After a monster 1998 season, baseball is back. But to Morgan, a Hall of Fame player and highly regarded analyst for ESPN, baseball still needs help in getting and keeping fans. Morgan goes point by point, describing what’s best about baseball and what needs fixing. Secure in his status within the game, he isn—t afraid to name names or step on a few toes. Morgan is blunt in his criticism of baseball’s poor administration. He discusses why the leagues and teams repeatedly fail to hire qualified black and Latino players for management positions, and suggests ways to correct the imbalance. He notes the declining interest among African-Americans in playing and watching baseball, and offers steps to rekindle this interest, largely through an expanded presence in inner-city kids— lives. Officiating also comes under Morgan’s microscope in a chapter with the self-explanatory title —Don—t Kill the Umpires! (Just Teach Them the Strike Zone),— in which the author outlines how the Major Leagues, the players, and the umpires can unite in making officiating more consistent and therefore better. However, Morgan confines most of his observations and advice to the game on the field. He chides current managers for ignoring fundamentals, such as base stealing. And he offers advice on how to rein in the excessive scoring that detracts from the game’s subtle balance between hitters and pitchers (raise the mounds for starters, shorten starting pitching staffs from five to four pitchers, don—t overuse young hurlers). Naturally, Morgan’s passion for the game doesn—t permit him only to focus on the negatives. Endlessly citing baseball’s charms (while addressing its miscues and shortcomings), Morgan identifies the players and managers most worth watching. He even playfully engages in the debate over which is the game’s greatest team, the 1998 Yankees, or his own 1975—6 Cincinnati Reds. Lovers of baseball, detractors of baseball, and even those alienated from it—all will be drawn to this outstanding and outspoken, no-punches-pulled prescription for the ills of the Grand Old Game. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60524-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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