Readable and generally interesting, but the appeal won’t go far beyond serious college-baseball fans.
Pitch-by-pitch account of the 2008 College World Series in Omaha, Neb.
ESPN The Magazine senior writer McGee’s diligent research, chock full of statistics, history and local color, should prove a welcome treat for hardcore baseball junkies, but it may be more than the casual fan can comfortably digest. Even dedicated fans may get impatient when the author detours from the compelling action on the field to insert yet another obscure historical sidebar. At one point, he pauses to describe how the dining room at the local Hilton Garden Inn was named after a former Omaha police chief. To maintain the narrative flow, McGee wisely avoids chronicling all eight teams participating in the tournament and focuses on those teams—Georgia, North Carolina, LSU and underdog Fresno State—who survived to the final rounds. The author unearths some memorable off-the-field stories, like the Iowa couple who drove 500 miles to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary at the tournament, or the local memorabilia and food merchants who basically survive all year on the income they draw from the two-week-long invasion of baseball fans. McGee is less successful at building the action to a dramatic climax or placing the story in the appropriate context. Like the aging and soon-to-be-replaced Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium, where the College World Series has been staged since 1947, the majority of these athletes are walking the big-time sports stage for one last hurrah. McGee delivers the nuts-and-bolts of the tournament—and some interesting historical tidbits—but doesn’t capture the bittersweet smell and feel, the “pure, unhinged, uncorrupted, refuse-to-sellout joy.”
Readable and generally interesting, but the appeal won’t go far beyond serious college-baseball fans.Pub Date: May 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-55723-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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