The Book Review Thread

[Grandstander]

Read an interesting one recently? This thread is the place to tell us about it and what you thought of it. I considered opening this on the CE board, but I didn't want to limit it to political or hot topic books.

I'll go first with:
"How Bill James Changed Our View of Baseball"...edited by Gregory F. Augstine Pierce.
Acta Sports 2007

This is a short (136 pages) collection of essays about Sabermetric pioneer Bill James, written by "colleagues, critics, competitors and just plain fans" as the sub title says. I ordered this one from Amazon and was at first annoyed at how short it was, but later relieved by the same since the book is repetitve, petty at times, and no insights about Bill James were offered that you didn't already know simply by reading his books. Every contributing author is in agreement over several things: 1) That James is a brilliant, innovative thinker. 2) That James has had a profound effect on the way that everyone looks at baseball value. Not all, but most add that 3) James had a profound effect on them beyond baseball, also in teaching them how to think in a critical manner.

Beyond these similar descriptives, many of the authors used the opportunity to regrind some axes from the past. Gary Hucabay, founder of Baseball Prospectus, contributes an esay where the focus is on the arrogance of James which he eventually excuses as as misperception by James' critics. Still, it radiated the aura of a left handed compliment. Pete Palmer, author of "The Hidden Game of Baseball" and a rival of sorts of James over the years, cops out with an essay that doesn't talk much about James himself, rather it centers on assorted Sabermetric issues with James a bit player in the discussion.

Hal Richman, inventer of the Strat-O-Matic game, does a nice job of praising James for a few pages, but then there is a gratuitous interuption as Richman detours into a defense of how he was right about defensive measurements and James was wrong. Sam Walker, sports writer for the Wall Street journal talks about how he resented Bill James for replacing the poetry of the game with analysis. Then he got to meet Bill James in person, James wasn't as big a jerk as Walker was figuring, so Walker forgives him. Yawn.

Ron Shandler, who makes his living writing a Fantasy Baseball tout book, invests his essay time in explaining why James' contempt for Fantasy Baseball is okay. Rob Neyer, who spent four years as Bill James' research assistant before breaking out as a writer, talks about the lessons he learned from James, but does so in such a way as to leave you with the impression that James was a horribly impatient teacher. I was puzzled by the selection of Neyer's illustration of learning from James. He mentions that he submitted an essay for one of the Abtracts to James and it came back with an array of curse filled corrections. The one that Neyer decides to mention is when he described some player's downward slope and ended it with "he was released." James wrote in the margin "No! no no! He was not released. He EARNED his release. Things do not happen to people, People DO things." I cannot decide if this is supposed to be an example of James' razor sharp mind, or merely Neyer highlighting what a petty eccentric James is. In either case, I fail to see a distinction between "was released" which comes with the implication that it was earned since GM's tend to hang on to players with value, and "earned his release."

What the reader does not find is anything which illuminates the character of Bill James, and that in itself does illuminate his character somewhat. None of the authors calls him his "pal", none talk about what a nice guy he is or what a terrific experience knowing him has been. They all seem to go out of their way to address only James the genius and a picture of a man not well liked personally is heavily suggested but never mentioned directly. The price of genius I suppose. Even the essay by Susan James, Bill's wife, produces no surprises. Bill spends every unoccupied moment of his time thinking about baseball. Bill is an obsessive person. Nothing you would not have guessed yourself if you hadn't already been told this by James himself in his Abstracts.

The book concludes with an essay from James which seems over written, like a man responding to an uncomfortable task by being overly gracious and mannerly.

So...I have to give this one the GrandThumb down. There simply isn't anything surprising or especially insightful offered.

