Lapchick respected basketball, and fans of the game will respect this warm and intelligent biography.
The history of basketball as seen through the life of Joe Lapchick, an original Celtic, the first coach of the New York Knicks and the longtime roundball patriarch of St. John’s University.
Alfieri, who was a point guard at St. John’s, helped win a national championship for Lapchick in 1959. His book—mostly biography, a little memoir—relates the life of a man who helped shepherd the game of basketball from the 1920s into the ’60s. He covers Lapchick’s glamorous but wearying days as center for the barnstorming Celtics in the ’20s and ’30s; his tough-but-humble approach in his first decade at St. John’s, when the Redman and Madison Square Garden became synonymous with college hoops; his struggles in the early days of the NBA, where he supported integration; and his last decade as the wise overseer of a perennial powerhouse back at St. John’s. Alfieri does a yeoman’s job in concisely presenting the 50 years of Lapchick’s storied career without succumbing to tedium and trivia. Nor does the author paint a completely rosy picture of the sport’s history as he addresses directly the exploitation of athletes, racism in sports and gambling scandals. The narrative stalls a bit when Alfieri focuses on his own experiences playing in college. But at his best, the author provides, through one pivotal figure, a clearer understanding of the issues behind the development of modern basketball, of its style of play, of its social significance and of its maneuverings to become profitable entertainment.
Lapchick respected basketball, and fans of the game will respect this warm and intelligent biography.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59228-869-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A broad and deep look at Japan’s medieval referents, and a capable illustration of a martial art form steeped in rich...
A reflective and entertaining journey through Japan, as the author seeks to reconnect with his martial arts sensei.
Lowry is a student of koryu (not to be confused with kendo), a style of Japanese classical swordsmanship. Koryu is a medieval art, like Noh and the tea ceremony, a style of combat born on the battlefield–but more importantly, it’s a way to address the world (though an esoteric one: Lowry may well be the only American practicing the art in the United States). Indeed, present-day practitioners refrain from exercising its fatal possibilities. Lowry’s sensei left the U.S. to return to Japan, urging Lowry to follow. Though his life headed in a different direction, he never forgot his training–when the time was ripe, he journeyed to Japan to join his sensei. The narrative revolves around this pivotal decision, and it provides a warm center from which the author expounds on such topics as the glories of a Japanese bath; the evolution of the Samurai caste; the peculiarities of Japanese landscape architecture; the elements of proper sandal-tying; the custom of the premarital shenanigans called yobai; and the teachings of mikkyo Buddhism. He also includes the vital story of the sword–what it reveals about Japanese life and technology, social structure and aesthetic values, etiquette, apprenticeship and the process of education. Lowry’s seriousness lends an earnest cast to the proceedings, but he’s not without a sense of humor–commenting upon his accomplished slurping of noodles, a friend’s wife notes, “He really sucks!”
A broad and deep look at Japan’s medieval referents, and a capable illustration of a martial art form steeped in rich tradition.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-890536-10-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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