A husband-and-wife team of popular-culture experts provides a lively celebration of the beach, “nature’s most potent antidepressant.” Len—ek (The Antic Alphabet, 1994) and Bosker, professors of Russian and medicine, respectively, who live in Oregon, are clearly in love with beaches. In this, their latest in a series of popular-culture studies (including one on bathing suits), they have transformed their unabashed passion for sun and sand (or rocks, as it may be) into a romp through the history of beaches, from their ancient geological formation to the environmental and commercial dangers that threaten them today. Along the way, they explore sexuality, sport, architecture, and fashion at the beach. At the heart of their historical narrative is the premise that the beach as we know it today is a recent phenomenon. Here we witness the beach’s gradual transformation from a hostile wilderness’site of conquest, commerce, and tribal practices—to a civilized recreation site. Throughout, the historical narrative is limited to Western cultures, primarily American and European. Chapters often begin with fictional tableaus that lend an intimate feel to the narrative. Throughout, The Beach is filled with fascinating illustrations and photographs of the once-popular bathing machine, assorted swimsuit styles of the past (including the first adhesive brassiere!), and the “Tan-O-Meter,” a gas-pump-shaped tanning-oil dispenser. But for all their mirth, Len—ek and Bosker are serious about the beach’s role in history and its appeal to the human imagination. In the end, they argue, “it is to the beach . . . that we go to reinvent ourselves.” For those readers unable to resist the beach’s appeal, the authors include a highly select list of the world’s hottest and fanciest beach hotels and resorts. Those who ordinarily bike or walk to the local beach will find pleasure and novelty in The Beach, but they’d better look elsewhere for seashore recommendations.
Pub Date: May 25, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88095-7
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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