by John Evangelist Walsh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2007
Walsh manages only a broken-bat blooper in this disappointing plate appearance.
The 1888 birth and subsequent celebrity of the rollicking baseball ballad by Ernest L. Thayer.
This latest from prolific pop biographer/historian Walsh (Moonlight, 2000, etc.) explores the two contrasting worlds that combined to create the phenomenon of “Casey at the Bat”: Broadway light opera and professional baseball, which was still in its childhood but rapidly gaining popularity in the late-19th century. Never known for understatement, the author early on makes the preposterous claim that “Casey” is the equal of Robert Frost’s “Birches” or “Mending Wall.” Fortunately, he does much better when he turns from literary criticism to social history. Illustrated with numerous period photographs and quotations from contemporary newspapers, the text brings the period to life. Thayer was a journalist in San Francisco who periodically contributed topical ballads; “Casey” appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888. Arch Gunter, a successful New York writer visiting his parents in California, clipped the poem and brought it home. When he learned that Wallack’s Theater was hosting a “Baseball Night” to take advantage of local enthusiasm for the first-place New York Giants, Gunter presented the clipping to Wallack’s manager, who promptly passed it on to his star, DeWolf Hopper. “Casey” was a smash from the first time this popular actor delivered it on August 14, 1888; Hopper performed the poem thousands of times during his career. He and Thayer eventually met, had lunch, made nice. Walsh ably describes this early intersection between entertainment and professional sport. He’s less effective in imagining the conversation between Thayer and Hopper, and yet less effective when he composes some clumsy lyrics of the sort that might have been included in one of Hopper’s shows. Readers may also wonder why the author neglects to consider any of Casey’s many reinterpretations in our own day, as did Frank Deford in Casey on the Loose (1989).
Walsh manages only a broken-bat blooper in this disappointing plate appearance.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-58567-893-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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by Bonnie Tsui ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
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
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by Bonnie Tsui ; illustrated by Sophie Diao
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by Jeanne Marie Laskas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 24, 2015
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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