[Zen653]

Continuing on the sports theme, I recently finished reading John Feinstein's "Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game," a 300+ page book about legendary basketball pioneer Red Auerbach. The book is centered around a series of lunches at the China Doll restaraunt in Washington D.C, where Feinstein met with Auerbach, and his coterie of family, friends, and admirers, including his brother Zang, various basketball coaches from the Washington area, Secret Service agents, World War II veterans, former Celtics great Sam Jones, Chris Wallace of Fox News, and various elderly lawyers and doctors from Auerbach's Country Club. Feinstein describes each person in the weekly lunch group, and more interestingly, retells Auerbach's many anecdotes in the Celtic icon's own words. We learn about Auerbach's childhood in Brooklyn as one of three sons in a blue collar Jewish family, we review his early successes and failures as a high school and college basketball player, we explore his colorful opinions on an array of basketball and political personalities, and we re-live some of the lesser known good and bad moments in Boston Celtics history. The entire book is essentially Auerbach saying, "Did I ever tell you about....?" and then telling a short story about an early coaching experience at the high school level, or about why he wouldn't let Bill Russell eat pancakes, or about why he started smoking cigars at the end of games, or about how he tricked Golden State into making the Kevin McHale/Robert Parish trade, or about how he learned to like Bob Cousy, or about how he got the jump ball rule changed in the NBA, or about how he got Tommy Heinsohn "arrested" by Polish intelligence agents, or about his tempestuous relationship with Adolph Rupp, or about his decision to make Bill Russell the first black coach in the NBA, or about the way he negotiated Larry Bird's first contract, or about his philosophy on adding one impact player per year, or about his strong patriotism and sense of justice, or about the time he met Presidents Kennedy and Clinton, or about his lack of respect for coaches who try to exert too much control over the flow of the game, etc. Lots of little interesting tales and basketball insights (which are not nearly as complicated as one would think coming from someone widely regarded as one of the true geniuses in NBA history. Auerbach's basketball philosophy seems refreshingly simple and to the point.) Halfway through the book, you don't want to put it down because one story blends perfectly into the next and you look forward to the next anecdote. Feinstein does a wonderful job of giving you a picture of what Auerbach was like as a person. You come away from it wishing you had been able to attend these lunches so that you could hear these stories directly from the man himself. You end up more interested in the forgotten years of basketball, hungry to learn more about the many anecdotes he touches upon, but doesn't belabor. I found myself wishing that the book had another 300 pages in it. Then again, I'm a Boston Celtics fan, and about 50% of the material is Celtics-related. Auerbach clearly loved the franchise that he built from almost the ground up.

If you're looking for deep insight into basketball strategy, you'll be disappointed with this book. You only get basics. If you're hoping for detailed anecdotes about the Boston Celtics dynasty years, you'll also be disappointed. You get just enough for the gist but then it's on to the next story within a couple pages. If you're looking for (1) brief highlights on a variety of basketball topics, (2) insight into who Red Auerbach was and what made him tick, (3) evaluations on famous high school, college and professional basketball players, executives and coaches, then this is the book for you; I strongly recommend it to any basketball fan. It's a quick and easy read.

[dlb]

Continuing the sports theme, I just completed Blue Blood, by Art Chansky, a history of the Duke - Carolina basketball rivalry. It's hard to imagine that the on the court conflicts of two colleges could generate 360 pages of content, but this is a long and storied rivalry. If you thought that Henderson's recent bit of smashmouth basketball reflected the lowest point in the contest's history, you're eyes will be opened as you read about the game-ending brawl initiated by Art Heyman and Larry Brown, or the time that Doug Moe's defense of Heyman included spitting in the Duke star's face every time he took a shot.

If you live outside the area and want to see what it's like to live within the sphere of this all-consuming hatred, this book will give you the blow-by-blow. If you're a Duke or Carolina fan who just loves to gnash your teeth while reliving the sins of your foe or thrill to your favorite's famous moments, Blue Blood will get your heart racing over both.

However, there is one small problem. Art Chansky is a small-town journalist (sports reporter for the Durham Morning Herald), and he writes like one. You will not find the fine prose of a Roger Angell here, nor quick wit, nor any sort of skill in capturing the magic of a moment. You will find the facts as they might be reported in the local paper after the game. Luckily, those offer plenty of fun on their own.

[nanwynnfan]

Just finishing the last 100 pages or so of Peter Lance's "1,000 Years for Revenge," a real eye-opener into the cast of characters involved in international terrorism events from all sides of the drama.

