As swift and entertaining as a close race—but rarely contemplative or introspective.
A New York Times sportswriter spends the year 2000 following some prominent owners, trainers, and jockeys as they prepare for horseracing’s Triple Crown.
Drape has a problem with suspense: Fans of horseracing already know the outcomes of the three races that comprise the final pages of this galloping chronicle. But his julep is not entirely mintless, for the strengths of this account are the portraits he paints of the various players. “Hope is robust,” he writes. “It is the horses who are fragile.” Note the who. In this extravagant world there are no insulting which’s or that’s trotted out to refer to horseflesh. But Drape’s portraits contradict his conclusion. More fragile by far than the horses are the egos of everyone involved. We begin in August 1999 Saratoga, where the author introduces some of the major players and begins explaining fundamentals like claiming races. He then moves to one of the annual yearling sales, where we meet the enormously wealthy Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who flies in his own 747 from the United Arab Emirates to bid millions of dollars for animals he thinks one day might win a Big One. We meet the two top trainers in the country, Bob Baffert and the flamboyant D. Wayne Lukas, as well as a couple of bright but lesser lights, Neil Drysdale and Jenine Sahadi—the most successful female trainer in the country, who must cope not only with God’s dumbest creatures (male chauvinists) but also with horses. Drape periodically inserts passages of memoir about the deaths of his father and mother, about his imminent divorce (he refers to his spouse as his “soon-to-be ex-wife”), and about his own passions for betting and racing (including his experience of owning a quarter horse). He expresses little skepticism about his world and is silent on such subjects as cruelty to animals, egregious excess, and the dark side of gambling.
As swift and entertaining as a close race—but rarely contemplative or introspective.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-785-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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