An offbeat bowling manual that makes for compelling reading.
A comprehensive and surprisingly philosophical guide to the sport of bowling.
“We play games to fill the time, to take the pressure off, and to find ways to enjoy and smell the roses all at once,” writes Dilyard (Ian and the Great Silver Dragon: A Friendship Begins, 2019, etc.) in this nonfiction work. “Can we learn how to play these games with more fulfillment, and elevate our consciousness at the same time?” It may seem like an overreaching question, but such queries have resulted in successful books in the past, such as Eugen Herrigel’s classic Zen in the Art of Archery (1948) or even Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons (1957) by Ben Hogan with Herbert Warren Wind, which both reached wide audiences by blending sports instruction with advice for living. Dilyard, a self-described bowling obsessive, never loses sight of the practical elements of his discussion; indeed, his book is filled with engaging insights into the physical components of the sport: “Tossing a bowling ball puts the body in an unbalanced state and therefore it will attempt to find balance,” he explains in terms that will bring some comfort to students of bowling who thought that they were merely uncoordinated. “Training the body to not do a reflex movement takes time.” Indeed, time is a pervasive theme throughout the book; Dilyard is very good at explaining the physical subtleties of the game, but he stresses that time and practice are essential: “It may not take a lifetime to solidify being good,” he writes, “but it will take much more than five minutes.” However, alongside this expert advice about how to perfect one’s bowling game, there are deeper observations about the “search for perfection,” which Dilyard sees the sport as embodying. The game, he insists, is ultimately about honing one’s inner self by making key decisions: “It is and always will be about making choices, and thereby creating different outcomes.” He manages to combine the philosophical and the practical with seamless skill, and even readers who have no immediate plans to visit a bowling alley will find his book to be enlightening.
An offbeat bowling manual that makes for compelling reading.Pub Date: April 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-624556-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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