The bureaucratic in-fighting, egoism and turf protection; the dismissive attitudes toward what can only be coined as "third world intel;" the tossing out of invaluable human assets and the data they have provided; and the failure to connect the dots because of compartmentalizing are more astonishing than I had suspected.

Moreover, there are real heroes here, although most of us would never recognize their names, as they have been brushed aside or tossed on the junk heap as mere supporting characters.

[TylerDurden]

1,000 Years for Revenge is a good one nanwynn, well-written and infuriating. Although Lance has unfortunately become a bit sensationalistic and close-minded in his more recent work (I think from spending too much around Worldnetdaily conspiracy nut Jack Cashill.) The book is a good place for anyone interested in the subject to start. That its written much like a novel helps keep track of the admittedly large and easily confusing amount of information.

[nanwynnfan]

TylerDurden: Glad to see your comment. Suspecting that this might be the case, I began with "1,000 Years," holding off on the more recent "Triple Cross" for fear of rehashing, with embellishment in the latter work.

[TylerDurden]

I admittedly don't read many books (trying to change this), but the most recent one I've finished is 'First In' by former CIA officer Gary Schroen. A firsthand account of the famous 'Jawbreaker' team that infiltrated Afghanistan and made contact with the Northern Alliance mere days after 9/11.

An excellent read. That the story is true, and written in fairly plain language, makes it seem all the more surreal. A small team of Americans CIA officers, all with elite military backgrounds or decades-long experience in the region, living in the compound of an Afghan tribesman.

During the day they tour the frontlines between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban...meeting, negotiating, bribing, and sometimes mediating between the bizarre cast of warlords, tribal leaders, militia thugs, and legitimate freedom fighters that make up the Northern Alliance.

At night they deal with bureaucratic and political noise emanating from the Pentagon, Langley, and the White House...trying their best to facilitate the movement of more CIA officers, equipment, and eventually American Special Forces soldiers into Afghanistan to embed with the Northern Alliance.

The goal being to organize and prepare the Northern Alliance to mount a conventional military offensive in cooperation with American logistics and air support...ending years of WWI style stalemate between the two sides. All without JAWBREAKER ever firing a shot of their own in anger.

Incredibly informative, very personal. Patriotic but never ever preachy or jingoistic, although I'd certainly forgive a bit of bravado if Schroen had written it.

Recommended.

[LongtimeBravesFan]

I'm almost finished reading The Innocent Man by John Grisham. It is the true story of a man who was wrongly convicted of murder and sent to death row.

Ron Williamson was a high school baseball star from Oklahoma who wanted to be the next Micky Mantle. Injuries ended his career in A ball and he never settled into steady work or home life afterwards. He sunk into depression and heavy alcohol use. Based on the word of jailhouse snitches and shoddy and illegal police work, he and a friend were convicted of the brutal murder of a young woman.

The book is scary because it shows how this could happen to anybody. anybody who favors the death penalty should read this book.

One criticism was that Grisham does overwhelm the reader with a parade of names that briefly appear and I lost track at times of who some people were.

A slam on the judicial system without being preachy it was a hard hitting indictment of how indigent defendants can be railroaded by cops and judges looking to solve homicides.

[Grandstander]

Tyler....

If you enjoyed "First In" (sounds quite interesting, I shall look for it) then I suspect that you would very much appreciate George Crile's "Charlie Wilson's War" which I rank as one of the best political books I have read. It relates the true story of how alcoholic playboy Congressman Charlie Wilson of Texas, usurped the executive branch to fund and promote the CIA's clandestine anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan during the occupation of the '80's. I can't imagine anyone not finding this fascinating and eye opening.
Amazon.com: Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times: Books: George Crile

[Grandstander]

"Burying The Black Sox: How Baseball's Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded." Gene Carney. Potomac Books, 2006. 303 pp.

I nearly abandoned this book after the first 40 pages. The writing was turgid, the focus rambling and the introduction seemed to go on forever. I stuck with it despite this and I am glad that I did.

