But, overall, this is a good blend of the excitement of big-game weekends and the Machiavellian world of recruiting,...
Dawgs, Gators, Vols, and the Crimson Tide mix it up in this lively, panoramic look at the 1999 Southeast Conference Football season.
Newsweek reporter (and Tennessee grad) Ernsberger organizes his story around four big games: Florida-Tennessee, Florida-Georgia, Auburn-Alabama, and (in the championship) Florida-Alabama. He conveys the great fun these contests hold for the fan: RVs, cookouts, drinking, and school rituals that make for an enjoyable weekend. Florida Gator fans, for example, were so loyal they drove through Hurricane Floyd to make the Tennessee game in Gainesville. Between games, Ernsberger portrays a variety of SEC figures. Steve Spurrier of Florida and Phillip Fulmer of Tennessee attempt to win another national championship. Vanderbilt’s Woody Widenhofer recruits across the country to keep up with the bigger state schools. Jerry DiNardo of LSU gets fired. Players—Shaun Alexander (a star at Alabama) and Ainsley Battles (a solid player at Vanderbilt)—balance football with good academic work. Joe Harrington, the Video Guy at Tennessee, supervises six cameramen and has a $25,000 budget just for videotape. Recruiting high-school stars is critical business, and Bobby Burton provides the latest news at his Web site (rivals.com): Albert “the House that Moves” Means is a Memphis high-school standout and has his choice of schools. (Lynn Lang, his coach, guides him, keeps an eye on his studies, and drives a new $30,000 vehicle soon after Means decides to go to Alabama.) Better editing would have improved Ernsberger’s account, and fans of Ole Miss, Kentucky, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Mississippi Sate will be angry at his neglect of their programs.
But, overall, this is a good blend of the excitement of big-game weekends and the Machiavellian world of recruiting, coaching, and managing alumni at large competitive universities.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87131-926-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
