One of the best books written about the world of professional ski racing.
Inside the world of world-class alpine ski racing.
For generations, the United States Ski Team was a virtual afterthought in alpine ski racing. The Austrians, Swiss and teams from the Nordic nations dominated a sport characterized by swashbuckling athletes undeterred by the speed and risks inherent in hurtling down some of the world’s most treacherous mountains. However, by the turn of the 20th century, change had arrived, and American skiers such as Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn suddenly found themselves atop podiums. As a result, they became celebrities in Europe and even in the United States, where the sport of skiing only rose to prominence every time the winter Olympics rolled around. New York Daily News investigative reporter Vinton (co-author: American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America's Pastime, 2009), a former ski racing coach, ably narrates this story of the rise of American skiing to the sport’s highest levels. The author focuses on the 2009-2010 World Cup season and the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Vinton writes vividly and captures the dangers and thrills inherent in the sport, especially its crowning event, the downhill. Although the book purports to look comprehensively at the entire team, Miller and Vonn are the clear stars. Through their stories and those of many of their teammates, Vinton provides compelling insight into a sport that millions enjoy recreationally but that relatively few will ever experience competitively. If there is a quibble about the book, it is that the 2009-2010 season is far enough removed from the present to not be particularly timely—the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics have already come and gone—but is not distant enough to qualify as history. Nonetheless, the book is a winner.
One of the best books written about the world of professional ski racing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0393244779
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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
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