Melodramatic and corny, but, nonetheless, a good family epic enlivened with a nice locale and a stiff dose of history.
Another Hawaiian family saga from Chun (The Monkey Dragon, 2002), this about a young woman who returns to Honolulu after 12 years on the mainland and slowly begins to make peace with her past.
Miki Ai’Lee is about as Hawaiian as you can get. The daughter of an old and powerful Chinese family that settled in Hawaii in the 19th century, Miki left Hawaii in 1958 to go to college in San Francisco and never came back. Why? She became an art historian and college professor there, but there are universities in Hawaii, too. Family history has more to do with it. For the last 150 years in Hawaii, the Chinese immigrants have fought the American settlers for cultural and political dominance—and two of the greatest rivals in this struggle have been the Ai’Lee and Demming families. The Demmings first came to Hawaii from New England as missionaries, but by the turn of the 20th century they had become wealthy landowners and traders. Their feud with the Ai’Lees began when Arthur Demming fell in love with a young Hawaiian princess who spurned him to marry Chun Ai’Lee, Miki’s great-grandfather. In revenge, Demming spent years plotting against the Ai’Lees and eventually managed to steal their lands from them. The Ai’Lees recovered and prospered once more, but not before putting a curse on the Demmings that has brought misery to the family ever since. By the time Miki was born in 1940 such things were not talked about much, but her family was horrified nevertheless when Miki fell in love with classmate Alex Demming. Miki has no chance of a happy ending with Alex, so she gives up on him and makes her own life far from home. But when she returns to Hawaii in 1970 to look after her ailing grandmother, she meets up again with Alex, whose life has not gone according to plan, either. Maybe there are second acts in life after all.
Melodramatic and corny, but, nonetheless, a good family epic enlivened with a nice locale and a stiff dose of history.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4022-3030-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
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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