A thoroughly enjoyable read and a useful tool for any serious NBA fan.
Bishara, in a must-read for professional-basketball junkies, chronicles his journey as he sees 25 National Basketball Association games without paying face value for the tickets.
The author, a diehard NBA fan, understands the frustration that so many people feel when they see the exorbitant prices that teams charge for tickets. His debut serves as a guide for fans who want to find the best deals on tickets but don’t have experience dealing with scalpers or scouring the Internet. Bishara takes readers game by game as he explains how he acquires his ticket for each of 25 games, lists how much he paid, and compares that price to the ticket’s face value. However, these stories not only provide practical advice for getting the best bargains, but also offer plenty of entertainment. Whether he’s scoring free tickets from a local bartender or getting ripped off by a scam artist in Chicago, the author’s love for the game of basketball and for bargain hunting is always apparent. The stories don’t always end with a ticket purchase, either; Bishara scopes out each city’s nightlife and each arena’s beer selection and provides smart commentary on the state of each franchise. He writes in a conversational style, reporting on every aspect of his experience as a helpful friend might, and breaks up the stories with interviews with a veteran scalper and the head of a dynamic-pricing software company. Both interviews are incredibly interesting, and offer readers insiders’ perspectives on two very different sides of the ticket market. Although Bishara writes from the point of view of an average fan, he also displays a thorough understanding of how ticket pricing works and how that market is evolving. He also provides a valuable “Reflections” chapter, in which he hands out awards for the best arena food, the most thriving scalper trade, the most attractive cheerleaders and more.
A thoroughly enjoyable read and a useful tool for any serious NBA fan.Pub Date: June 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479264186
Page Count: 334
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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