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
A convincing case for the societal benefits of sports fandom.
A Fox Sports executive and the founder of a consulting firm explore the social value of fandom in this nonfiction book.
Chicago Cubs season ticket holder Nick Camfield’s fandom “runs at least three generations deep,” and every trip to Wrigley Field “transports” him back to his childhood experience of watching games with his father. In conducting interviews with the Cubs enthusiast and others for this well-researched work, Valenta and Sikorjak came across dozens of individuals like Camfield whose emotional well-being and favorite memories revolved around sports—from Little League coaches and fantasy football leaguers to local fan club members and season ticket holders. In addition to anecdotal oral histories, the authors (self-described data geeks) convincingly deploy a host of statistical data to back their argument that not only do sports fans “have more friends,” they also “exhibit stronger measures of wellbeing, happiness, confidence, and optimism than non-fans.” Not only does fandom bring families closer together, the volume argues, but it is also an essential tool—for instance, it is used by immigrants to find a welcome home in new cities or countries. And as much as rivalry is central to the world of sports, fandom, the book contends, can actually “soften the hardened boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ ” Valenta, the senior vice president of strategy and analytics for Fox Sports, and Sikorjak, the founder of an analytics consulting firm and a former executive with Madison Square Garden, combine their career insights into American sports with a firm grasp of data-driven analysis that is accompanied by a network of scholarly endnotes. At times their prose can revel in the sappy nostalgia of sports history, which may alienate more objective sociologists while gripping the average fan. Still, their writing effectively blends keen storytelling with erudite statistical analysis that will appeal to both scholars of human behavior and lifelong sports enthusiasts. The book’s readability is enhanced by an ample use of full-color charts, graphics, diagrams, and other visual aids that support its overall message that the value of sports goes far beyond its mere entertainment value, as its “social power” has the potential to “heal an ailing world.”
A convincing case for the societal benefits of sports fandom.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9858428-1-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Silicon Valley Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
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