The athletes and their story deserve better.
An American doctor covers the trials of the men who bioengineered East Germany’s champion swim teams.
Ungerleider, a sports doctor and consultant who obviously knows his way around international athletics, sets out to document the prosecution of the East German officials responsible for plying hundreds of teenage athletes with steroids during the cold war. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the East German state developed a program of “supportive measures”—a euphemism for drug and doping treatments—that were used to turn promising teenagers into überathletes who dominated Olympic and international competitions. In addition to broad backs and low swim times, however, the drugs also led to exaggerated male sexual characteristics in women, devastating psychological traumas, serious long-term health problems, and a rash of birth defects. Now, led by Professor Werner Franke, a crusading scientist, and Brigitte Berendonk, a former swimmer, many of the doped athletes are bringing civil and criminal suits against the doctors and trainers who gave them the little blue pills in the first place. Ungerleider has a great story: a tragedy with ties to the Holocaust, communism, nationalism, science, justice, feminism, and the other epic themes of the 20th century. Unfortunately he botches it terribly, and the end result is little more than an overblown, repetitive magazine article with no apparent organizational principle and writing so bad one wonders if it was just shoddily translated from German. The legal context of the trials is never explained, the narrative is nearly impossible to follow, and even the medical science dissolves into static. It makes things only worse that the babble is interspersed with snippets that strive for the heroic and fall miserably short.
The athletes and their story deserve better.Pub Date: July 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26977-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
An inspiringly intense memoir for readers of adventure lit.
A much-honored climber’s exciting story of the death-defying feats that led to rock-climbing superstardom.
Honnold showed a predilection for climbing when he was still a small child. At age 5, he managed to scramble 30 feet off the ground at a climbing gym within just a few minutes. Later, he entered climbing competitions all over his home state of California. After his father died, Honnold dropped out of college and chose to live out of his mother’s minivan while climbing mountains. This book—which alternates between narratives by Honnold and writer/climber Roberts (Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest, 2015, etc.)—focuses on that remarkable and unconventional life and how Honnold, a quiet man who climbed purely for the joy of adventure, became “the most famous climber in the world” in the span of seven years. In his early days as a vagabond climber, he learned how to free solo, a form of climbing that relies on strength and skill alone. Not long after that, Honnold began attempting climbs—such as Half Dome in Yosemite and Sendero Luminoso in Mexico—that veterans of the sport believed were too difficult to do without gear or a partner. His notoriety spread quickly among rock climbers. Rapidly, Honnold became the subject of several documentaries and was receiving sponsorships that allowed him to travel the world and push the boundaries of his sport to extreme new heights. His dedication to the sport of rock climbing had its costs, however, including the painful end of a long-term relationship. Yet celebrity status also reinforced his belief in the importance of living simply. In 2012, he established the Honnold Foundation, which sought “sustainable ways to improve lives worldwide.” The humility, pioneering spirit, and courage that are the author’s personal hallmarks are both refreshing and invigorating. His account ultimately reminds readers how genuine fulfillment comes only when engaging in life fully and without fear.
An inspiringly intense memoir for readers of adventure lit.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24762-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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