Along with what I suppose is the majority of the nation, my detailed knowledge of the 1919 World Series fix had come from Elliot Asinov's "Eight Men Out" which is a wonderful, well written account of the confusing and complex events. "Burying the Black Sox" was seeming to be a confused and complex account of the events. However, after gaining a fuller appreciation of what went on, what is disputed, and what is commonly believed but actually not true, I have to admit that there is no short, entertaining way to cover the subject if your goal is historical accuracy. Carney's purpose is the truth, not entertainment.

He achieves this goal with an extremely well documented and heavily footnoted presentation. The theme around which the book is built, is that "Eight Men Out" is a misnomer for the scandal since many more people were involved than have been supposed. The identified fixers have been Arnold Rothstein, Abe Attles, Sleepy Bill Burns and Billy Maharg. That any of them were among the gamblers who actually first proposed the scheme and got things in action, is unlikley. The evidence actually points to gamblers in St. Louis and Milwaukee. Further, along with the banished eight, there were a half dozen more major league players from other teams who were suspended because they had knowledge of the fix and used it to win bets. Additionally, Carney concusively establishes that White Sox owner Charles Comiskey had been informed of the plan before the start of the series, while the series was being played and again after it had been concluded. It was Comiskey who organized and sustained the cover up of the fix while pretending in public to be investigating it. Comiskey was aided by club secretary Harry Grabiner and the White Sox team lawyers.

It would take a massive amount of review space to go into details about any or all aspects of this story, so rather than that, I'll tell you what I learned in general.

The reason that the specifics are so hard to pin down is that this was never any sort of coherent conspiracy. No one was in charge, there was no central figure calling the shots and planning the events. To this day it is unknown whether the players (Gandil and Cicotte) first raised the idea with Burns or Maharg, or Burns and Maharg first approached Cicotte and Gandil. Also forever unknown will be the degree to which the players were actually trying to lose.

Carney makes the excellent point that if you were informed before watching any ballgame that the outcome was fixed, you would see evidence of the fix in every on field failure even if there actually was no fix. Thus, the play on the field in 1919 does not prove anything either way. Errors were going to be made, batters were going to strike out, runners were going to be left on base....in any ballgame. Carney points to the poor Series performances of Eddie Collins and Ray Schalk, two players who were not involved with the gamblers. If they had been, in the aftermath it would be easy to assume that they had tanked on purpose.

Because performances are not suitable evidence, the truth about the events must be extracted from the statements of those involved and here we have a storm of conflicting assertions. Eddie Cicotte's "lost" grand jury testimony was sufficient to bring about the indictments of the eight, but in 1924, testifying as a witness in Joe Jackson's lawsuit against the White Sox for back pay, Cicotte claimed that he did accept the ten thousand dollars to throw the first game, he did send the ageed upon signal that the fix was on by hitting the first batter he faced....and then he changed his mind and pitched to win the rest of the way, his failures quite real. Joe Jackson was ordered arrested by the judge at the trial because of glaring conflicts between his original grand jury statements and those he made at his lawsuit trial. The judge threw out a favorable jury verdict for Jackson and pointed out how Joe had to have perjured himself at one or the other times.

Gamblers testified that it was Cicotte, not Gandil who was the brains behind the scheme, that it actually was Gandil and Risberg, that it was no one player in particular and no one particular gambler.....not much help there.

What emerges from this confusion is the fact that the particpants themselves were at all times confused. No one knew what the others were really doing, who was letting down and who was going all out. The players were duplicitous with the gamblers, the gamblers were duplicitous with the players and with one another, The scheme was on, it was off, it was back on, it was off because the players got stiffed on the promised money, it was back on because of threats of violence to player's families. Cicotte was in it all the way, or maybe just the first game, or maybe just the first batter. Jackson accepted money but still played to win. Jackson accepted money but didn't know what it was for. Jackson accepted money and tried to bring it to Comiskey's attention, only to be rebuffed. Jackson accepted money and understood that while he was not expected to play poorly, he was expected to keep his mouth shut. Evidence for all these versions exist.

