A treat for gridiron fans.
Hall of Fame wide receiver Rice and sportswriter Williams (co-authors: 50 Years, 50 Moments: The Most Unforgettable Plays in Super Bowl History, 2015) turn in a lively history of the NFL.
A century ago, George Halas, the legendary Bears coach, “arguably the most influential figure in the history of professional football,” caught a train to Ohio and created a league, the American Professional Football Association, made up of teams from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and New York. Most of those teams—the Muncie Flyers and Rochester Jeffersons, anyone?—no longer exist, but the league itself evolved, and with it football became increasingly popular not just in pro stadiums, but also in high school and college. Early football wasn’t pretty: It was a mud-spattered mess, made messier by the fact that the first players didn’t have helmets—and many grew their hair long in the belief that “a thick shock of hair would help absorb the shock of collisions.” The authors are comprehensive in their coverage, explaining the necessary partnership of quarterbacks and receivers—you can’t have greats of either unless you have greats of both—and the machinations of the draft, with a roster of the best of all time. Rice and Williams serve up a rogues’ gallery, taking in the great and the forgotten alike. The pace of the narrative is a little herky-jerky, switching from anecdote to stats and brief biographies that threaten to induce chronological whiplash; the book could benefit from both streamlining and a little more Ken Burns–like splashiness, given the occasion. But there are plenty of locker-room stories that are worth the price of admission—e.g., Detroit Lions QB Bobby Layne’s habit of sending rookies out to buy beer just ahead of curfew, which was sure to bring on a fine, since they “couldn’t refuse the best, most influential player on the team,” and Rice’s own habit, maddening to equipment managers, of trying on every pair of pants in the place before a game: “Everything had to be spanking new.”
A treat for gridiron fans.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-269290-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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