A rare woman in male-dominated waters, Page, editor of The American Fly Fisher, is more interested in ``the light on the water'' than on the size of fish, in ``inspiration, not data.'' Although she was a latecomer to the fishing mania, Page's essays show that her eventual infection was inevitable, given her family heritage and her marriage to Tom Rosenbauer (The Orvis Fly- Fishing Guide, not reviewed). The granddaughter of Sparse Grey Hackle (a.k.a. Alfred Waterbury Miller), who wrote Fishless Days, Angling Nights (1971), she grew up around fishing but, unlike the boys, was not encouraged to participate. The family passion did, though, land her a job with Nick Lyons's New York publishing firm, whose daily concerns focused on angling (Lyons provides this volume's foreword). In 1984, promised a canoe ride in Vermont by Rosenbauer, Page finally tried her hand at casting and became hooked. Her first casts, she writes, ``are better forgotten,'' but she vividly, if minimalistically, recalls her first trout: ``A silvery little fish, and it was wee.'' These essays find Page fishing in Vermont's Battenkill River, off a small island near Cape Cod, and in Montana, where she's astonished to find trout in the Missouri River ``in grouped pods...like a herd of porpoises leaping against the current.'' But it's the little rivers—``the jewels of the outdoor experiments''—that most capture Page's fancy. She writes of trying to balance her career, marriage, and motherhood (she and Rosenbauer named their daughter Brooke) with a lust for wild trout. In one funny scene, a pencil-less Page, suddenly struck by literary inspiration, must negotiate a field of cow flops and electrified fences while wearing wet, sagging jeans. Deftly shifting gears in the same essay, she recounts her mother's slow death. Page adds a touch of light poetry to a genre little known for graceful writing. (12 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55821-367-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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
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