Many a young girl dreams of becoming an Olympic gymnast, but the road to the gold can be downright dangerous, proposes Ryan in this expose of upper-level competitive gymnasties and figure skating. "What I found," she writes, "was a story about legal, even celebrated child abuse."
Ryan saw girls 13 and younger training 8 hours a day on a diet of little more than apples, laxatives and painkillers, falling into anorexia and bulimia in order to reach unreasonably low weights. She notes that the average female U.S. Olympic gymnast in 1992 was 16 and weighed 83 pounds, or 23 pounds less than her nearly-18-year-old counterparts in 1976. Death is not unknown to the sport. Despite the efforts of her parents and her coach to help her overcome an eating disorder, Christy Henrich, a favorite for the 1992 Games, died of multiple organ failure at 22. Girls also train with multiple stress fractures or worse. Julissa Gomez was working on her poor vaulting techniques with a sprained ankle. The next year at the World Sports Fair, the 16-year-old still hadn't mastered the maneuvers. She smashed into the vault forehead-first and snapped her neck, then died in 1991 after three years in a vegetative state.
Ryan blames the coaches, the fame-crazed parents and the U.S. Gymnastics Federation, which requires no training degrees to coach and makes no regular checks at studios. She tells a horrific tale of Bela Karolyi, who coached Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton, exploding at a young girl who was eating a peach after a workout, calling her lazy and fat. That afternoon the whole team was punished with an extra two hours of training.
Ryan's coverage is limited—she spoke to only two dozen of the roughly 200 elite U.S. gymnasts—and her research is often based on anecdotal and secondary sources. Still, the book makes for fascinating reading, if only because it proves once again that perfection is always an illusion. (Double-day, $22.95)
by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen
There's a certain kind of adolescent dweeb who gets a rush from playing war games with names like Afrika Korps and Stalingrad—youths who rush home after school to manipulate mountains of cardboard representing the 13th Panzer Division and the 101st Airborne.
Happily most of them grow up to be harmless software designers. But occasionally one of them grows up to be Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Such a man is Newt Gingrich, coauthor (with historian William R. Forstchen) of the new thriller 1945, the latest initiative in his apparently implacable drive to win the coveted Weirdest Grown Man in North America award. Gingrich's novel, now stripped of the semi-steamy passages that gave it a big blast of prepublicity, still reveals a very unhealthy fascination with the Third Reich. The horrendously written book (" 'So. Did you like Heidelberg?' Hitler asked") proceeds from the hackneyed What if Germany Had Won? premise that has been the subject of countless novels, movies and comic books.
In this 382-page version, Germany refuses to go to war with the United States in 1941 and instead concentrates on defeating the Russians. Meanwhile, the Americans crush Japan. Now, in 1945, the victorious Germans are ready to launch a commando raid to steal American plans for the A-bomb and take over the world. All that stands in their way is James Mannheim Martel, an American naval intelligence officer with a German mother and a cousin who just happens to be a German intelligence officer.
With the sex stuff gone, what folks really ought to be steamed up about is Gingrich's crackpot historical revisionism, in which he portrays Germany as a pretty neat country that just happened to get bushwhacked when the Nazis seized power. For the record, the Nazis did not seize power; they got elected by Germans. Nevertheless, in the course of his juvenile book, Gingrich takes many occasions to praise the Nazis for their valor, ingenuity and efficiency.
"The Nazis may be crazy, but they sure can throw a parade," notes Martel at one point. Yeah, so can the Klan.
1945 is also the first novel in living memory in which a Speaker of the House uses a fictional Nazi, Otto Skorzeny, as a mouthpiece to campaign against U.S. gun control laws. The Nazis, it will be recalled, were not big on gun control. (Baen, $24)
by Robert Fulghum
With millions of books in print (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It), Robert Fulghum is securely situated as one of the top simple sages on the bestseller lists. Intent on having modern society find the sacred in the commonplace, his fifth book takes a look at rituals, big and little. Taking showers, for example.
But he's sincere, and his message feels good. Revealing his own considerable heartaches (giving up an illegitimate child, his parents dying estranged from him) with unabashed honesty, he implores us to celebrate the passages—the weddings, the birth of a child, the first sexual experience—and to forgive ourselves for the bad marriages and all those other awful mistakes.
A parish minister for 22 years, Fulghum offers prayers and services for life's momentous events, as well as suggestions for everyday ceremonies. He aptly recognizes their importance in today's age of fragmented families and communities. Sure, Fulghum is overbearing, oversimplified and saccharine. But he's also touching, practical and wise. (Villard, $20)
by Gabriel García Márquez
When a convent crypt in an old slavers' port in South America is shattered to make way for a five-star hotel, a mass of lustrous copper-colored hair tumbles out, 22 meters of it, attached to a small skull. The only legible marking on the stone is the given name Sierva María de Todos los Angeles, and Gabriel García Márquez, witness to the event, wonders if this is perhaps the tomb of the little marquise revered along the Caribbean coast as a miracle worker.
