A devoted and comprehensive tour guide, Trecker delivers the goods with gusto.
A veteran sports commentator shares the hard-nosed, insider machinations of the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
A Chicago-based columnist and analyst for Fox Soccer Channel, Trecker got his first taste of World Cup fever at the 2002 games co-hosted (for the first time) by political rivals South Korea and Japan, in which the United States surprisingly progressed to the quarterfinals. Four years later, the author found himself in the commerce-driven German city of Leipzig, witnessing a rather lackluster team-placement ceremony at the start of a commissioned four-week tour of Germany for the 2006 World Cup. Finely balancing his personal experiences with comprehensive historical detail, and a generous supply of factoid footnotes, Trecker begins with the basics, explaining that the games are the end result of four years of carefully tracked worldwide competitions wherein 210 nations vie for 32 coveted placement slots. He ponders the controversial host-city selection process and profiles such better known team managers as suave, seasoned veteran “Bora” Milutinovic from Serbia and Wayne Rooney, pride of the Manchester team and polar opposite of “remote tabloid figure” David Beckham. A guaranteed cash cow, the World Cup event was positioned by Germany as “the biggest sales event the planet had ever seen,” even as that country continued to struggle with spiking unemployment rates and the residual shock of Eastern bloc unification. Trecker traveled to Hamburg, the United States’s home-base city; Munich, where he unexpectedly was housed in the gay district surrounded by Asian-staffed brothels and adult novelty shops peddling “World Cup–branded sex toys”; and onward to a spontaneous pub crawl in Frankfurt with the ever-thirsty English fans. Two weeks into the tournament, however, the author fell seriously ill, delaying his coverage (and the publication of this book). He recovered in time to witness the championship game, in which a game-altering headbutt would send 350-million spectators into a historic frenzy.
A devoted and comprehensive tour guide, Trecker delivers the goods with gusto.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-603098-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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
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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