A well-crafted story that will appeal most strongly to baseball aficionados.
Parallel tales of two of baseball’s greatest lions in the winters of their careers.
By the late 1950s, writes Shapiro (Journalism/Columbia Univ.; The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together, 2003, etc.), baseball, though still popular, was in trouble. Attendance had fallen precipitously since the ’40s, and the game was being supplanted by football as America’s favorite professional sport. Enter veteran baseball executive Branch Rickey, who at age 74 attempted to save baseball by creating a third major league, the Continental League. This new league, envisioned Rickey, would be free of the self-interested and self-destructive myopia of the current major-league owners and would share resources, prospective players and the ever more lucrative revenue from television. In short, the new league would be competitive, which the previous leagues were not. The impetus was the New York Yankees and their wizened manager Casey Stengel, who had made an art of mangling the English language while proving to be a master baseball tactician. Under Stengel, the Yankees had won seven World Series, with consistently dominating performances that made baseball boring. With the “reserve clause” in place, in which players were tied to a team for life, not much promised to change. While Rickey pushed for such change, Stengel, approaching 70, was under pressure to continue the Yankees’ winning ways. Both men, each nursing an oversized ego, believed they would succeed because they willed it; in 1960, both men failed. Rickey would find the likely owners for the new league franchises no more open to innovation than the established league owners, and the Continental League would die with the expansion of the National and American Leagues. To save his job, Stengel had to win the 1960 World Series; he did not and was promptly fired. Eventually Rickey and Stengel, both of whom loved the limelight, faded from public awareness. Shapiro expertly enlivens these two larger-than-life characters and captures in fine detail an important era in baseball history.
A well-crafted story that will appeal most strongly to baseball aficionados.Pub Date: May 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8247-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.
A disjointed debut memoir about how competitive swimming shaped the personal and artistic sensibilities of a respected illustrator.
Through a series of vignettes, paintings and photographs that often have no sequential relationship to each other, Shapton (The Native Trees of Canada, 2010, etc.) depicts her intense relationship to all aspects of swimming: pools, water, races and even bathing suits. The author trained competitively throughout her adolescence, yet however much she loved racing, “the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn’t motivate me.” In 1988 and again in 1992, she qualified for the Olympic trials but never went further. Soon afterward, Shapton gave up competition, but she never quite ended her relationship to swimming. Almost 20 years later, she writes, “I dream about swimming at least three nights a week.” Her recollections are equally saturated with stories that somehow involve the act of swimming. When she speaks of her family, it is less in terms of who they are as individuals and more in context of how they were involved in her life as a competitive swimmer. When she describes her adult life—which she often reveals in disconnected fragments—it is in ways that sometimes seem totally random. If she remembers the day before her wedding, for example, it is because she couldn't find a bathing suit to wear in her hotel pool. Her watery obsession also defines her view of her chosen profession, art. At one point, Shapton recalls a documentary about Olympian Michael Phelps and draws the parallel that art, like great athleticism, is as “serene in aspect” as it is “incomprehensible.”
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.Pub Date: July 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15817-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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