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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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