Category: books

Categories
books

Articles of War

I got this book in Denver, CO. It’s a great town and the Tattered Cover is a great, independent bookstore. It was displayed prominently at the entrance because it was the “One Book, One Denver” offering at the time. Arvin is a Denver resident with roots in the Midwest (he went to U of M). I’m a damn fool for some local flavor so I grabbed it.

This is a story about the horrors of war; World War II in fact. It’s about a fictional kid named George Tilson who lands in France and makes his way across many battlefields dodging German bombs and bullets. Early on, he doesn’t separate himself as a proficient fighter and barely fires a shot. He spends most of his time beating himself up for being afraid.

There was good reason to be afraid. Large chunks of the book are devoted to describing just how awful it is be in battle. He spends his time in dirty foxholes and is always on the brink of starvation. He sees fellow soldiers get shot, blown up by booby traps, and killed by freak mishaps. There is some hope. In the background and often on his mind is a woman he met during his first week in France. Here name is Claire.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

On the violent front, his desire to leave the battleground and find Claire is so great that he raises his hand above the cover of a brick wall hoping to get shot and thus get a ticket out of the war. He takes a flesh wound but it’s not enough to get him sent home. Even worse, shortly thereafter he gets chosen to participate on a firing squad chartered to execute a deserter named Private Eddie Slovik.

The picture of Eddie Slovik struggling to stand after being shot by the firing squad haunts Tilson for the rest of the war. I think it basically desensitizes him to everything in life. This allows him to finish out the war as a respectable fighter and he even volunteers to hang around after the war to help rebuild. He is so desensitized that he even ignores Claire after noticing her in a line of beggars holding a baby. He finds out shortly after from Claire’s father that she was raped by a Nazi.

The last scene finds Tilson in the bunkhouse when he hears a knock at the door. He opens the door but nobody is there. Then he hears the crying of a baby. It’s Claire’s baby girl and note requesting that Tilson take care of her.

The book ends there, leaving the open ended question of whether Tilson has the emotional fortitude take the child in. I’d like to think that he did so and that it changed his outlook for the rest of his life.

Arvin’s inspiration for this book appears to have come from another book called The Execution of Private Slovik. According to the book, Private Slovik was the only deserter during the war to pay the ultimate price of death. It was even made into a movie with Martin Sheen. Check out some of the reviews on Amazon of the movie, it seems to have stoked some passions.

It’s not light reading. I may have to get the movie.

Categories
books

Match Made in Heaven

Yes, I play golf. A fair amount of golf in fact. Here is my golf cred. What kind of idiot takes pictures of every one of their scorecards? Well, me. And inevitably, I read a few golf books each year. This is a fantastical piece of golf fiction about a dying man whom God gives one last chance to live; all he has to do is beat a group of historical figures in an eighteen hole match on the course on which he learned the game.

The main character is Elliot Goodman; athlete, professor, husband, father. He just had a heart attack and is being driven to the hospital when God makes a visit and strikes the bargain. Goodman plays eighteen imaginary one-hole matches and has eighteen imaginary conversations with dead people. Certainly, these are dead people who Mitchell holds in the highest regard. Fun stuff.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

Goodman’s opponents range from DaVinci on the first hole to an old golf club employee near the end. He plays against singers, athletes, movie stars, and other various historical figures. It appears that Mitchell is passionate about the game because he exhibits a fair amount of knowledge of golf. But don’t read this book for insights into match play strategy; read this book to get in touch with the mystical nature and simple pleasures of the game.

For example, here is why John Lennon plays golf:

“… I mean, some people play golf ‘cuz they wanna see how low they can shoot? And some play ‘cuz they’re outgoing and competitive? Me? I couldn’t give a shit about the scoring. I play ‘cuz it’s fun!

Hitting the ball from one spot to the next and just being outdoors, ya’ know? And feeling free and looking at the trees and the grass and the birds and the clouds. …”

I like this take. Lennon was his opponent on the fourth hole, so there is plenty more golf love to come.

While playing Babe Zaharias, Goodman makes this observation:

He had often thought that golf is a particularly glorious game, not just for all the obvious reasons, but for one in particular. Of all the major sports, it is the only one where, if you’re “in the zone,” you can perform, at any given moment, on any given day, just as well as, and probably better than, anyone on the face of the earth who ever played the game!

