While not quite all-star material, this second annual collection of sports essays, drawn from sources ranging from Sports Illustrated to Esquire to Tropic, scores plenty of points— beginning with the perceptive introduction by guest editor McGuane, who chose the finalists from series editor Glenn Stout's nominations. Curiously, McGuane's meditation on how sports captivate us by acting as a societal mirror is the collection's anomaly, the only piece here that deals primarily in abstractions—including the idea that sets the book's theme: ``At the core of sport is courage.'' And so nearly all of the 25 essays that follow focus on individual players and how they play their games and their lives. The leadoff selection, Gary Smith's mournful ``Shadow of a Nation,'' is paradigmatic—the story of a young Crow Indian whose great skill on the basketball court proved no match for his real opposing team: the defeatism and alcoholism that had conquered so many Crows before him. This sort of sportswriting-with-a-conscience abounds here, from Timothy Dwyer's moving ``Center of Gravity,'' about basketball star Manute Bol returning to his starving homeland of Sudan, to Paul Solotaroff's muckraking ``The Power and the Gory,'' on the ravages wrought by steroids. More traditional, particularly effective pieces focus on the sad career-slides of Roger Maris (David von Drehle) and Sonny Liston (William Nack), and the serene joy of bird-dogging (Sydney Lea). There are numerous portraits, some routine (Leigh Montville on Nolan Ryan; Joe Sexton on hockey star Brett Hull) and some exceptional (Michael Disend on an obscure handball king; Donna St. George on Minnesota Fats). Dave Barry closes things with an amusingly flip look at hard-driving basketball forward Grant Long. A level, literate playing field for the armchair athlete- -though a few more pieces by women (more than three, anyway) would be welcome next time around.
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1992
ISBN: 0-395-60340-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.
An exhaustive—and exhausting—chronicle of the champ's boxing career and disastrous life.
Tyson was dealt an unforgiving hand as a child, raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in a "horrific, tough and gruesome" environment populated by "loud, aggressive" people who "smelled like raw sewage.” A first-grade dropout with several break-ins under his belt by age 7, his formal education resumed when he was placed in juvenile detention at age 11, but the lesson he learned at home was to do absolutely anything to survive. Two years later, his career path was set when he met legendary boxing trainer Cus D'Amato. However, Tyson’s temperament never changed; if anything, it hardened when he took on the persona of Iron Mike, a merciless and savage fighter who became undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. By his own admission, he was an "arrogant sociopath" in and out of the ring, and he never reconciled his thuggish childhood with his adult self—nor did he try. He still partied with pimps, drug addicts and hustlers, and he was determined to feed all of his vices and fuel several drug addictions at the cost of his freedom (he recounts his well-documented incarcerations), sanity and children. Yet throughout this time, he remained a voracious reader, and he compares himself to Clovis and Charlemagne and references Camus, Sartre, Mao Zedong and Nietzsche's "Overman" in casual conversation. Tyson is a slumdog philosopher whose insatiable appetites have ruined his life many times over. He remains self-loathing and pitiable, and his tone throughout the book is sardonic, exasperated and indignant, his language consistently crude. The book, co-authored by Sloman (co-author: Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of Kiss, 2012, etc.), reads like his journal; he updated it after reading the galleys and added "A Postscript to the Epilogue" as well.
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16128-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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