The last of the participants died in the 1970's and thus we will never know with any certainty what really took place. But even if everyone still lived and was willing to tell all that he knows, we would still not get the true overall picture because they didn't know it. The gamblers were uncertain which players were bought for which games. The players were uncertain which games they were supposed to lose and how it was to be achieved. It may well be that only the first game was deliberately thrown and that the rest of the series was simply the Reds beating the White Sox in real competition. It could even be that none of the games were thrown and the Reds victory was entirely legit. The players were certainly not entirely legit, we do know for sure that Cicotte received ten thousand, Gandil and Risberg got ten thousand, Jackson and Lefty Williams got five thousand each...but what they did to earn it, or whether they double crossed the gamblers because they were supposed to have gotten 20 k each....unknown.

I would say that this book is for those with a deep interest in the subject and others will find it too scholastic in orientation to make for an enjoyable read. "Eight Men Out" is much more stimulating reading. Asinov's book has a few small errors (e.g...there was never any 10 k promised to Cicotte for winning 30 games, supposedly the non payment of which was Cicotte's motive) but Asinov wanted his work to read like a novel. To that end, he did not make up events, rather he chose from conflicting accounts, those "facts" which he thought most likely to be true, and did not footnote his book to let the readers know that these "facts" were in dispute. This formula worked...the book is a terrific read. Carney's book is not a terrific read, but it is terrifically educational.

[dlb]

I'm currently reading Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. It is a narrative history of the birth of the modern conservative movement, sired not so much by Goldwater himself, as by his 1964 presidential candidacy, which was, from what I gather so far, more thrust upon him than sought. It is also part one of the story that is continued in his recently released Nixonland.

I have four criteria for judging works of history. First, I want the writer to be open about his biases. I don't expect objectivity from any discipline that excites human passions and for which the source material is almost always inconclusive.

So, since I know going in that the writer is biased, I want him to admit it. My preference is for the approach taken by the better academic historians, of simply stating one's point of view in the preface or introduction. This gets the matter out of the way early and pays the reader the courtesy of providing the context for the ensuing content.

I'm not a stickler on this point, though. I'm also quite amenable to the normal journalistic standard of writing oneself into the story enough that the perceptive reader knows on which side the writer stands. Perlstein satisfies my desire for honest presentation via the latter approach. A writer whose work appears regularly in magazines such as The Nation and Village Voice, he is somewhat amused by the odd assembly of intellectuals, energetic individualists and downright cranks who crafted what came to be the most important political movement of the last half-century.

My second criterion is good storytelling. I want the characters to be richly drawn and the emotions of the events to pour forth from the facts. I don't want to just be curious about what happened next; I want to care.

Perlstein is an adequate storyteller. His style is brisk and chatty, leaving me feeling as if I'm listening to some energetic doctoral candidate holding forth, cocktail in hand, about the events that swirled around the minuscule detail that is the subject of his dissertation.

This paragraph about Nelson Rockefeller's successful 1958 campaign for governor of New York captures Perlstein at his best:

Rockefeller surprised the world with his effortless populism on the campaign trail (though to be sure he was a populist who instinctively threw his arms back whenever he stepped outdoors to accommodate whomever - there was always someone - was putting his coat on for him). Some days he reached out with his muscular right arm to shake two thousand hands, giving most people his trademark salutation, "Hiyah, fella!" At a county fair he rode a harness racer's sulky at full gallop. At Coney Island he stripped to swim trunks and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. In Rockland County he spoke in the rain atop a wooden plank suspended between two oil drums. ("I hope my platform is stronger than this plank," he said in that ever so slightly patrician voice with the rumble at the bottom.) And in an encounter that came to symbolize the Rockefeller campaign style, he trooped into Ratner's delicatessen on New York's Lower East Side and stuffed cheese blintzes, one after the other, into his chiseled, handsome face. "I recommend the blintzes," he told anyone who would listen, shaking a hand, autographing a napkin, flashing a billion-dollar grin with a double wink of his left eye. He won handily. The planning for a presidential campaign began soon after.