Not a bad take. Sure, a weekend warrior like myself, even in the zone, can’t compete with the pros. But there are those tiny moments, those great holes, those flushed shots, that allow you to do something great that can’t really be bettered by any other human. Heck, I dropped a flushed six iron into the hole on the first at White Deer Run about five years ago for an eagle; that shot couldn’t have been hit any better by Jack or Tiger. Contrast this to my marathon experience, where I was running the same course as the world class athletes, but never once could I feel remotely comparable to them. I was logging 8:50 miles and they were logging 5:00 minute miles. I couldn’t fathom running that fast. Heck, that’s an all out sprint as far as I’m concerned and they are doing it for 26 miles. Insanity.

Goodman also makes some keen insights sports in general. I’ve always been a big fan of being a balanced athlete. I think Tiger’s greatness is locked up in his balanced approach to the game. He has every angle covered; the mental game, the emotional game, fitness, distance, touch around the greens, clutch putting, determination, accuracy with the irons. He practices the range of skills needed to succeed and never focuses on a single aspect, he has no weaknesses, there are no chinks in his armor (although it could be too much too fast given this knee injury, we’ll see). Mitchell, through Goodman, makes a similar point about Willie Mays:

Willie may not have been the pure hitter Ted Williams was or the power hitter Hank Aaron was or have had the early Mickey Mantle’s speed afoot, yet he was greater than them all in his peerless brilliance in all aspects of the game, his unparalleled charisma, and his boundless and profound passion for playing baseball.

Tiger may not have the charisma of Willie Mays, but he defines “peerless brilliance in all aspects of the game.”

Then Mitchell pulls off a gem like this, right from the mouth of William Shakespeare:

O golf! Thou dost imbue mine life with meaning
And givest me a purpose to trudge on!
Thou showest me mine frailties today,
Then showest me anew, quite on the morrow,
And makest me relate to mine own flaws
And human peccadilloes of mine doing;
Just as I revealed in others’ lives
The sins and imperfections of a Man,
So hast thou shown in me that vanity,
That greed, that lust for pow’r, that blind ambition,
That madness born of rage, that indecision,
That green-eyed monster envy, which inhabit
Yet every pore and wrinkle of my being!

There are a lot of messages in those lines. The Shakespeare match, written in the form of a play, is pretty cool. I’m not exactly sure if it was in iambic pentameter, but it was very cool nonetheless.

In keeping with Mitchell’s high regard for balance, after beating Babe Ruth on the fifteenth, Goodman makes this observation about his stellar play and how it reflects his own life:

The Babe, impressive as he was, was a one-trick pony out there. Power, power, and more power. And me? Not much to talk about for the macho guys in the locker room, but I sure got the job done. Come to think of it, I was the model versatility out there! Power, in moderation, on the drive, intelligence by choosing a safe three-iron on the second shot, the finesse to keep it on the top tier with the pitch, and accuracy with the putt. The complete package!

Elliot thought about how lucky he had been to be versatile and multifaceted during his life, too. About how he could do and be lots of things, using various talents and energies and fields of expertise, and have lots of passions and play different roles in dealing with different people.

He was fortunate not to be a Georgie One-Note.

This kind of careful thought about the game gets a little deeper in the match with Gandhi. Gandhi goes on a long diatribe about why he loves the game so much:

“… You see, my good friend, the game of golf is the epitome of the essence of satyagraha. That is why I love this game so exceedingly much. Because in golf, as in life, there is much to be learned from truth in firmness, from nonviolent resistance.

In both golf and life, there is strength through gentleness. There is results through patience. There is moving forward through yielding. There is achievement through self-restraint. There is fruitfulness through abstinence, gain through compromise, victory through humility, reward through sacrifice.

… It is about complete service to the game…”

This is a solid, thoughtful, golf story. It didn’t rock my socks off while I was reading it, but it did make me reflect a fair amount about my love for the game. That’s important for golf fiction, it needs to constantly make you reflect on the game and your relationship with it. If you play the game, I think you’ll like this book.

Categories
books

The Essential Drucker

My familiarity with Drucker is mostly from reading certain excerpts of his stuff as an undergrad. I regret not “getting” the management classes I took in school. I liked pouring through the detailed concepts of finance, economics, and accounting but I didn’t expend the same amount of resources on management. In retrospect, this stunted my development as a businessperson. There is a certain aspect of thinking from the organizational and personal development level that I didn’t do until my mid-30s.

