerned star quality in a little-known defender named Brandi Chastain. Wahl also had a fine eye for the infrastructure of the game: Doha may be a paradise for moneyed fans, but the author dug deep to show the terrible abuse suffered by guest workers in Qatar during the 2022 World Cup. Wahl was at his best when in some dudgeon, but he also enjoyed working a good conceit, reveling, for instance, in an Argentinian TV ad where tango, beer, and soccer meet in a scene “that could easily have been scripted by the writer Jorge Luis Borges”—one that hinges on a miracle that proves that God loves the game as much as anyone.
A fine collection by a much-missed writer who was just rising to the top of his game.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780593726761
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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