Parks has no problem with the surrender of civility on Sundays in soccer stadiums. His readers probably will. (1 map)
The prolific English-born novelist (Mimi’s Ghost, 2001), essayist (Hell and Back, 2002), and memoirist (An Italian Education, 1995) romps around Italy with the rarely civil but always rabid supporters of a mediocre professional soccer team.
Hoping to examine “the way the dream intersects with ordinary life, private and public,” Parks decides to see every Sunday soccer game of Hellas Verona, his beloved team in his adopted city. (More than 250 pages pass before he grudgingly acknowledges that Verona has another team, Chievo Verona, whose rise accompanies Hellas’s fall.) Parks’s passion for the game, for Italian language and culture, and for adolescent tomfoolery are at first sufficient. In clear, vibrant, gleefully un-PC prose he describes stadium crowds; jam-packed buses, trains, and planes; significant moments in games; and the surly, unpredictable way that chance becomes a player. But as the season continues, Parks cannot shield from view the ugliness of the fans whose acceptance he so desperately and even pathetically craves. They post toxic notes on the team Web site (many appear as chapter epigraphs). They scream obscenities at policemen, at other fans, at bus drivers. They grunt like monkeys at the black players on opposing teams. Objects and fists fly. In one horrifying episode on a train near the end, a scene out of A Clockwork Orange, they torment “a pretty young girl” (a phrase Parks uses throughout the book), urging her to spread her legs, show her breasts—or at least give them her brassiere. One of them brags about his erection. And what does Parks do while this virtual rape is occurring? “I begin to feel vaguely responsible,” he says. But he does nothing but watch, participate a little (the girl is seated beside him), remember it, enjoy it.
Parks has no problem with the surrender of civility on Sundays in soccer stadiums. His readers probably will. (1 map)Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-628-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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
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