by Ted McClelland ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2005
Amusing, opinionated, rambling and filled with a dizzying array of handicapping formulas—in short, everything a horse-racing...
A Chicago journalist spends a lively year playing the ponies.
You can make a life at the track, but you can’t make a living,” says McClelland, a columnist at the Chicago Reader, as he sets out to prove himself wrong. Spending ten months at Illinois tracks both seedy (Hawthorne) and bucolic (Arlington Park), he studies the art of wagering. He bets on maidens (horses that have never won), the chalk (the betting favorite) and suckers (horses that repeatedly finish second, leading bettors to believe the animal is due for a win). McClelland learns from personalities both inside and outside the paddock: there’s curmudgeonly Creighton Schoenfeldt, a devotee of a handicapping program called All-Ways, which ranks every horse “according to its speed from the gate, its class, its workouts” and its finishing kicks. And there’s mild-tempered Bob the Brain, who, in the late 1970s, was one of a group of horseplayers making a living wage at the track. (That streak ended in the early 1990s, when the Racing Form began publishing speed figures each day.) And there’s also Omar Razvi, a cab driver and gambler who buys a filly named Sassiness with his winnings. After months of “betting like a eunuch,” McClelland decides to go from tightfisted to two-fisted, and triumphs—for a time. He finally discovers the “secret” to winning. It isn’t in predicting the horses’ behavior, it’s in predicting how other gamblers will bet, and exploiting their mistakes.
Amusing, opinionated, rambling and filled with a dizzying array of handicapping formulas—in short, everything a horse-racing book should be.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55652-567-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ted McClelland
BOOK REVIEW
by Bonnie Tsui ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Bonnie Tsui
BOOK REVIEW
by Bonnie Tsui ; illustrated by Sophie Diao
BOOK REVIEW
by Bonnie Tsui
by Jeanne Marie Laskas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 24, 2015
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Jeanne Marie Laskas
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.