Littman’s plainspoken journalism reminds readers that, even in the Google era, there’s no substitute for hard-nosed...
A collection of muscular reportage from the pages of Playboy.
Author and Playboy contributing editor Littman’s five feature-length articles demonstrate the power of shoe-leather reporting as a means of riveting readers. Loosely connected by the theme of contemporary men’s passions, these narratives use two distinct approaches—immediate, present-tense accounts and stories assembled after-the-fact and told in the past tense—and each approach has its merits. In one story, Littman gains entrance to one of the world’s most prestigious golf tournaments, the Masters—and does so by hobnobbing with Georgia gentry on $100 a day. In another story, Littman enters the edgy world of Super Bowl ticket scalpers. Both insider stories are rich in detail, with the golf piece reveling in Littman’s dreamy love of the tournament’s inherent beauty and his disdain for its cultivated exclusiveness. Jacksonville’s Super Bowl XXXIX, conversely, is the site of rough-and-ready underground commerce, where characters hustle tickets with the up-against-it verve of players from early Quentin Tarantino films. In another present-tense piece, Littman trains with the world’s fastest sprinters, again putting readers in the rush of the moment. One of the book’s two assembled, past-tense stories—an insightful take on steroids—works well but feels slightly dated through no fault of the author’s; it’s hard to view baseball slugger Barry Bonds as the biggest witch-hunt victim of the performance-enhancement era while Roger Clemens faces prison and Bonds was embraced by his former San Francisco Giants teammates through their 2010 championship run. The gem of the collection, the reconstruction of a fraternity hazing that ends in death, demonstrates a still-more sophisticated technique. Littman layers a series of startling events—Chico State pledges and brothers demonstrating youthful ambition, then tragedy—with enough realism to make readers unfamiliar with the event’s actual facts believe the reporter was on the scene.
Littman’s plainspoken journalism reminds readers that, even in the Google era, there’s no substitute for hard-nosed journalism.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-1453693445
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.
A disjointed debut memoir about how competitive swimming shaped the personal and artistic sensibilities of a respected illustrator.
Through a series of vignettes, paintings and photographs that often have no sequential relationship to each other, Shapton (The Native Trees of Canada, 2010, etc.) depicts her intense relationship to all aspects of swimming: pools, water, races and even bathing suits. The author trained competitively throughout her adolescence, yet however much she loved racing, “the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn’t motivate me.” In 1988 and again in 1992, she qualified for the Olympic trials but never went further. Soon afterward, Shapton gave up competition, but she never quite ended her relationship to swimming. Almost 20 years later, she writes, “I dream about swimming at least three nights a week.” Her recollections are equally saturated with stories that somehow involve the act of swimming. When she speaks of her family, it is less in terms of who they are as individuals and more in context of how they were involved in her life as a competitive swimmer. When she describes her adult life—which she often reveals in disconnected fragments—it is in ways that sometimes seem totally random. If she remembers the day before her wedding, for example, it is because she couldn't find a bathing suit to wear in her hotel pool. Her watery obsession also defines her view of her chosen profession, art. At one point, Shapton recalls a documentary about Olympian Michael Phelps and draws the parallel that art, like great athleticism, is as “serene in aspect” as it is “incomprehensible.”
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.Pub Date: July 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15817-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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