The Red Sox just delivered the World Series, but Lee delivers the beauty of elemental baseball: two pleasures the sport...
Now in his mid-50s, countercultural and free-spirited as ever, the popular ex-Major League southpaw continues to zip curveballs over the plate and at the establishment in this sequel to The Wrong Stuff (1984).
One reason 20 years have elapsed between the two books may be that Lee robustly and publicly enjoys his recreational intoxicants; another may be that he has kept very busy playing baseball outside show purviews. Lee has always been an outspoken, unconventional character who irked managers and front offices alike. (Both blackballed him from time to time.) In the mid-1980s, after 13 years in the limelight with the Boston Red Sox and the Montreal Expos, he found himself looking for rubbers from which to pitch. He found plenty who were eager to tap his profane and exuberant personality, from the senior circuit and the exhibition leagues to colleges and clinics for Mic-Mac Indians in his adopted Canada. Lee is supreme at conveying the pure joy of playing baseball, and he also captures the fun of his run for president of the United States as the Rhinoceros Party candidate (he gets Abbie Hoffman’s endorsement, but not Hunter Thompson’s), of learning how to drink cognac from Bobby Hull, of playing in the 1988 Goodwill Games in the Soviet Union, of hitting a home run while playing for a semi-pro team in Saskatchewan that instantaneously coincided with a shatter of lightning and the coming of rain to quell an ruinous drought. He’s entertainingly all over the field: going to Cuba and tendering a savvy piece of travel writing, discussing Bernoulli’s principle and the physics of the curveball with Ted Williams, explaining the dynamics that involved pitching into trade winds rather than prevailing westerlies, sending up a lovely tribute to his father and his children, or taking the Major League to task for its greed and glitz.
The Red Sox just delivered the World Series, but Lee delivers the beauty of elemental baseball: two pleasures the sport sorely needed.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-5407-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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