Christine Brennan
Auteur de Inside Edge: A Revealing Journey into the Secret World of Figure Skating
A propos de l'auteur
Christine Brennan is a USA Today sports columnist, a correspondent for ABC News and ESPN and the author of the best-selling figure skating books Inside Edge and Edge of Glory. Brennan broke the news of the pairs figure skating scandal at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. She first afficher plus wrote about skating at the 1988 Olympics in Calgary and has reported on the sport extensively since 1991. Brennan, a former staff writer at the Washington Post, has covered the last 10 Olympic Games, beginning with the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Brennan has won the Women's Sports Foundation's journalism award four times and was named one of the top 10 sports columnists at the largest U.S. newspapers by the Associated Press Sports Editors in 2001. A native of Toledo, Ohio, Brennan was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in 1995. She received undergraduate and master's degrees in journalism from Northwestern University in 1980 and 1981, respectively. She lives in Washington, D.C. Dan Diamond has edited, published and written books about sports since 1984 through his company Dan Diamond and Associates. With McClelland & Stewart, he has edited two deluxe books on skating, Figure Skating -- A Celebration (1994) and A Year in Figure Skating (1996). He also edited The Official NHL 75th Anniversary Commemorative Book (1991), The Official NHL Stanley Cup Centennial Book (1992), Total Hockey (1998 and 2000), Maple Leaf Gardens -- Memories & Dreams, 1931-1999 (1999) and The Toronto Blue Jays 25th Anniversary Commemorative Book (2001). He has also published numerous statistical guide books about hockey, baseball, arena football and indoor soccer. He lives in Toronto with his wife Carol, two collies and a crow. afficher moins
Crédit image: Christine Brennan
Œuvres de Christine Brennan
Edge of Glory: The Inside Story of the Quest for Figure Skatings Olympic Gold Medals (1998) 77 exemplaires
Metfield - Tales from a Suffolk Village 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Date de naissance
- 1958-05-14
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- USA
Membres
Critiques
Listes
Simon & Schuster (1)
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 7
- Aussi par
- 1
- Membres
- 274
- Popularité
- #84,603
- Évaluation
- 3.6
- Critiques
- 10
- ISBN
- 11
- Favoris
- 1
Though there are multiple perspectives wound into her narrative, Brennan does have several connecting throughlines, following particular skaters through the process of the season. There's precocious youngster Michelle Kwan, already poised and assured at only 15. And also talented-but-uncontrolled Nicole Bobek, who could win it all if she could stop sneaking out at night to hang out with boys. There's Rudy Galindo, toiling away and dreaming of reaching the heights of his one-time pairs partner Kristi Yamaguchi. Jenni Tew is an up-and-comer, dreaming of a spot at Nationals. And there are cameos from Scott Hamilton, Brian Boitano, Katerina Witt, and Torvill and Dean for perspective from more established skaters.
It's been well over two decades since the book was published, years in which Christine Brennan has become a respected voice in coverage of the sport. Back then, however, she was fairly new to it, and that newness does show. The drama feels artificially heightened, there's an almost breathless/scandalized quality to it that reads more like gossip than actual reporting. Despite taking some time with a judge and getting information about the amount of (uncompensated!) time it takes to serve as a judge and the seriousness with which they take their responsibilities, there's a lot of aspersions cast at the judging system as a whole, with veiled and not-so-veiled insinuations that judges collude on the basis of nationality and engage in machinations to game the system in favor of particular skaters, no matter what happens on the ice. This was well before the judging scandal of the Salt Lake City Olympics that changed the entire way scoring works in the sport, so it was interesting to get some background on how the system used to be before I started paying more active attention to it.
But it's hard to not take that information, and all the rest of it, with a grain of salt. The tell-all tone, the obvious favoritism towards particular skaters...it doesn't make a case for itself to be taken seriously. If you grew up in the Michelle Kwan era, though, and remember these skaters as some of the first ones you watched, it's an interesting read. It's a portrait, albeit a flawed one, of a time and place, and an environment that has changed so fundamentally that it's impossible to compare to the same world as it exists now. But of course, la plus ca change, and right now there are kids strapping on their skates and getting ready for practice, hoping to make it out there on the ice. I'd say this is a solid read for figure-skating fans, especially if you watched during the time chronicled, but there's not much to recommend it otherwise.… (plus d'informations)