Maybe it’s a function of age, but now management books are really interesting to me. This book is especially interesting because of its scope and efficiency. It distills a big chunk of Drucker’s management theory into a well-organized and relatively short book. The subtitle is “The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management.” It’s the management book you read before you read other books on management; actually, before you read another business book period.

The first chapter sets management in the intellectual realm. Drucker first describes the task of management with a caveat (page 4):

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change. But the very meaning of this task has changed, if only because the performance of management has converted the workforce from one composed of largely unskilled laborers to one of highly educated knowledge workers.

He then proceeds to broaden the scope of the term management (which I wish I would have read in 1987) and eventually describes management as a liberal art.

Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal art – “liberal” because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership: “art” because it is also concerned with practice and application.

I agree with Drucker, management is worthy of focus. It doesn’t come naturally except for the gifted few and you will be better positioned to help yourself, your business, and society if you at least have a rudimentary understanding of what it’s all about.

There is so much in this book that to begin pulling out the gems is difficult. The easiest way for me too depict it is with a cheat sheet of some sort. Check it out below. There are 26 chapters and they are grouped into Management, The Individual, and Society. I’ve taken things a few steps further and sub-grouped the chapters to assist the reader. I’ve also highlighted a few quotes and lists that I think represent the point of each chapter.

The Essential Drucker

It’s very theoretical and very fascinating. Drucker is a national hero in Japan (reminds me of Ben Franklin and his stature in France) and he clearly has great fondness and high hopes for the country. Applying his experience from that country to the US and management in general is a keen aspect of many of Drucker’s writings.

I highly recommend this book just to have around. You don’t need to read it all in one sitting. If you are in a reflective mood around your annual performance review, read chapters 13-17. If you are thinking of starting a new business, read chapters 10-12. In either case, Drucker will satisfy your needs or provide a basis for digging deeper into the topic.

Categories
books

Second Wind

It’s been a long time since I’ve read Dick Francis. I’m a big fan and I put him up there with with Grafton and Hillerman in that group of my top mystery and crime writers. This is the 21st book of his that I’ve read. He has like 40 I think.

I’ve said this before: these three writers really make me care about the characters. Francis is different because unlike Grafton and Hillerman, he very rarely (if ever) repeats characters. But that doesn’t detract from the character depth that he builds in each book.

His main characters vary widely and are usually not cops or private investigators. They are mostly just regular guys thrown into some sort of criminal situation that they have to get themselves out of. This book is about a meteorologist who gets embroiled in the illegal trade of plutonium with a surprising twist involving unpasteurized milk. C’mon, you gotta read it, it’s only 261 pages.

Despite Francis’ wide range of characters, there is plenty of Grafton-style continuity because each book is loosely related to the UK horse racing industry. Whereas Grafton has Santa Barbara and Hillerman has the four corners, Francis has Newmarket and the sport of kings. It makes for a fine backdrop.

I probably won’t read another one this year, but maybe.

Categories
books

Field Tested Books

If you recall, I like books about books; yes I do. Well what do you know? A local company has churned out a sweet book about books. Coudal Partners, a West Loop company that does design, publishing, and other things, has some pretty cool content on their site. You can go to their Museum of Online Museums, purchase some letter pins, or participate in a design contest. Neato.

But the best thing they have is clearly Field Tested Books. They canvass their friends and colleagues occasionally for book reviews; but they aren’t reviews as much as they are stories about the place and context in which the books were read. They post them all online, but they’ve put together a really attractive paperback version. I had to have it. Here is how Coudal and the crew couch this little project (from the back jacket):

The Field-Tested Books project is our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person’s experience with both.

The writing you’ll find here is grounded in that idea.

You won’t find any book reviews here.

You’ll find reviews of experience.

It’s likely you’ll also find an unexpected recommendation or two for planning your next trip.

Pack carefully, Books are heavy.

That, my friends, is cool. I got a few ideas for books to read, but more importantly there are some keen insights into reading. For example, try this:

That’s not what happens when you see a movie that was shot in your neighborhood. Movies sprinkle a bit of glitter on every block. Books don’t. Movies glamorize; books – good books – reveal. That’s bitter medicine to spoon into a high school kid. No wonder young people don’t read. (page 49, by Randy Cohen)

But here’s a view by another writer that’s not necessarily in line with Cohen:

Books can color the world, and under the influence of Hugo, France took on almost mythical proportions and made even the winter in Brittany less bleak than epic-seeming, a noble struggle. Which, as low as I’d been, was a deliverance. (page 112, Lauren Groff)

Or how about this:

… Also (I’m fairly certain of this) that I’ve made some pretty shabby decisions as to how to use my time on earth.

