A text that will delight college basketball fans but also raises tacit questions about the effects of big-time athletics on...
A veteran sportswriter returns with an account of the basketball wars—on- and off-court—among three iconic coaches in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Feinstein (Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball, 2014, etc.), who also writes columns (Washington Post, Golf Digest) and appears on broadcasts of sporting events, proceeds more or less chronologically from 1980, when Mike “Coach K” Krzyzewski began his career at Duke University and Jim Valvano began at North Carolina State. The author charts the rises and falls of the three teams—Duke, North Carolina, and North Carolina State—and, eventually, the deaths of two of his principals—Valvano in 1993 and UNC coach Dean Smith in 2015. Feinstein’s affection for the three is patent throughout, no more so than in his accounts of the deaths of the two late coaches. But he can barely restrain his admiration (and fondness) for Krzyzewski, whose accomplishments he chronicles with almost a family member’s devotion. (In the acknowledgements, the author notes his close friendship with Coach K.) Feinstein goes into detail about some key games, delves into the biographies of some of the players, and generally becomes swept away at times by the tidal power of his own affections—perhaps most evidently (and excessively) in his clichéd final sentence that claims that the stories of these three “will undoubtedly live forever.” To his credit, the author informs his narrative with myriads of interviews with all of his principals—and with those who have survived them—and enriches all with his deep knowledge and love of the game. He navigates through the murky waters of recruiting and explains how certain rules have affected the game—e.g., the 45-second shot clock, the fairly recent NBA ruling that forbids young men to enter the draft right out of high school.
A text that will delight college basketball fans but also raises tacit questions about the effects of big-time athletics on a university’s academic mission.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53941-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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