Convinced —nobody knows beans— about why fish bite, Dennis (A Place on the Water, 1993) eschews the usual nuts and bolts of fishing in favor of entertaining personal essays laced with good humor and middle-age nostalgia. The author, who recently moved to a farmhouse on a peninsula in Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay, writes that the concept of home tends —to expand as we grow older . . . to include the rivers and lakes where we fish and boat, the woods where we hunt and hike, every place that has emotional and historical significance.— The wistfulness behind that statement keynotes many of these pieces. In —A Trout for the Old Guy,— Dennis comes across a cigar box full of dry flies tied by a crotchety old fisherman he hadn—t thought about in 25 years. Elsewhere, he notes that there are three days of fishing he never misses: opening day, for obvious reasons; the great Hex hatch on Michigan’s rivers in late June, and the last day of the season, that final day to —be taken slowly, like a last meal.— Dennis has some fun discussing good fishing buddies and what qualifies them as such, and he takes dozens of 24-inch rainbows from the Rio Puelo in Chile, along with a 5-pound brook trout, —as bulky as a steroid junky.— One of the best pieces, and by far the funniest, is —Fish Naked,— wherein he pokes fun at the sartorial correctness of catalogue-outfitted anglers. He harks back to a 1970s trip to the Firehole in Yellowstone National Park when he and a friend happened on a naked man and woman fishing side by side. —Maybe nude angling was a local tradition. . . . Maybe it was a tactic. . . .— Not quite up to his earlier efforts, but Dennis’s descriptive writing and his sense of fishing as serious fun keeps this one afloat. (illustrations)
Pub Date: June 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18594-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
Looking back late in his baseball career, a one-time dominant phenom tells of his life at both the center and fringes of the game. As a young fireballer for the New York Mets in the mid-1980s, Dwight “Doc” Gooden was on top of the baseball world. He had success—by his early 20s, he had won Rookie of the Year honors, a Cy Young Award, and a World Series ring—and, as a superstar in the Big Apple, he had the most exciting lifestyle imaginable. Surrounded by his brash Mets teammates and Manhattan nightlife, Dwight the shy teenager quickly matured into Doc the confident party animal. Eventually, Gooden’s attention wandered from the game to the pursuit of good times, and his golden arm began to betray him just as the Mets’ presumed dynasty began to falter. (A talent-rich juggernaut in 1986, they were expected to rule baseball for years.) Serious fun off the field soon began to eclipse Dwight’s achievements on it. He was twice suspended for drug use, in 1987 and again in 1994. With the help of friends, family, and solid professional advice, Dwight reclaimed some of his glory in May 1996, when he pitched a no-hitter for the New York Yankees, who later that year went on to win the World Series. Gooden movingly describes the giddy joys of being young, rich, and seemingly invulnerable. He provides powerful insight into the mind of a pitcher, illuminating several elements of baseball that normally escape all but the most knowledgeable fans. When discussing his professional reversals, particularly his plunge into the gutter, he is brutally candid; he also seems to genuinely understand how his failings affected those closest to him. Assisted by Klapisch, one of the best sports scribes in the game, Gooden vividly re-creates for readers a roller- coaster ride of disparate emotions, from triumph to loss and shame. An honest, sincere, and affecting memoir.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16339-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
The prolific Sheed (Baseball and Lesser Sports, 1991, and many others) on his childhood love of baseball, pitched with typical Sheedian wit and warmth. As a kid, Sheed had the baseball bug bad. This makes him no different from any American sandlot Johnny—except that Sheed was a British boy, tossed across the Atlantic at the age of nine in the initial throes of WW II. Moreover, any sports interest at all was a decided oddity in his ``egghead'' family. So when, in 1941, he discovered America's pastime, it became something of an obsession, a fetishistic frenzy of statistics and idolatries. His baseball heart grew larger as he aged: At first caught by the miserable Philadelphia Athletics, it expanded to take in the St. Louis Cardinals' Gas House Gang (Dizzy and Daffy Dean, et al.) and then the wacky, benighted Brooklyn Dodgers, rooting for which Sheed likens to taking ``the losing side in the Thirty Years War'' (a cross that Sheed carried until the ``diabolical'' Walter O'Malley heisted the Dodgers to California in 1958). Sheed enthuses about Leo Duroucher (``the name of his game was Uproar''); the ``miracle'' of Ted Williams; the fat bat of Jimmy Foxx. Quirky truths tumble out: that ``the teams that break your heart are the ones that play in funny stadiums'' (Cubs, Red Sox); that the advent of the slider was the ``Great Divide'' between the ancient and modern eras, a Rubicon that Williams and Musial crossed with ease but that ruined DiMaggio; that, truth be told, a 12-year-old understands baseball to its depths, and adult insight adds nothing to the mix. A true fan, with eyes wandering now and then to football (but ``football was work, like plowing snow; baseball was play'') and other sports, yet ever faithful to ``the perfect game, the one they play in heaven.''
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-76710-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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