That’s why we read, I think: to find better decisions. (page 87, by Steve Almond)

And this too:

I don’t expect to reach that Babe Ruthian mark, but nonetheless, I am always sure to have at least one book with me, stanching the possibilities of lapsing into the fugue state known in modern times as “going postal” as I encounter life’s little delays. I feel it necessary to point all of this out because, for the most part, reading tends to be an open portal away from the many mundane circumstances in which I find myself. (page 125, by Robert Birnbaum)

Okay, there’s more. Here’s a guy talking about how much he loves the Spenser mystery novels:

… But while I can’t recall the plots to any of the books I read that trip, I met a fictional friend I still meet up with every year or so. I don’t travel much, but as cliché as it sounds, when I want to ‘get away from it all,’ I still reach for a good book about someone who’s been murdered. (page 159, by Mark Bazer)

Oh yeah, what about a guy reading The Adventures of Huck Finn in the back seat of a car during an 18 hour trip from Pittsburgh to Bradenton?:

… I even remember the moment that I put it together that we were on a journey south, same as Huck and Jim. I’m a little embarrassed to write that now; it’s so obvious and irrelevant and sentimental, but at the time it was revelation. As the southern landscape rolled past in my peripheral vision, I felt an immersive thrill I could never get from television or movies. (page 166, Kevin Guilfoile)

Each experience is anywhere from a couple of paragraphs to a page-and-a-half. I need to make a note to come back to it. It is rich with some books I want to read, as well as some interesting web links.

Categories
books

Native Tongue

Here is what Hiaasen does better than anybody I’ve read: he combines hilarity and satire with relatively thrilling crime. He’s funny, and I’m not talking wry humor or subtlety, I’m talking over-the-top, laugh-out-loud funny. The crime is relatively light and is outshone by the humor, but still contains enough “thrill” to keep it interesting from a crime standpoint. This effort was worthy, although not as good as Skinny Dip, which I read last year.

Hiaasen lives in South Florida and he clearly loves it. Any encroachment on the purity of this region gets skewered maliciously. He takes no prisoners. The brunt of his attacks this time are:

  • Tourists
  • Theme Parks (especially with animal kingdoms)
  • Golf Course Developments

Other slices of Americana also get highlighted by Hiaasen; like steroid use and phone sex operations. He just kind of pokes fun at them. I’m not sure what his agenda is, but it’s funny as hell.

In this book, an ex-newspaperman named Joe Winder is now the public relations man for the Amazon Kingdom of Thrills in North Key Largo, which happens to be owned by a ex-mobster in the witness protection program. Everything is clipping along fine, until the ex-mobster decides he wants to expand his holdings by wiping out a huge chunk of natural Florida habitat, next to the Kingdom of Thrills, for a golf course community. This just happens to be the same natural Florida habitat that Winder goes to a few nights a week after work to engage in some catch-and-return fishing. All hell breaks loose.

I probably won’t read Hiaasen again until 2009 because of my backlog, but I’m looking forward to the next one. Maybe I’ll read his golf book next.

Categories
books

Then We Came to the End

This whole office life is hell theme has played out for a few decades now. My earliest memories are from the late 1980s and Dilbert. Even as a college kid I found Dilbert kind of funny despite my lack of experience in a corporate environment. Fast forward more than a decade to the UK version of the office. Now that was pretty damn funny stuff. Side splitting funny actually. Around the same time came the American movie Office Space. Awesome, I loved it – that scene where they destroy the printer with gangsta rap in the background is one of the greatest scenes ever in American film. Then we had the US version of the office, which hooked me early on. However, about half way through the second season I got bored with it and quit watching.

Was I just jaded by the office life is hell genre? Actually, this occurred at a point when I quit watching just about all comedic, reality, or dramatic TV, so maybe there were larger forces at work. Whatever the case, I wasn’t going to pass up Then We Came to the End, despite its linkage to the office life is hell genre and my apparent discouragement with it. Heck, it was getting killer reviews everywhere and the NYT called it one of the top 10 books of 2007. So here we are. It’s a day after finishing it and despite struggling early on, I ended up liking it.

