Schullery (Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness, 1997, etc.), an inveterate ferreter of fly- fishing’s deep past, serves up more arcana and opinions for the sport’s devout. What allows Schullery to rise a cut above most fishing writers, aside from the fact that he writes with grace and brevity, is his deflationary tactic. Not only is he interested in discovering what he can about the origins of piscatorial verities, but he also delights in disemboweling the folderol passed off as eternal truth by the sport’s self-appointed guardians. This can range from the question of who qualifies as a trout bum to whether or not it was Dame Juliana Berners who wrote the 15th-century “Treatise on Fishing with an Angle.” It can mean learning who might have been the first to wet a horse-hair line in the Letort Spring Run, or who invented the dry fly and where it was first fished, or why building a great bamboo fly rod is a craft and building a great violin is an art. When it comes time for Schullery to venture a few opinions of his own, he wears his erudition lightly. He knows well the “charms of studying the evolution of a great fly pattern,” invests the changing of the body material on a Hendrickson dry with Darwinian import, and explains why a band of scarlet silk turns a humble coachman into royalty. And he is one of the few fishing writers who know enough to let a place—the Battenkill, for instance—keep its mystery, who know that no degree of dissection will reveal its soul. In a literature so abounding in snobs and reverse snobs, Schullery comes like a blast of fresh air, an iconoclast with an inclusive spirit that Whitman would have admired.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84246-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Smith offers a straightforward account of the heady world of professional football as he describes his recent seasons as the premier running back of ``America's Team,'' the Dallas Cowboys. In telling how a poor Florida boy became a multimillion-dollar star, Smith shows that modern football plays many roles in America today: It's an art, a thing of magic, a way of life—but most of all a gritty and competitive business (and for stars like Smith, a lucrative profession). Smith talks about his sandlot heroics, his childhood dream of becoming a star for the Cowboys, and the constant doubts his size raised about his ability to compete (in childhood he was too big, as a pro too small, said his detractors). Smith's account of his football career is, however, a success story from the beginning: He was a standout in high school and at the University of Florida. Dismayed, he says, by the instability of the Florida program, Smith left prior to his senior year in order to participate in the NFL draft. Picking Smith in the first round, Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson signed him for $3 million for three years (throughout Smith's account, stories of his numerous contract negotiations loom as large as his tales of on-field feats). With the Cowboys, Smith emerged as a player of big words and big deeds, making cocksure comments but placing first among rookie rushers his first season, subsequently leading the NFL in rushing, becoming the youngest player to rush for 1,500 yards, appearing in three Pro Bowls, and leading his team to consecutive Super Bowl victories. Smith's account, written with the help of Delsohn (coauthor of John Wayne, My Father, not reviewed) culminates in his amazing 1993 season, when he won the rushing title, the season MVP award, and the MVP award for the Super Bowl. A pleasant, absorbing look at life in the NFL—from the top. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59985-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
The athletes and their story deserve better.
An American doctor covers the trials of the men who bioengineered East Germany’s champion swim teams.
Ungerleider, a sports doctor and consultant who obviously knows his way around international athletics, sets out to document the prosecution of the East German officials responsible for plying hundreds of teenage athletes with steroids during the cold war. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the East German state developed a program of “supportive measures”—a euphemism for drug and doping treatments—that were used to turn promising teenagers into überathletes who dominated Olympic and international competitions. In addition to broad backs and low swim times, however, the drugs also led to exaggerated male sexual characteristics in women, devastating psychological traumas, serious long-term health problems, and a rash of birth defects. Now, led by Professor Werner Franke, a crusading scientist, and Brigitte Berendonk, a former swimmer, many of the doped athletes are bringing civil and criminal suits against the doctors and trainers who gave them the little blue pills in the first place. Ungerleider has a great story: a tragedy with ties to the Holocaust, communism, nationalism, science, justice, feminism, and the other epic themes of the 20th century. Unfortunately he botches it terribly, and the end result is little more than an overblown, repetitive magazine article with no apparent organizational principle and writing so bad one wonders if it was just shoddily translated from German. The legal context of the trials is never explained, the narrative is nearly impossible to follow, and even the medical science dissolves into static. It makes things only worse that the babble is interspersed with snippets that strive for the heroic and fall miserably short.
The athletes and their story deserve better.Pub Date: July 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26977-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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