Feinstein writes with warmth and enthusiasm of a beloved sport in a book that will grab any fan.
A rousing account of the 2018-2019 college basketball season, a time of surprises and rising stars.
Longtime Washington Post sportswriter Feinstein, author of such sports classics as A Season on the Brink and A Good Walk Spoiled, comes by his indefatigable love of basketball honestly: In the late 1960s, his father took him to NIT championship games at Madison Square Garden, seated a few yards from the boards. “There were no Spike Lee seats in those days,” he writes, gamely, “so this was about as good as it got.” The author is a sympathetic observer, fan, reporter, and scholar all at once, and he delivers reams of information about how the game has evolved in the decades since his childhood. Today, he notes, there are more than 350 teams in Division 1 college basketball, with the first game of the season involving more action than any one person could ever hope to comprehend, all on the path to “March madness.” The best parts of this book focus on the people who are involved in shaping the young players, such as the fellow who “gave up an $800,000-a-year job as a lawyer and CEO to become an assistant basketball coach for $32,000 a year—and couldn’t be happier.” Among Feinstein’s other subjects—notwithstanding such giants as Mike Krzyzewski, Tom Izzo, and Jim Calhoun—are coaches from historically black institutions, schools that are well represented throughout the season at every level of play; an episode involving a game between Howard and Harvard reveals coaching worthy of a championship NBA team. The narrative closes steadily in on victory by a school that had never enjoyed a national championship (Virginia) and the defeat of Feinstein’s alma mater: “I watched the Duke kids—and they were kids—heads down, tears of shock in their eyes, after the final buzzer on the last day of March and felt badly for them. But, being honest, not that badly.”
Feinstein writes with warmth and enthusiasm of a beloved sport in a book that will grab any fan.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54448-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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