Athletes in any sport stand to learn from Larsen’s methods, and Futterman turns in a fluent yarn reminiscent of Plimpton and...
The deputy sports editor for the New York Times chronicles a key figure in the development of modern track.
Why run? In a lively narrative, Futterman (Players: The Story of Sports and Money, and the Visionaries Who Fought To Create a Revolution, 2015) writes that it’s in part to fight death, for relative to an ordinary person, “the well-trained body has far more glycerol, which breaks down fatty tissue, and far less allantoin, which can bring on a condition known as oxidative stress that causes cell damage.” Running, by those lights, is a form of resistance against decay and demise. These are the sorts of ideas that intrigued Bob Larsen, a scientifically and philosophically minded coach. In the early 1970s, he rounded up a bunch of hippie jocks, known to sports history as the Jamul Toads, and set out to condition the young runners in ways that coaches had not considered before—running off track, running in extremes of heat and altitude, and the like, carefully gauging the effects of these conditions on performance. Larsen would go on to coach generations of runners, all the while employing the ethic of “running to the edge of exhaustion, the very foundation of every lesson Bob has delivered to every runner he had guided in the past forty years as he quietly writes the bible of distance running in the U.S.” Futterman chronicles plenty of thrills and spills, as well as the inevitable disappointments, on the road to winning Olympic squads and marathon champions, a development accompanied by lots of good science—running while slightly dehydrated, for instance, leads the body to produce more blood plasma, and “the increased plasma works to bring red blood cells to muscles that are under stress.” Ultimately, Larsen clearly understands what motivates runners in the endless rise and fall of competition: “He believes in rising.”
Athletes in any sport stand to learn from Larsen’s methods, and Futterman turns in a fluent yarn reminiscent of Plimpton and McPhee.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54374-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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