Third, I like historians who convey a sense of what it was like to be in that place at that time. If people only bathed once a week, I want to know that, and I want to know how a room full of those folks must have smelled. I want to know whether the cars and hotel rooms were air conditioned; or how a person might feel after a day's ride in a stage coach. Perlstein does not share my interest in these points and ignores them almost entirely.

Finally, what sets the great histories apart from the very good ones is the writer's ability to capture the suspense of the moment they're reporting. Since we usually know how the event in question turned out, it's too easy to slip into the comfortable yet false assumption that this was how things had to be. In almost every case, the outcome is not foreordained. As the Enola Gay takes off for its fateful flight, I want to share the crew's very real apprehensions that it is they, and not some 100,000 citizens of Hiroshima, who will breathe their last this August day. By this measure, Before the Storm is not a great history. By it's combined score, though, it is one that I can recommend.

The tale that Perlstein sets out to tell is complicated and he sometimes loses the narrative thread in a tangle of seemingly minor events, organizations and individuals. The birth of the conservative movement was not, like noisier events of its day, characterized by dashing leaders riding through the land on chargers of eloquent rhetoric. Quite the opposite, it came from the late night whisperings of deeply dissatisfied men who searched along the dim horizons of what they thought was the twilight of Western Civilization for a man on horseback; a champion to lead them through a long night's march into the inevitable battle of the coming day.

The short version goes something like this: In 1952 and pretty much throughout the Eisenhower years, American politics was defined by a consensus formed by the successes of the New Deal and the triumph over fascism. Government was good. It contributed to our national prosperity. Through the proper programs, properly enacted, we could build the greatest nation in human history. Republicans and Democrats fought more about how things should be done than whether. The old guard conservatives, personified by the man Eisenhower bamboozled out of the 1952 Republican nomination, Robert Taft, were old, worn out and impotent.

This society did, however, have its discontents. Small-time industrialists who saw unions, taxes and government programs to address the plight of the poor as nothing more than the bloody red hand of Communism tightening around the neck of Lady Liberty. Segregationists made livid by Brown and completely appalled when Eisenhower's Army invaded the sovereign state of Arkansas to enforce the decision. Young men who indulged their youthful nonconformist urges by styling themselves as rugged individualists in the mold of Ayn Rand's heroes. And the all-important catalyst, columnists and radio personalities who preached to this choir-behind-the-curtain with all the fire and fervor of camp meeting evangelists. All they lacked was a candidate.

They saw Rockefeller as just another Democrat, though perhaps the most dangerous of that breed, as he was in line to take the reins of the Republican Party. Nixon was okay, but too much of an equivocator. How could they trust a Southern California Republican who was embarrassed by the John Birch Society? Goldwater said all of the right things. When he spoke the hairs on the backs of their necks stood on end. Even dull addresses concerning mundane matters were met with thunderous applause. He was, however, uninterested in running for the presidency. He was a pro and not at all attracted to the idea of letting some overheated amateurs make a fool of him on the national stage.

But in the back rooms of newly founded or rejuvenated precinct halls in unglamorous towns and cities across the South, Midwest and West, they built a Republican Party that had the power to do what no one thought possible: send Rocky back to his lavish apartment on the Upper West Side and launch Barry Goldwater's bid for the Oval Office.

As we know, it was, to all appearances, a colossal failure. However, as Perlstein cautions, the easiest way to misread a political movement is to look only on the surface, considering only the electoral results. In the campaign of '64, the conservative movement may not have gotten off the ground, but brick by brick, block by block, it built the foundation that first gave us Richard Nixon, then Reagan, Bush I and most recently, Bush II. Perhaps of even greater consequence, it built an edifice of ideas that is as imposing a feature of our political skyline as FDR's towering New Deal.

In all, Before the Storm is a good story, well told. It isn't one of the greatest histories you'll ever read, but it is better than most. Plus, it is the first (as best I know), account of the conservative movement to trace its origins all the way back to the first rivulets to trickle out of the tiny cracks and fissures of the post-New Deal consensus.