Perhaps not the soul of basketball but certainly the wallet. A fine work of sports journalism and a must for every bookish...
A blow-by-blow account of the 2010-2011 NBA season, which reshaped the face of pro basketball in a flurry of big money.
There was no end to the talent assembled when the teams lined up to play out that season, but it had opened on a note that was sour to many ears when LeBron James aired a “curious vanity show” meant to promote his brand and “extend his reach further into the entertainment mainstream.” He did that, taking his free agency option to leave his home-state Cleveland Cavaliers and sign on with the Miami Heat. As fans will remember, and as NBA.com contributor Thomsen (Flutie!, 1985) painstakingly reminds us, James was but one of an extraordinary group of free agent players whose movements shook up long-settled lineups. There were Shaquille O’Neal, Chris Bosh, and Amar’e Stoudemire, among many others, joining contract-bound players like Kobe Bryant, who had lately emerged as the league’s chief bad guy: “Instead of emulating the likability of [Michael] Jordan, Kobe appeared to be following the controversial path of Jordan’s adversary Isaiah Thomas.” Everyone wanted to be Jordan, and by moving to Miami, aside from raking in a fat paycheck, James would find himself on a squad whose combined talent was guaranteed to crush all comers. It didn’t quite work out like that. Thomsen goes deep behind the scenes into locker rooms, conference rooms, and boardrooms to follow what often amounts to a nonstop clash of egos—and a few friendships, too. Notable was the rancor between old-school owners like Detroit Pistons owner Bill Davidson and arrivistes like Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. “Whereas his rivals tended to see pro sports as a secretive society of sacred traditions,” writes the author, “Cuban viewed the NBA as an entertainment industry that needed to evolve.” Evolve it did, and with sometimes unintended consequences.
Perhaps not the soul of basketball but certainly the wallet. A fine work of sports journalism and a must for every bookish roundball fan.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-547-74651-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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