In the hands of Nobel Prize winner Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera), the legend of the girl bitten by a rabid dog on her 12th birthday, 200 years before, becomes a mesmerizing tale.
The unloved child of a dissipated aristocrat and his cacao-addicted wife, Sierva María is raised in the slave quarters of the family mansion until the fateful bite arouses her father's concern. Subjected to horrendous "cures," she is imprisoned in a convent to be exorcised. But the earnest exorcist himself becomes obsessed by the child and overcome by love. "It is the demon," he tells his bishop, who finds him in tears, "the most terrible one of all."
With exquisite prose, Márquez brings the magic, superstition and imposing power of the church to vivid life in a wondrous story of doomed and forbidden love. (Knopf, $21)
by Lisa Alther
When friends-for-life Jude and Molly were girls in Tennessee, they liked to pretend they'd been brought up in the wild by wolves. They'd speak their own wolf-child language, while trying to decipher the human world around them.
For Jude, this novel's main character, that world includes several violent, haunting deaths in her immediate circle and a confused sexuality (the reader understands Jude is a lesbian many irritating pages before she does).
Molly grows out of being both a wolf-child and a lesbian, becoming a born-again Christian before her death in a car accident. Despite an adventurous adulthood, Jude stays gratingly naive.
Somewhere between the moving and hilarious Kinflicks (the author's first novel) and Heaven (her fifth), Alther lost her sense of humor. Without that humor to alleviate Jude's pain, the reader just wants Jude to reach some kind of self-awareness in order to put both herself and the rest of us out of our misery. Unfortunately, that epiphany is far too weak and too late in the book to save anybody. (Dutton, $22.95)
by Alanna Nash with Billy Smith, Marty Lacker and Lamar Fike
In 700-plus pages of gossip about Elvis Presley's private life by three hangers-on, the authors make the alternately worshipful and unflattering comments about their beneficent boss that define the best tradition of gofer tell-alls. Not surprisingly their dish is pretty thin: 18 years after his death, we learn that Presley once nearly hired a hit man. Only an ardent fan or devoted voyeur will enjoy scaling this mountain of crumbs.
The book, though, is not without humor. Fike remembers how Presley drank Bloody Marys throughout a 1969 Barbra Streisand concert in Las Vegas while pondering Streisand's marital history. Afterward, he wobbled backstage and said, "Man, what did you ever see in Elliott Gould? I can't stand the guy."
But the revelations about Presley's last years are old stuff: He had to wear a corset to fit into his jeweled jumpsuit, he could no longer hit high or low notes and his drug use shifted into overdrive. (Smith estimates that in the '60s, Presley was "bombed" 40 percent of the time; by the '70s it was 60 percent.) His death seems inevitable, especially in the company of such indifferent—and unapologetic—minders as these. (HarperCollins, $25)
by Jane Heller
Beach Book of the Week
FIRED COOKBOOK EDITOR JUDY MILLS has a lot to fall back on—great legs, a handsome husband who makes big bucks as a commodities trader, a restored Connecticut colonial and membership in The Oaks, the prestigious country club where she hopes to network her way into a new job. But when Judy's best prospect, feminist lawyer Claire Cox, is found bludgeoned to death in a sand trap, she finds herself taking on another assignment—working with sexy Det. Tom Cunningham as the police try to penetrate The Oaks' wall of silence, and the mystery.
As sparks and wisecracks fly between the two, readers will recognize the suburban sleuth turf staked out by Susan Isaacs. But this breezy second novel shows that Heller, a Connecticut resident and former publishing executive, is also intimate with the territory. Knowing and naughty, her mystery is engaging enough to divert—but not enough that you forget to reapply the sunscreen. (Kensington, $19.95)
>Joan Ryan
HORROR STORIES IN MINIATURE
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE SPORTS writer Joan Ryan, 35, spent 15 months interviewing past Olympians and present hopefuls for this book. "I can't even watch gymnastics anymore," she says.
What were the worst things you saw?
The incessant name-calling—the belittling of the girls by the coaches is shocking. It's crazy to see what kinds of injuries these girls train with; it's not uncommon to take eight to 10 Advils a day as well as cortisone and Novocain and other painkillers. In 1992 every girl on the Olympic gymnastics team performed with injuries; it's like the NFL for 15-year-olds."
For most girls, what are the emotional costs?
These girls are obsessed with weight and how they look. A 1994 University of Utah study of elite gymnasts found that 59% admitted to some form of eating disorder. The sad thing is that they achieve so much, but they can't see that. They are not taught to be proud of themselves. Physically, they begin menstruating late because of strenuous exercise coupled with poor eating habits. Then they don't get enough estrogen, and that can lead to infertility and weak bones.
How do the parents get sucked in?
They want to give their kids every opportunity to be happy or succeed, so they support them without question. But gradually training builds to 8 hours a day, abuse starts, and it becomes normal because the coach is abusing everyone. Parents of elite gymnasts tell me they imagine themselves cheering in the stands at the Olympics. It's a huge fantasy
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