Fishermen will love this book for its attention to detail and for seeing the humor in their obsessions, but a more general...
Fly-fishing enthusiasts turn a lazy fishing town into a madhouse as they try to become the first to snag an ugly trout for a big reward in this playful, good-natured insider’s sendup of the sport.
Ure (Leaving the Fold, 2000, etc.) previously wrote a fly-fishing memoir, but his first attempt at fiction is a community love note to the craziness that the fishing hobby can induce. Jud Buckalew, a trout-fishing guide living with his pet cat, Bob, in a tiny cabin in Last Chance, Idaho, only wants peace and quiet to pursue, à la Captain Ahab, the giant old trout he calls “The Pig.” Upset that his smarmy cousin Mark Bosham—who claims a childhood spent in Paris but neglects to mention it was Paris, Idaho—has been appointed the local fishing inspector, Jud calls on his old friend Rollo Pasco, a State Department employee, and asks him to send frozen samples of a hideous, fanged trout created in a failed gene splicing experiment. Jud convinces Mark that the fish are a new species found in the river, and Mark puts out a $50,000 reward for a live specimen that he could send for genetic analysis. The town residents and fish-seekers are broad caricatures—the crazy naked environmentalist, the older bass fisherman with a priapic medical condition, and the two guys who are amusingly depicted in their home environments as they catch the fish frenzy and try to hide their fishing adventures from their wives. But character interactions are often stilted and shallow, particularly the rapidly developed romantic relationship between Jud and Suzanne Hsu, visiting NBC reporter and “oriental mirage.” This struggle to make his characters play believably against one another means that even when all their stories come together at the river, the farce never really reaches a satisfying peak before scattering back into its component parts.
Fishermen will love this book for its attention to detail and for seeing the humor in their obsessions, but a more general audience may not quite get it.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481005326
Page Count: 216
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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