Jim Brown reviewed It All Felt Impossible by Tom McAllister
Philly in the 1990s and 2000s
This is a great and quick-reading memoir by my colleague at Rutgers-Camden. Each chapter is a short essay for each year of McAllister's life. My favorite essay was 2006 when Tom is in Iowa City and dealing with a tornado for the first time. He's lived most of his life in Philadelphia, and the book offers an interesting picture of Philly during his early years 90s and 00s.
I'm always amazed at how vulnerable people are willing to be in memoirs, and this is no exception.
My favorite passage is about the slam dunk contest from the 2005 essay:
"I want to clarify something: dunks matter more than you think they do. You may want to tell me it's all a big dumb spectacle, and the scoring doesn't make sense, and it's just a show to sell Sprite and sneakers, and yes, sure, that's what it is. But strip all …
This is a great and quick-reading memoir by my colleague at Rutgers-Camden. Each chapter is a short essay for each year of McAllister's life. My favorite essay was 2006 when Tom is in Iowa City and dealing with a tornado for the first time. He's lived most of his life in Philadelphia, and the book offers an interesting picture of Philly during his early years 90s and 00s.
I'm always amazed at how vulnerable people are willing to be in memoirs, and this is no exception.
My favorite passage is about the slam dunk contest from the 2005 essay:
"I want to clarify something: dunks matter more than you think they do. You may want to tell me it's all a big dumb spectacle, and the scoring doesn't make sense, and it's just a show to sell Sprite and sneakers, and yes, sure, that's what it is. But strip all the nonsense away and you see an aesthetic achievement that can only be performed by a tiny percentage of humans in world history. Each dunk is one of the most perfect sporting feats on the planet, a beautiful expression of athletic perfection, of power, speed, and creativity. These players—their bodies built specifically for this task, spinning in the goddamn air, not just floating because there's no violence propelling it, and throwing it down behind their heads with more grace and fluidity in the coordination than many dancers—are the culmination of a century worth of training, learning, and evolutionary adaptations." (90)