A competent sports book, but a sharper edge on the author’s narrative knife would have sliced more deeply below the surface.
Sports Illustrated editor and writer Beech debuts with an account of Army football’s last great season, 1958, when the team finished 8-0-1 and declined a Cotton Bowl invitation.
There are no structural surprises here. An introduction tells how football fans began shifting their allegiances to the NFL after 1958, how that year was “the end of an era.” The author then proceeds through the season, game by game, pausing to sketch settings and biographies of his principals. The leading character is the coach, Earl Henry “Red” Blaik, who retired at the end of the season after a 121-33-10 record at the U.S. Military Academy. Beech portrays the coach as a near-divine presence on the campus (players waited to be spoken to), a man whose assistants always deferred and who maintained a close relationship with Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who received game films every week. The author also deals with the great crisis of Blaik’s life—the 1951 academic cheating scandal that involved his own son, who was dismissed from the academy along with scores of others—and profiles a number of players, including Heisman-winning halfback Pete Dawkins, the talented runner Bob Anderson and the celebrated “Lonesome (or Lonely) End” Bill Carpenter, who never entered the huddles but stayed far down the line of scrimmage, where he received signals from his teammates. The author deals carefully with the intrateam rivalries and jealousies and relates highlights of each game, sometimes excessively so, with occasional sports clichés (“blaze of glory”). Beech neglects discussion of the racial composition of the lily-white Army team, and the final chapters belong to the where-are-they-now genre.
A competent sports book, but a sharper edge on the author’s narrative knife would have sliced more deeply below the surface.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-54818-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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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