It’s a story about a Chicago advertising firm set during the tech bust. Cushy marketing jobs at the Michigan Avenue based firm are being trimmed and the best way for the employees to deal with the stress (and lack of work) is to gossip, play jokes, and complain. There is a host of kooky characters and the situations they get themselves into are described in great detail by Ferris. The weird and humorous stuff Ferris comes up with is very creative and the depths in which he describes them is amazing, but early on it feels like recycled office life is hell material.

Eventually though, there are strong moments and solid themes that raise this book above the standard material out there today, which invariably degrades into making fun of the stupid boss and casting all consultants as evil beasts. Ferris goes beyond this tired act.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

The interlude (I didn’t come up with that term) about Lynn Mason (the boss) and her last night before surgery to remove a cancerous tumor is well done. Ferris changes the perspective and the chapter title styling and just launches into it. I really couldn’t tell what was going on, but I couldn’t put it down. It held my attention well. And the way Ferris linked up this interlude with the rest of the book was smooth, really smooth. The interlude was actually a book written by one of the characters, a reading of which brings the whole crew together at the end. Great stuff.

The other memorable scene occurred when Joe (the #2 guy) tells the story of his trip to jail to visit Tom Mota (the office villain who everyone feared would one day come back to blow away the floor after being let go). Joe fired Tom. Not because Tom wrote FAG on Joe’s wall (nobody was really sure who did this). Nope, Joe fired Tom because they were cutting back. Tom, in turn, hated Joe, but not really. Tom just hated being at the firm. To make a long story short, it turns out that Tom figures out that he admires Joe for staying above it all. You had to be there, but it’s a great scene. The last thing that Tom says to Joe before he is taken back to his cell is:

“Yeah.” Tom raised his manacled hands abruptly. “Stay up here, you f&%#,” he said.

Good stuff. All in all, it was a labor at times, but worth the read.

One more thing, Ferris has Chicago down pat. He knows about the long lines at Potbelly, the weather, the neighborhoods, the suburbs, the lake … you name it. If you live in Chicago, it will all be very familiar to you.

Categories
books

The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky

This is another suggestion by Nick Hornby (from reading Housekeeping vs. The Dirt). Hornby hasn’t done me wrong yet. In December of 1988, a group of terrorists planted a bomb on Pan Am flight 103 from Heathrow to New York. That plane blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland shortly after takeoff. None of the passengers survived. On that plane was a gentleman named David Dornstein. He was a 25 year old writer, actor, brother, son, boyfriend, Brown graduate, and all-around tortured soul. He was on his way home to Philadelphia to see his family.

David’s brother, Ken, was 19 years old when this happened. This book is partly Ken’s autobiographical account of how he dealt with David’s early death and partly Ken’s devotional to David, whom Ken loved very much. It’s sad man, really sad. But not sad in a way that you get choked up while reading it. In fact, the sadness of the story really didn’t hit me until I started banging this out.

Ken spent about 15 years going through David’s journals, talking to David’s friends and acquaintences, and visiting the places that David had been. David was a starving artist of epic proportions and he left a vast estate of journals. Ken pieces these journals together to give the story of David’s life and tells his own story along the way.

Ken doesn’t sugar coat anything. There is plenty of pain and suffering. For example, their mother had emotional problems and left before Ken and David were teen-agers. Around this time, David was apparently abused by an adult neighbor, which Ken does not find out about this until he starts reading the journals. There is an especially tense moment when Ken meets the perpetrator, but never brings up the accusations.

Ken also ends up building lasting relationships with two of David’s old girlfriends. In fact, he ends up marrying and starting a family with one of them. Ken loved his brother. And he finds out after his death just how much he loved him and how much that love was returned by David, even after his death. It’s not touching necessarily. I didn’t necessary feel any sympathy. It didn’t strike those chords with me. But I loved this book. It’s a slice of humanity that I just found kind of interesting.

Categories
books

3 Nights in August

Buzz Bissinger wrote Friday Night Lights, which is on of my favorite books and movies, and clearly the greatest football film of all time. But Bissinger, it turns out, is actually more of a baseball fan than a football fan and 3 Nights in August is the baseball book he’s always wanted to write. It’s the story of a three game series in St. Louis between the Cubs and Cardinals in 2004, told mostly from the perspective of Tony La Russa, the Cardinal’s manager and collaborator on the book.

