With its narrative vivacity and wealth of historical settings, this classy piece of sports writing is not just for squash...
A history of squash that’s as lively and well paced as the game itself . . . used to be.
It all started with bored medieval European monks who took pleasure in bouncing a ball off the inside corner of a monastery wall, writes journalist and expert player Zug. This game called “racquets”—and its many variants, from court tennis to fives—moved on to become a plaything of the French and English aristocracy (true courts were pricey affairs). A rude form was also played by prisoners and common folk, but what we now call squash was to become, some 150 years ago, the child of private schools like St. Paul’s and tony universities in the Ivy League. (Dartmouth squash captain Zug’s mostly enthusiastic writing occasionally bears witness to that pedigree, with its “contumacious preferences” and “rodomontade eccentricities.”) This sprightly social history of the game also contains good descriptive material on playing styles, from the finesse players who concentrated “on precision of stroke and nicety of placing” to sparkling brutalists like Vic Niederhoffer, as well as fine-line profiles of the sport’s temples (Randolph at Harvard, Merion in Pennsylvania) and its absurdly brilliant players (Hashim Khan, Alicia McConnell, Mark Talbott). Zug is also adept with atmosphere, whether he is praising the composed prowess and humility of great players, or recreating historic matches blow by blow. But he’s perhaps best at tracing the game’s evolution from India rubber balls, bamboo racquets, and granite cages to today’s titanium shafts and glass walls. He ends on a down note, with the sport’s governing body adopting a softer ball, a boon for the aerobics, notes Zug, but death to the “the maverick players and quirky clubs” that thrived on the little nuclear pinball, which ricocheted “like bees shaken in a jar.”
With its narrative vivacity and wealth of historical settings, this classy piece of sports writing is not just for squash nuts.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2990-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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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