American Reference Books Annual - Shannon Graff Hysell
Enjoyable to browse or read cover-to-cover. Everything from the earliest days of tracing figures on frozen ponds to the up-and-coming stars of tomorrow are featured here. The photographs found here, many of which are unique to this volume, fit the text well and the show the progression of the sport. Because there are so few reference titles available on this topic this would be a good addition to the reference section of larger public libraries. Some libraries may find it fits better in the circulating reference collection, however, where patrons can enjoy it at their leisure.
Canadian Geographic
Fans of all ages will delight in the stories of the stars who have jumped higher, spun tighter and skated more gracefully as they pushed skating's artistic and technical boundaries. A beautifully illustrated celebration of the best athletes from a wildly popular sport, this new book profiles 60 great skaters, including champions in men's, women's, pairs and ice dancing.
Georgia Straight
Hamilton Spectator columnist Steve Milton has written a lively and authoritative history of figure skating, including profiles of 63 star athletes. This lushly illustrated new book shows how women such as Sonja Henie, Barbara Ann Scott, Peggy Fleming, Midori Ito, Kristi Yamaguchi, Katarina Witt, Michelle Kwan, and Irina Slutskaya contributed to the evolution of the sport, which has become one of the marquee events of the Winter Games. Milton demonstrates how North Vancouver's silver-medal-winning Karen Magnussen has not received enough recognition for her innovations, which included the first layover camel and a spiral sequence that later became a requirement of the short program. "She was the first woman to do the splits in both directions, the first to proceed from an Ina Bauer into a double Axel and the first to do a side layback into a back layback," he writes. As the preceding sentence shows, Milton knows his figure skating.
Globe and Mail
Double-page illustrations give plenty of scope for expressive drawings, brightened with cheerful watercolor washes. This small-scale story is fitting for children whose play involves the imagined adventures of their favorite toys.
Good Times
If you didn't get your fill of figure skating during the Olympics, don't despair--this book is for you!
Huntsville Forester
This large-format hardcover is beautifully illustrated with historic photos of the sport's legends.
SciTech Book News
Milton, a sports journalist who has covered figure skating for three decades, profiles 63 figure skaters in men's and women's singles, pairs, and ice dancing, including pioneers, legends, influential skaters, technical innnovators, and current stars. Accompanied by color photos, the profiles give information on skaters like Dick Button, Brian Boitano, Sonja Henie, Michelle Kwan, Katarina Witt, Gordeeva and Grinkov, Shen and Zhao, Torvill and dean, Brian Joubert, Carol Heiss, and Kristi Yamaguchi. Sidebars discuss important themes and moments in skatin'g history, like the judging system, nationalism, and the Nancy Kerrigan incident.
Waterloo Region Record
A sports writer with the Hamilton Spectator, Steve Milton has attended seven Winter Olympics and more than a dozen World Figure Skating Championships. In this book [Milton] profiles more than 60 world champions, past and present, from all over the world, in the process telling the history of the sport.
World Figure Skating Museum & Hall of Fame
Steve Milton's book is simply wonderful. Figure Skating's Greatest Stars is more than a comprehensive look at the greatest skaters the world has ever seen--it is a refreshing narrative on skating's past, present and future. This book is a must for all skating fans, regardless of age.
Frontenac This Week/Kingston This Week
Steve Milton has created a beautifully illustrated celebration of the best athletes from this wildly popular sport.... Fans of all ages will delight in reading the stories of these stars who have jumped higher, spun tighter and skated more gracefully as they pushed skating's artistic and technical boundaries.
VOYA
Milton's book divides sixty-three biographical essays among five chapters. The biographical chapters are interspersed with those of topical note. "Figures and 6.0," covers the end of skating's compulsory figures and the demise of the 6.0 scoring system; "Nationalism and the Building of Champions" addresses the sometimes uncomfortable marriage of figure skating—like so many sports—to the political realm; and "Pivotal Moments" addresses topics such as the introduction of women and the influence of television. Milton dominates the genre and has published more than ten biographies on figure skating since 1994. No other author even comes close. Printed on slick, heavy paper, this oversized title seems to suffer from psychosis: it plays at the fringes of information for research wrapped in a coffee table ornament. Milton touches on hot-button issues such as inequitable scoring, the Harding-Kerrigan debacle, and Dorothy Hamill's depression, but without much depth. The index, which includes only names, makes the book's objective clear: its focus, as says the title, is the sport's stars. Fair enough. Here it succeeds, and interested fans will find considerable and highly readable information in a friendly format. Older fans and researchers will no doubt have tougher questions, however. Nowhere does Milton speak to drugs—do they tempt competitors? What did Rudy Galindo's brave coming-out do for the sport? Do parallels of the unremitting stress of the tennis circuit exist in figure skating? With his considerable expertise, Milton almost certainly has something to say about these topics. Let's hope his next book does. Reviewer: Lauri J. Vaughan
Library Journal
Milton, author of twelve figure-skating books (Figure Skating Now), wants sports fans to be as familiar with Jackson Haines, Sonja Henie, and Peggy Fleming as they are with Abner Doubleday, Babe Ruth, and Mickey Mantle. With this large, colorful book, he fills the need for a popular history of figure skating. Far from a dry parade of names, the book focuses on trailblazers and pivotal personalities such as artistic rebel John Curry of the 1970s and creative innovators Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean in the 1980s. Readers learn not only about the skaters' careers but their personal lives as well, such as Dorothy Hamill's battle with depression. A great chapter on scoring explains the pros and cons of the elimination of compulsory figures and, without getting too technical, outlines the new scoring system that replaced the problematic 6.0 scale. However, the book lacks an appendix of medal winners, which James Hines's more thorough and definitive Figure Staking, A History includes. VERDICT Recommended for avid figure-skating fans and, because of the many action photos, casual fans as well.—Kathy Ruffle, Coll. of New Caledonia Lib., Prince George, B.C.