Bissinger starts when the players begin wandering into the clubhouse for game one and finishes with the last out of game three. But the book is more than just a description of the preparation, the strategy, the pressure, and the decisions made during the series. It’s about the people and personalities involved in baseball – human beings doing something that they love, often at the expense of their health and their relationships.

The MLB clubhouse is different from the locker rooms of the NFL and NBA. Baseball is a complicated game, as complicated as American football, but the baseball regular season is 180 days long with only about 20 off nights. Engaging in something this involved requires more than a locker room and some offices. It requires a clubhouse. And the Cards gave Bissinger unlimited access to the clubhouse, which made for a richly detailed book about baseball. The Cards also gave Bissinger unlimited access to La Russa, which made for a richly detailed book about management of any sporting endeavor.

It makes me want to spend more time with baseball. I’m a golf and college football guy, you know that. Those are my sports. But what you probably don’t know is that I was a baseball junkie from the ages of about 13-18. Don’t believe me? Well, ask my buddy Zu about how quickly I could regurgitate the top hitters, pitchers, or starting lineups from any major league team back in the 80’s. Ask Zu how often we would haul our tails to Cleveland or Detroit to catch a game. Heck, ask Zu what we would eat without farmers (inside joke, sorry).

This book is rich; it’s full of great sporting questions and assertions that transcend baseball. If you call yourself a sports fan, run to the library or bookstore and grab this book now. I’m just going to go through some of my favorite parts.

Dave Duncan, the pitching coach and La Russa’s main confidant, sits the starting pitcher down before every game and goes through “the binder” with him. Here’s what Bissinger has to say about the binder (page 46-47).

…. He also had a red binder in front of him. This particular one is marked “Cubs,” but he has one for every team in the league. He stores them in a red steel case that goes on the road with him. It looks a little bit like a vault on wheels, maybe because the knowledge it holds is priceless.

The binders contain his charts, a packet for every opposing player, a remarkable Rohrschach in which he has tracked every pitch each batter has been thrown by his pitchers and what that batter did with it. Using a system of grids, three up and three across dividing the hitting zone into nine sections, he has made small notations that record the type and location of every pitch. …

That’s the type of inside-the-clubhouse detail you can expect from this book.

I love this stuff. I get caught up in the preparation and recording aspects of competition. Related to golf, the act of preparing my equipment and studying the next course I’m going to play is as enjoyable as playing the game. The act of going through my round after the fact and attempting to learn something about my game is as enjoyable as playing the game. I get caught up in the process, maybe to a fault. But if La Russa’s post game actions are any indication of what it takes to achieve excellence, I’m severely lacking.

Here is what LaRussa does after the game (pages 94-95):

… He will eat in silence at J Bucks restaurant several miles from the stadium. He will have a book with him, Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley, about the battle of Iwo Jima. He will climb into his Cardinals-red Cadillac Escalade. He will return to where he lives in St. Louis, a residential suite in a hotel in the city’s west end. And he will follow the routine that he has followed since he first went into the foxhole. He will pull out the little lineup cards that he uses to keep score during the games. They help him keep track and stay ahead when he manages, and now he’s reviewing certain situations the players faced – the count, an RBI situation or a steal situation or a hit-and-run situation – and whether he reacted appropriately. …

… He learned to keep a list from Dick Williams, the manager of the A’s when they won world championships in 1972 and 1973. Williams told him that if you don’t make notes about a game as it’s occurring and review them afterward, you will forget what happened, because of the daily grind of the season. …

I played golf today and I’m looking at my scorecard, going back through the round trying to recall where I made the right decisions and the wrong decisions. I need to take better notes on my rounds if I’m going to achieve the kind of excellence that La Russa has. This is important. La Russa has inspired me to be more copious.

La Russa certainly has his act together from a baseball perspective, but this book delves into the personal, and Bissinger doesn’t sugar coat the life of a manager (or player). Bissinger explains how difficult it was to live with La Russa from his wife’s perspective. So difficult in fact, that they don’t even attempt to live together. La Russa’s wife and kids live in California and spend very little time on the road with him. La Russa is very frank about a situation early in his managing career where he decided to stay with the White Sox rather than fly home and help his family while his daughter was hospitalized with pneumonia. He regrets it to this day, but baseball is his life, and living away from his family for 8 months a year is just part of it.

