Twenty-eight stories, no duds in the bunch and a few to reread after a dog and a beer.
The Sports Illustrated columnist succeeds in his editing debut, picking mostly winners in the 12th annual collection of top sportswriting.
Reilly begins shakily with an “invalid” story by Bill Plaschke: Sarah Morris, cerebral palsy sufferer, baseball fan, and creator/editor/writer of Dodger Place, has a Web site with one monthly visitor and types her reports with a head pointer strapped around her temple. Plaschke minimizes the pity and makes the simple point that sports makes life better. From there, Reilly goes on to two excellent, contrasting profiles. First to Germany to visit Max Schmeling, the boxer who beat the great Joe Louis in 1936. Frank Deford talks with the 97-year-old widower, who admits he brownnosed Hitler but also maintained Jewish friends and saved two boys, risking his own life, during Kristallnacht in 1938. Then to Cuba for Eugene Robinson’s portrait of the “Cuban Ali,” Teofilo Stevenson, the three-time Olympic Gold Medal winner who passed up the big bucks to stay loyal to Castro and Communist Cuba. Juliet Macur’s depiction of a 19-year-old anorexic track star is hold-your-breath-and-hope-she-lives dramatic. Gene Wojciechowski’s requiem for basketball coach Al McGuire is sweet and sad. The funniest story comes from Scott Osler; in “Name It,” he uses athlete’s names as nouns or verbs. A man’s boss gives him a royal Aikman (concussive headache); the employee wants to Spree (choke) him, but finding another job would be difficult because the paperboy Knoblauchs (throws away) the morning edition. Reilly could have Soriano-ed (led off with power) this story, but he decides to Bucky Dent it (have an unlikely star appear later). Finally, Dan Neil’s fun night at Crash-O-Rama near Orlando should get demolition derby big-time hours somewhere on cable.
Twenty-eight stories, no duds in the bunch and a few to reread after a dog and a beer.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-08627-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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