Vivid rodeo life and lore for armchair cowpokes and bowlegged hands alike, by a devoted “kicker with a literary bent.”
A quixotic son of the Southwest hits the road to follow a truly American sport and, incidentally, chase his own history as well.
Stratton (Backyard Brawl, 2002), a journalist based in Austin, Texas, hailing first out of Guthrie, Okla., takes to the rodeo trail (usually leaving wife Luscaine at home) and travels to cowboy circuit venues Prescott, Cheyenne, Oklahoma City, Portland, even Las Vegas. He reports on the small-time ranch-hand contests and the major meets, on the bruising sport of the rough stock and saddle bronc riders, on the baggy pants clowns, the steer wrestlers, cowgirl barrel racers and stock contractors. Here are the professional cowboys, the ass-kickers and assorted feckless adepts of the dirt arena and open air. Here are the fierce animals and the fabled heroes. Here are Tom Mix, Bill Pickett, Yakima Canutt, Freckles Brown and Tornado, the bull he rode in on. Our guide Stratton, shod in his Luccheses, crowned in his Stetson, sketches the history of the sport from the Spanish inheritance and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. There may have been a touch of racism in the past, he indicates. Now, judging from the author’s research, the raw and wild rodeo world is still redolent of the smell of the stockyard along with the tang of human musk. We learn the rules of proper cowboy demeanor and appropriate dress as well as the rules of the various standard events. Certainly, it is show business, traditional and commercial. But it’s more: It’s a primeval, fierce contest between beasts and men, with rough lives and sad endings. Stratton ties his own family history into his account, including an embezzler grandfather, colorful ladies and Cowboy Don, the runaway father he never met. He chases the rodeo and Cowboy Don’s specter, and he catches and hogties them both.
Vivid rodeo life and lore for armchair cowpokes and bowlegged hands alike, by a devoted “kicker with a literary bent.”Pub Date: May 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101072-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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