This isn’t the end of the personal stories told by Bissinger. One of my favorites was about a pitcher named Carl Eldred, on oft-injured pitcher whom the Cards helped stage a comeback. Eldred left the game for a little because of injuries but was tinkering around one day and found that his arm didn’t hurt. He tossed around the idea of getting back with a team and here are some of his thoughts (pg 168):

Eldred missed the competition. He missed being part of a team. Those are the things that you expect an athlete to mention when you ask what he misses. But there was something else. He knew that his wife might have a difficult time truly understanding it, as would anybody who hasn’t done it. It was the feeling of what it felt like to grip a baseball, know the grip felt right in the fingers because you were coming with a full-heat hothouse four-seamer, throw that four-seamer to the very spot you intended, then watch it pop into the back of the catcher’s glove as the hitter swings through it. It wasn’t a macho feeling to Eldred. It was simply one worth trying to have again.

In one small paragraph Bissinger captured why I will play golf for the rest of my life – why I love the game so much. I do so because of something that happens about once or twice per summer (out of about 3,000 strokes on average). It’s the perfect execution of a stroke that gives an unexplainable feeling of satisfaction (that something else mentioned above). It’s the 5-wood (maybe 3 years ago) from 205 that found the green after I worked it right to left around some trees and over the marsh on number on 17 at Royal Melbourne. It’s the 4-iron (maybe 5 years ago) from 190 into a stiff wind on the 15th at PGA Ryder to a back pin that hit pin-high and ended up about three feet behind its ball mark, never wavering from its line. I will hack it around for an eternity as long as I have a chance to feel shots like these even once a year – even at a ratio of 1/3,000.

So many cool things; just so damn many. Bissinger relates a conversation where La Russa thinks about “… how many players La Russa had managed who have had that rare combination of talent and fiery heart (page 129).” It came to seventeen all total. Bissinger lets La Russa ruminate about how great Pujols is, on every front. Bissinger contrasts keeping notes on paper (La Russa), keeping them digitally (the video guy), or using both mediums (Duncan, the pitching coach). Then, back to the game, Bissinger comes up with lines like this (page 240):

Morris retires the side in order in the sixth, the final pitch a sweet 12-to-6 curve that Sosa misses by so much, even the Arch smiles.

Finally, in the version I have, Bissinger finishes with a strong afterword. He compares and contrasts his book to Moneyball – managing by instinct versus managing by numbers – “humanistas versus the statisticians.” It was a good way to finish, be it a little self-indulgent. I read Moneyball and liked it and I’m a big Michael Lewis fan. Take a hint from a guy that has read both – read them both, back-to-back, in any order. It’s on my list of things to do some day after retirement.

Categories
books

The Ruins

I haven’t read any sci-fi/fantasy/horror yet this year so it’s about time I do so. I saw that my sister read this book and she is a reader par excellence. I asked her about it and even though she didn’t say it was a must-read, she didn’t appear to hate it.

I would like to take this chance to give some props to Shelfari because I wouldn’t have known that she read it if I had not gone through her Shelfari bookshelf. Shelfari is a cool tool.

I’m not sure I have a good definition of the horror genre. For me, horror books have two ingredients; a supernatural evil and gore. This book has both, in abundance. It’s not necessarily in my wheelhouse, but I needed a change of pace.

It was fun, engrossing, tense; but it left me kind of empty. There isn’t much to reflect on as I sit here after the fact. I could sort through the character flaws of the people that got killed and try and figure out what Smith is trying to say about our times. But I won’t. I could think about the evil that pervaded the book and try and draw parallels to evil in the world today. But I won’t. I’m moving on with very little reflection actually.

* PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW *

The evil in this book is a plant – a vine with a thirst for humans and their excretions. So a bunch of young vacationers venture into the Mexican outback in search of a friend, and they end up getting surrounded by this vine. They can actually touch and walk through this vine because it seems the vine really can’t kill them until they get an open wound or let the vine into their body through some orifice. So as long as they are alert, they can survive the vine. However, there’s another problem beyond the vine that surrounds them. Outside of the vine’s perimeter is a tribe of Mayans who will kill them if they try to escape.

Without food and water, their days are numbered. It goes from bleak, to really bleak, to bleaker than you can imagine, to everyone is dead.