A kaleidoscopic insiders’ story of baseball as played by the Durham Bulls, Buffalo Bisons, Lehigh Valley IronPigs, Norfolk...
One of the doyens of the sportswriting world takes on the national pastime with a frenetic road trip to minor league clubhouses and fields where true baseball is played.
Longtime sports journalist (Washington Post, Golf Digest, etc.) Feinstein (Foul Trouble, 2013, etc.) chronicles his tours of the farm clubs for a season to uncover real life in the old ballgame. It’s where erstwhile pitchers get injured too much and agile outfielders can’t bat much better than .200. All the participants—players, coaches, managers, broadcasters, umpires and groundskeepers—want to get sent up from the minors to the major league. Some may have been there before; all dream of being called up once or once more. There, the pay is much better—the lowest paycheck is about five times the highest in the minors—and life is good, as well, with decent hotel stays, better clubhouses and travel by charter planes instead of lengthy bus rides. That’s nice, though clearly, the attraction is simply proof of superior ability to play the game. “The most poignant stories in sports are never about the multimillionaires who make their games look easy,” writes the author, “but about the guys who love their games, even though they often fail while playing them.” For most journeyman athletes, far more likely than making the jump to the big leagues is being sent down or released (baseball for “fired”). Feinstein focuses on the careers of two managers, two outfielders, two pitchers, a designated hitter and an umpire through the 2012 season in the International League, but his roster is crowded with many others who wear many different uniforms during the summer. Ultimately, the narrative loses some focus as the wandering athletes, in loving servitude to the game, come and go and come again in these pages.
A kaleidoscopic insiders’ story of baseball as played by the Durham Bulls, Buffalo Bisons, Lehigh Valley IronPigs, Norfolk Tides and others like them.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53593-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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