A commemoration of a writer who wryly observed his generation.
Newspaper pieces from the most famous journalist of the 1920s.
Ring Lardner (1885-1933), well-known for his much-anthologized short story “Haircut,” was a prolific journalist whose work was carried by 150 newspapers across the country as well as by prominent magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and Colliers. Between 1913 and 1919, he wrote more than 1,600 columns for the Chicago Tribune and between 1919 and 1927, produced more than 500 syndicated pieces. Throughout his career, he covered a wide range of topics, including political commentary, social satire, and, most especially, sports. Despite this output, his journalism has appeared in only two collections, an oversight that Rapoport (editor: From Black Sox to Three-Peats: A Century of Chicago’s Best Sportswriting, 2013, etc.), a former Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Daily News sports columnist, aims to correct with this abundant compendium. Although he provides introductions to each of the sections and helpful endnotes, much of what occupied Lardner is completely out of date for contemporary readers. There are sections on baseball, football, boxing, the America’s Cup, golf, and horse racing, all of which refer to ephemeral events long past. Of possible historical interest are Lardner’s views about Prohibition, World War I (in which he did not serve) and the contentious peace talks that followed, and various political conventions and elections. He made fun of the growing interest in radio, until he got one for his family; and of suburban life in general. Unfortunately, his characteristic lowbrow style—phonetic spelling and bad grammar—is likely to elicit winces. Cynical and irreverent, his pieces on politicians (he calls them “simps,”) are sometimes-amusing, but less so are his opinions about women (“girls will be girls,” he remarks in a piece about his wife’s desire to redo the decor of their house) and marriage (“Why Not a Husband’s Union?” is the title of one piece). The editor could well have left out Lardner’s doggerel poetry.
A commemoration of a writer who wryly observed his generation.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8032-6973-6
Page Count: 582
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
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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