Menzer covers college basketball for the Winston-Salem Journal, so he should be the right guy to explain all the fascinations of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s legendary Tobacco Road connection. The heart of the ACC, generally considered the most consistently competitive conference in men’s college hoops, is the four schools located within a small stretch of North Carolina—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, Wake Forest, and North Carolina State. Until 1956, when Wake moved to Winston-Salem, 110 miles away from the Raleigh-Durham area, the four schools lay within 30 miles of one another. As Duke’s superb coach Mike Krzyzewski observes wryly, “Here we share the same dry cleaners.” The result is a series of rivalries without equal in the sport. It doesn’t hurt that until very recently, when Charlotte became a banking center, there were no major-league pro teams in the vicinity. Carolina college basketball was the entire sporting universe—and local talent tended to stay at home. Ironically, as Menzer relates, all four of these outstanding programs were built by outsiders. The great names of Carolina college coaching (Everett Case, Frank McGuire, Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jimmy Valvano) came from Indiana, New York City, Kansas, Chicago, and New York City, respectively. Whatever their provenance, these guys created dominant teams; 17 of the first 18, and 31 of the first 35, ACC titles were held by one of them. And they produced national champions, too. Menzer’s tale includes such colorful characters as the Pepsi-guzzling Case, part-time minister Bones McKinney, and the wildly flamboyant Valvano; and mostly, Menzer narrates with gusto. But when he gets to the era of the great Smith-Valvano-Krzyzewski duels of the 1980s and ’90s—the period he himself reported—the book, oddly, seems to run out of gas. Not a brilliant piece of reporting or writing, but good fun for the fans.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84674-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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