The author’s tribute is heartfelt, and Sweat is a worthy subject, but there simply isn’t enough material here for a...
An earnest attempt to view championship racehorse Secretariat through the eyes of his African-American groom.
In 1973, “Big Red” became America’s tenth Triple Crown winner, setting track records at the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness and romping over the finish line at the Belmont Stakes 31 lengths ahead of his closest competitor. During his two-year racing career, the thoroughbred was groomed by Edward “Shorty” Sweat. Considered one of the best in the business, he had back-to-back Derby winners in 1972–73 with Riva Ridge and Secretariat. Some 30 years later, Scanlan (Wild About Horses, 1998, etc.) decided to write generally about the groom-horse bond and specifically about Sweat, who died in 1998. Gathering memories from other grooms, exercise riders and Secretariat’s jockey, Ron Turcotte, the author discovered that everyone held the same opinion: Edward Sweat was a kind man and a superb horseman who loved Big Red. They didn’t have much to say beyond that, however, and Scanlan’s decision to mimic people’s speech patterns makes reading some of the interviews an embarrassing experience. (Exercise rider Charlie Davis, for example, speculates that if Secretariat could have talked, the horse would have told him, “I am the pilot. You is de co-pilot.”) Sweat should have had a larger share of Secretariat’s winnings, the author believes; his contributions to the thoroughbred’s victories have been overlooked by history. Yet in his heyday, the groom made the cover of such mainstream magazines as Essence and Ebony, and he was still being quoted extensively in racing publications at the time of his death. Lacking the kind of detail about Sweat’s personality that would make this more than just another biography of Big Red, Scanlan doesn’t add anything to the accounts of the racehorse’s career provided by Raymond Woolfe in Secretariat (2001) and William Nack in Big Red of Meadow Stable (1975).
The author’s tribute is heartfelt, and Sweat is a worthy subject, but there simply isn’t enough material here for a full-length book.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36724-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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