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
A wryly told, delightful mÇlange of footloose chronicles by a sometimes anxious wanderer. Maxwell (I Don't Know Why I Swallowed the Fly, 1997) is rather like the rest of us: wary of small planes and rushing rivers, yet also fond of wildlife. Unlike some of us, however, she gamely runs Idaho's Salmon River, takes a 37-hour train ride across the Gobi Desert (``insidious grit stormed the failing shell of that old railroad mollusk''), and snorkels among whales. Fly-fishing is Maxwell's raison d'àtre, and readers will happily follow her as she searches for steelhead trout on a wild and secret Washington river and fishes a Mongolian waterway reputedly containing the heftiest salmon on earth (up to 200 pounds apiece). One need not be a fellow traveler to appreciate her jaunts; Maxwell's prose is wittily light-hearted. Repulsed by said Mongolian salmon, she declares, ``I'd be damned if I was going to set a world record with a fish that looked so much like Quasimodo in a mermaid suit.'' During an uncharacteristically urban trip to Italy, she comments, ``If the Italian Renaissance painters had been dentists, their dentures would have looked like Venice. Arcaded and cupolaed, welded together with fancy bridgework, riddled with elegant root canals, its yellowed buildings rising straight out of the sea, it looks, for all the world, like a floating grin.'' On her stubbornly eclectic route, Maxwell also journeys to Alaska with sled-dog champion Susan Butcher and her Alaskan huskies. She visits a huge colony of monarch butterflies; she encounters a giant toxic toad. And amid all the double entendres and sardonic asides, this outdoorswoman remains an informative naturalist. Though she'll go to almost any length to muscle out a story, Maxwell writes with refreshingly little machismo.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-878067-98-2
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
The story of the tortuous negotiations between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the two Koreas over the staging of the 1988 summer Olympics in Seoul takes the reader into the heart of Cold War politics in all its paranoid splendor. At the center of this delicate imbroglio stood the former Spanish ambassador to Moscow, IOC chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch, who danced his way through negotiations of mind-boggling complexity. Pretty soon, in fact, the reader gets bogged down in the interminable petty wrangling that finally brought the Seoul games to fruition, without, however, being much intrigued or diverted on the way. Park Chong Kyu, head of the Korean Olympic Committee, Ashwini Kumar, an Indian IOC negotiator, Kim Yu Sun, the North Korean member of the IOC, Samaranch, et al., hardly emerge as personalities at all, which renders their various interactions somewhat dull. No doubt the intrigues themselves would have made an interesting article—the attempt to ideologize and manipulate the Olympic ideal is a juicy enough topic. It is indeed curious to note that the IOC at one point considered granting North Korea the staging of the table tennis tournament, a sport in which it was strong, and the canoeing event, simply because a river runs between the two Koreas. But a 340-page book packed with endless footnotes and acronyms (``DPRK NOC refuses IOC request for DPRK and ROK to march together in Opening and Closing Ceremonies'') simply collapses under its own weight. It is also worth asking whether Pound, who is still a member of the IOC, is sufficiently unhindered to tell the story as it should be told. This is a shame, for there is undoubtedly an interesting backstage story here—but one that needs a light, acerbic touch to bring it to life.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-71507-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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