Richly researched and textured writing that reveals the humanity of the author’s subjects.
A senior writer for ESPN The Magazine debuts with a collection of his explorations of sports-world notables who reached—or are reaching—the ends of their careers.
Thompson’s abundant strengths as a long-form journalist are evident on nearly every page. He is a relentless researcher and sensitive interviewer, a writer who tries to understand the factors that made his subjects who they are—or were. In an essay about Muhammad Ali, for example, Thompson engages in a seemingly endless pursuit of one of Ali’s very first opponents, a man who vanished from the grid. The author pursues the end-of-career stories of Michael Jordan and, later, Tiger Woods and helps us see the connections between the two, who are friends. He also chronicles the lives of people far less celebrated—e.g., Tony Harris, a college basketball star whose paranoia sent him into the jungles of Brazil, where he was found dead. Wright is particularly incisive in his essays on coaches, including Bear Bryant (Alabama football), Pat Riley (NBA) and Urban Meyer (who just completed his final football season at Ohio State)—all three of whom have had to deal with the end of their glory years. There are some longer, more complicated pieces here, too—the story of the New Orleans Saints, the Super Bowl, and Hurricane Katrina—and of football at the University of Mississippi when James Meredith broke the color line in 1962. Thompson also deals with the rugged family dynamics of Ted Williams and, in a brief piece, the angst and celebration in Chicago when the Cubs finally won the World Series in 2016. He ends with an emotional piece about his own late father. Though he’s sometimes a little quick on the draw with his identifications of motives and causes, his gritty determination makes it easy to forgive.
Richly researched and textured writing that reveals the humanity of the author’s subjects.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313387-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
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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