It is unfortunate that Rushin’s often sophomoric sense of humor intrudes on an otherwise engaging and astutely observed odyssey of the rich variety of American sports, major and minor. A Sports Illustrated staffer for 10 years, Rushin covered 23,000 miles —to revisit the twin pursuits of my youth: epic car trips and unhealthy obsession with sports.” On his trip, grazing at the “endless salad bar of American sports,” he caught everything from amateur softball games and 9-ball tournaments to the NBA playoffs. He included numerous “local shrines,” such as Larry Bird’s hometown of French Lick, Ind., the field used in Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Ia., and the town of Jim Thorpe, Penn. At a Chicago Bears training camp, “a whiff of the Porta Potties— sets off a Proustian wave of nostalgia for high school football games, though he is seriously moved by the tears of Lou Groza and the anger of Dante Lavelli, veterans of the glory days of the dearly departed Cleveland Browns. As Rushin’s tour progresses, he visits the obvious: baseball’s Hall of Fame, Augusta National Golf Club, the Talladega National Raceway, Churchill Downs, the Houston Astrodome, and Dodger Stadium (though primarily for the hot dogs). But he also hits the not-so-obvious: St. Louis, where the Anheuser-Busch brewery and the Bowling Hall of Fame “stand as twin monarchs to keggers and keglers”; the Mildred (Babe) Didrickson Zaharias Museum in Beaumont, Tex., and the Louisville Slugger plant, which is actually located In Indiana. All of this is great fun, and Rushin can be a sharp, sometimes quirky tour guide, e.g., his side trip to Las Vegas to view Andre Agassi’s ponytail on display in a restaurant. But he can’t resist spiking his good work with repeated awful stabs at humor: losses for the University of North Carolina women’s soccer team (284—6 since 1981) “were as irregular as Rose Kennedy.” “The air was warm and heavy and foul, like God’s halitosis,” he writes elsewhere, and he has a bit of scatalogical fun with Michael Jordan’s having —released his own fragrance.— Too bad in a a volume that often offers moments of (Thomas) Boswellian sagacity.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-48229-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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