A wise, funny, eminently quotable, but woefully overplotted feel-good novel about cycling, friendship, aging, and the...
Decades after losing a companion on Mont Ventoux, five friends reunite to make peace with the mountain—and each other—by cycling it once more.
In the summer of 1982, six teenagers travel from their home in Holland to Provence. Three of them—Peter, a rising star in the poetry world; Joost, a gregarious math genius; and Bart, the narrator—plan on biking up Mont Ventoux, a brutal climb steeped in cycling history. The other three—David, the steady homebody; André, the pothead; and Laura, the beautiful, brilliant woman with whom all five men are, in their own ways, enamored—tag along for the camaraderie. The ascent, though grueling, is a success, but Peter dies while descending, and his surviving friends, each carrying a new cargo of guilt and confusion, go their separate ways. Thirty years later, they remain estranged. Bart is a crime reporter, André is a forcibly retired (i.e. “acquitted due to lack of evidence”) high-end drug dealer, Joost is an underhanded but prizewinning physicist, and David (who still dislikes travel) owns a successful travel agency. No one has heard from Laura. So when she makes contact, they’re eager to reconvene (with bikes) in Southern France to analyze what they were and what they’ve become. Though debut novelist Wagendorp excels in his depiction of middle-age male friendships, Laura, the love object, is less convincing and at times seems more like a device than a person. The novel is further hamstrung by overly self-conscious literary elements (it is not enough, apparently, for a book to be concerned with past and present; one must add a string theorist’s thoughts on timelessness to the mix) and excessive, blockbuster-style plotting. But for every flaw, the humorous rapport between the longtime friends offers serious counterweight: André: “Sorry…for all those years of silence. I should have responded, at least to the announcement of your daughter’s birth.” Bart: “I expect you were busy.” André: “Pretty.” Bart: “No excuse, bastard….She’ll be 21 soon.” André: “Yes, well anyway, congratulations on your daughter’s birth.”
A wise, funny, eminently quotable, but woefully overplotted feel-good novel about cycling, friendship, aging, and the remedial nature of athletics.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64286-017-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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