An excellent primer on the basics of the great American pastime.
A comprehensive instructional manual for the game of baseball.
Baseball is a complex, nuanced sport, and it’s best if a player starts young, when he or she can focus on the fundamentals. In his debut, Gabe walks readers through the various components of the game, discussing the basic aspects of every position, and then provides insights into other key elements, such as sliding and bunting. His instruction is clear and always focuses on foundations that, when perfected, may provide a player with a competitive advantage over his or her peers. The book accompanies each lesson with helpful pictures, which are particularly indispensable when teaching such things as proper hitting stance. It’s impressively comprehensive, covering everything from proper infielder footwork to the mechanics of pitching. Gabe repeatedly returns to the psychological aspect of the game; at one point, he describes a player’s proper mental comportment as a combination of intense focus and an unrelenting desire to win: “The killer instinct is a tool you need to use daily, even in batting practice. It brings your concentration up to another level.” The author also includes some thoughts on physical conditioning, particularly plyometric exercises, and offers some trenchant insights into how the game has changed since his days as an amateur player. Pitchers simply throw the ball faster now, he says, and the elusive genius of the fastball is now a learnable skill with targeted training. Overall, Gabe consistently writes with clarity and patience. However, something as complicated as hitting a baseball—the “hardest thing to do in sports”—is exceedingly difficult to learn from a book, however artfully fashioned. Ultimately, this work shouldn’t be construed as a substitute for training under an experienced coach. In fact, one could argue that it’s best as a manual for coaches themselves, to ensure that they have enough knowledge of the sport’s underpinnings to teach newcomers. Still, this is as well-crafted an introduction to baseball as one is likely to find in print.
An excellent primer on the basics of the great American pastime.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5175-0887-6
Page Count: 184
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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