This venture into the murky waters of Italian soccer begins as a radical departure for the best-selling journalist McGinnis (The Last Brother, not reviewed, etc.), known more for his true crime volumes than his sports reporting. Over the first few chapters McGinniss explains how he became enamored of the world’s most popular sport after watching the 1994 World Cup, which took place in the US. He pursued his newfound love to one of the hotbeds of football (to give it its proper name) mania, Italy. There he stumbled across an enchanting true-to-life fairy tale, the story of a beleaguered minor-league team from Castel di Sangro, a tiny mountain town in the gut-wrenchingly poor Abruzzo region, a team that had managed to climb up the ladder of soccer success. McGinniss resolved to spend the entire season with the Castel di Sangro team to see if they would survive a year in Serie B representing the smallest municipality to ever send a team that high in Italian football. At first, this seems unlikely and even unpromising material for McGinniss, but as he develops emotional ties to the individual players, the wacky coach who calls himself “a bulldozer,” and the somewhat sinister figures who run the team, the book takes on a certain delightful momentum. Gradually, readers will come to care for and admire these young men with the same intensity as the author. Regrettably, it all turns sour at the end—for reasons having nothing to do with the outcome of their season’s efforts—in ways that recapitulate the ending of McGinniss’s relationship with other subjects, notably Jeffrey Macdonald, whom he wrote about in Fatal Vision. Too often, the author makes himself the center of his story; but he is too good a reporter not to convey some of what makes the sport and the people around it so compelling. Up to the last 40 pages, an entertaining and often moving read.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-55736-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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A thoughtful and compelling book following the members of a single recruiting class at Penn State's distinguished football program through their college gridiron careers. By the end of their four (and in some cases five) years of college football, the group of 28 young men who had entered the school in August 1988 were reduced to a near-handful by injuries, academic shortcomings, transfers, and graduation. They had come to the small town of State College to play for one of the sport's fabled coaches, Joe Paterno, a man with a reputation for combining coaching excellence with a commitment to academic and ethical integrity. Denlinger, a Penn State alumnus who covers college football for the Washington Post, found that reputation for the most part merited. However, this is neither a bronzing of Paterno nor a whitewash of college sports. Given the trajectories of the young men he covered, that would be impossible. As Denlinger proves, college football is a bruisingly brutal sport, and several of the students he followed found their careers ended abruptly by torn-up knees, battered backs, and a variety of fractures large and small. About midway through the book, Denlinger observes, ``All college football players fall into two categories: The haves and the have-nots.'' To his credit, much of his book focuses on the latter group—from a student manager who improbably became the team's long snapper to the kids who never got much playing time. Finally, he closes by suggesting two major changes in college football: the elimination of artificial playing surfaces and a severe cutback in scholarships. Denlinger captures in equal parts the frustrating pain and the adrenaline-pumping thrill of playing college football at the highest level.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11436-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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