Engaging history of perhaps horse-racing’s finest moment.
Sports historian Sahadi (One Sunday in December: The 1958 NFL Championship Game and How It Changed Professional Football, 2008, etc.) tells the story of Affirmed’s 1978 Triple Crown triumph.
“The decade of the seventies,” writes the author, “was the golden age of thoroughbred racing,” as incomparable horses such as Secretariat, Seattle Slew and Riva Ridge strutted their stuff on America’s racing turf. But no horse captured the imagination of race fans, and the general public, as did Affirmed, and his rivalry with Alydar” “It was Ali-Frazier, Palmer-Nicklaus, and McEnroe-Connors, right there with them.” The rise of Affirmed brought together an unlikely collection of characters. There was millionaire owner Louis Wolfson, who nine years earlier had been imprisoned—unjustly, contends Sahadi—for a white-collar crime; colorful and wise trainer Laz Barrera, who had emigrated from Castro’s Cuba to Mexico and then arrived almost penniless in California and jockey superstar Steve Cauthen. Riding since he could walk, his string of victories in 1977, at the tender age of 17, made Cauthen a national celebrity, appearing on The Tonight Show and a Wheaties box and, of course, recording an album. As 2-year-olds in 1977, Affirmed and Alydar established their own notoriety. In six meetings, Affirmed won four times, but all by a small margin. As the 1978 Triple Crown season arrived, it was anybody’s guess who among the two might emerge triumphant. While Affirmed did win each race, each time it was only by the slimmest of margins. Affirmed had established his greatness, but he had been pushed all the way by the challenge of Alydar. Sahadi ably captures the atmosphere of the horse-racing world and the characters surrounding Affirmed, although a tendency toward hagiography (Wolfson is “a distinguished man of letters with a decorous and noble appearance”) and repetition (Cauthen is too often described as “fuzzy cheeked”) occasionally bogs down the narrative.
Engaging history of perhaps horse-racing’s finest moment.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-62808-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
