A sturdy collection of top-shelf McPhee, with a grab bag of curiosities for fans.
A mix of new and old work from New Yorker staff writer McPhee (Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, 2017, etc.), assembled curiously but with his trademark eye for detail.
Fittingly for a writer obsessive about the nuance of words, the title has multiple meanings. In an essay anchoring the first section, the “patch” refers to a patch of lily pads good for fishing for chain pickerel and, less overtly, to his final efforts to bond with his dying father. The second section, “An Album Quilt,” is deliberately patchwork, collecting excerpts from articles previously unavailable in book form. Many date back to his stint at Time magazine in the 1950s and ’60s, when he produced celebrity profiles. Pieces about glitterati like Cary Grant, Richard Burton, and Sophia Loren seem peculiar coming from a writer now more associated with oranges, plate tectonics, and lacrosse, but his approach hasn’t wavered: He delivers the goods in a dry (but not humorless) deadpan, trusting in the details of his research to produce the kind of surprise and irony that lesser writers turn to verbal acrobatics to achieve. The best detail in the Loren profile comes not from the actress or her associates but from her infant wet nurse; a brief profile of Joan Baez distills her rebellious attitude into the tart two-word quote that ends it. Still, to put it in golf terms McPhee might appreciate, his long game was always much stronger than his short game. He isn’t built for “Talk of the Town”–style observational pieces about MENSA meetings or Peter Sellers’ knack for accents. He’s built for long-form pieces like “The Orange Trapper,” in which his obsession with collecting lost golf balls becomes a deep dive into the wilderness and a kind of proxy study of the American class ladder.
A sturdy collection of top-shelf McPhee, with a grab bag of curiosities for fans.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-22948-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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