Fans won’t argue the game’s significance to the sport, but Frost’s narrative is over-the-top and gushing, making it strictly...
A pitch-by-pitch account of the game best known for the image of the hopping, waving, ecstatic catcher Carlton Fisk, whose 12th-inning home run won the game for the Boston Red Sox.
Sports nonfiction vet Frost (The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever, 2007, etc.) is a bit too fond of superlatives. Sox outfielder Dwight Evans made the “greatest catch in the history of the World Series”; at game’s end Boston Globe sportswriter Peter Gammons wrote “one of the most lyrical, inspired and impressionistic columns ever written about a baseball game.” And so on. All the players were larger-than-life. Carl Yastrzemski had the greatest work ethic since John Henry; Sox pitcher Luis Tiant loved his father more than anyone since the baby Jesus; Reds’ third baseman Pete Rose had a “gap-toothed Huck Finn enthusiasm for the game.” Sprinkled throughout the breathless game narration are allusions to historical events from the mid-1970s: the presidency of Gerald Ford, the imminent American Bicentennial celebration, the advent of Saturday Night Live. Between pitches, Frost delivers the back stories of just about everyone involved: the sportscasters and -writers, the players, the owners, the managers—even the Fenway Park organist. The diction is often of the aw-shucks variety. Reds manager Sparky Anderson once ripped a couple of guys a new one; writer Maureen Dowd was “a sharp young cookie.” Fisk finally comes to bat in the 12th nearly 300 pages in. After a page-long description of the flight of the struck baseball, Frost devotes nearly 100 more pages to the aftermath of the game. He tells us what happened to everyone and claims that this particular game rescued baseball from a serious drought.
Fans won’t argue the game’s significance to the sport, but Frost’s narrative is over-the-top and gushing, making it strictly for baseball die-hards.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2310-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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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