pure science with a splash of black cat

@downinpockets

More general history, and I’m not writing minireviews because that took me forever, LOL.

David Halberstam’s books are really long and might not be up your alley, but I have:

• The Best and the Brightest, about Vietnam, more specifically what was going on here in the U.S. while the war was happening
• The Powers That Be, about the media
• The Coldest Winter, about the Korean War
• War in a Time of Peace, about the world and American foreign policy post-Cold War

I haven’t read any of them yet, really. I did start The Coldest Winter but had to put it down because my brain was leaking out of my ear. (Once again, I do not know how I am going to read these come school time and not die.) I am, however, reading The Fifties right now, and I absolutely LOVE it. It’s fucking long (816 pages) but it’s easier to read than most of his non-sports books and it’s fascinating.

He also wrote a book called The Children about some of the key figures early in the Civil Rights Movement. They had it and War in a Time of Peace last time I went to Barnes & Noble and I only bought the latter first because it was cheaper, ahaha. I really want to read that one, too.

The rest of what I have, remember, and liked:

• Growing Up by Russell Baker (nonfiction, Depression-era)
• A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo (nonfiction, Vietnam)
• Regeneration by Pat Barker (fiction, World War I)
• The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker (fiction, World War I)
• — There’s a third book in this series, called The Ghost Road, that I haven’t read yet
• On Secret Service by John Jakes (fiction, Civil War)

There is also Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa on my shelf, if you like graphic novels and a more global view of history.

@downinpockets

BRINGING!

My absolute favorite baseball books, nonpartisan division —

• Cait Murphy, Crazy ‘08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History. It’s mostly about the Giants/Cubs pennant race in 1908, but it also covers baseball as a whole and has some interesting bits on the state of America at the time.
• Bill Felber, A Game of Brawl: The Orioles, the Beaneaters, and the Battle for the 1897 Pennant. This is on the same idea as Crazy ‘08, but a different season and different teams. And it’s really crazy how radically different baseball was just eleven years before 1908. I found this really hard to put down.
• David Halberstam, October 1964. I keep needling Other Sam to read it because she’s a Cards fan, but I am reeeeally not a Cards or Yankees fan and it is easily my favorite Halberstam baseball book. (Yes, Mary, more than The Teammates, sorry.) It is beautifully written and not only a good piece of baseball writing, but also a good piece of social science writing. The main theme is racism and the slow process of integration in baseball. It’s wonderful.
• Bill James, Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?: Baseball, Cooperstown, and the Politics of Glory. If you’re not into stats, you can skip them and still love this book. He basically built an argument about what is and is not a Hall of Famer around Joe Jackson and Don Drysdale, and I think Pete Rose (it’s been a while since I read it). I disagree with him vehemently on Drysdale, but it’s a nice history of the Hall of Fame itself and it’s interesting to hear a baseball intellectual’s thoughts on how it should or should not work.
• Joe Posnanski, The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America. I wrote this in a review: “It is warm and sad and funny and heartbreaking and beautiful. Joe Posnanski is one of the best, if not the best, sportswriters working today, and he’s one of the best writers, too. He doesn’t go the Roger Kahn “hey look at me” route, he doesn’t preach, he doesn’t sell you anything. Buck O’Neil sells himself. To learn about the man and the world he lived in, you can hardly do better than reading this and Buck’s autobiography. Pick this up and read it and you cannot be disappointed.” That’s all I have to say.

Some other good ones —

• Lawrence Ritter, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told By the Men Who Played It. Kind of a must-read for a baseball fan. Some of it is hard to read because it’s so old (1960s) and the players he interviewed can be really, really obnoxious (Sam Crawford). But it’s a great window into a bygone era, biases and all. Harry Hooper’s chapter was my favorite and I hated Rube Marquard less after his chapter (even if he is still the worst Hall of Famer EVER).
• Peter Morris, But Didn’t We Have Fun?: An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1870. I liked this, but it’s a little hard to read, in that it’s loaded with information and sometimes it goes a little slow. It’s really interesthing, though, and Morris is a good writer. If you’re not already into olde-tyme base ball, read A Game of Brawl first — I promise it’s worth it even if you’re apprehensive — and see if it interests you. (The baseball in A Game of Brawl is practically modern compared to this book.)
• Baseball Prospectus, It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over: The Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book. Another book where you can skip the stats. It’s a great look at how league/division pennants have been won and lost (or, in some cases, completely BLOWN in hilarious/pathetic fashion) over time. It’s heavy and a little slow to read sometimes, but some of the anecdotes are hi-fucking-larious (apparently Luis Tiant got into a habit of calling Carl Yastrzemski “El Polacko”) and the history is more than worth it.

Partisan division —

• David Halberstam, The Teammates and Summer of ‘49. God, he is such a good writer. The former is about the ’40s/’50s Red Sox wrapped around a road trip by Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr to Florida to see Ted Williams before he died, and the latter is about the ‘49 pennant race with the Yankees. They are both excellent.
• Tom Adelman, Black and Blue: Sandy Koufax, the Robinson Boys, and the World Series That Stunned America. He did another book called The Long Ball about the ‘75 World Series, but I really did not like it. This is awesome, though. He wraps it around racism, but it’s surprisingly light and funny — anecdotes about Frank Robinson being silly, Vin Scully managing a game, general history on baseball at the time plus the Orioles and Dodgers. It reminds me a lot of Halberstam, which is probably why I like it.

Biographies —

• Jane Leavy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy. It’s basically a biography of Sandy, but it’s also a social history of ’60s America and a game story on his perfecto in 1965. It is really, really good, it’s the only book on this list I’ve read more than twice (five times), and it’s about as close to a definitive look at this man as we’re going to get, at least while he’s alive. (Also, it’s the reason Olivia and I call him “Sandeeeee,” which you needed to know in order to sell you on this book.)
• Leigh Montville, Ted Williams: Biography of an American Hero. Probably too long for someone who’s not a Red Sox fan, but he is possibly the greatest pure hitter in baseball history and a significant American historical figure (what with his war service). I think the prose is trying too hard to be artsy in parts, but it’s surprisingly straightforward for an admitted Williams worshipper. And it broke my heart. This man deserved better than he got in his old age. (I also liked Ted’s book, My Turn at Bat, a lot, if you want an autobiography. It’s probably half as long, so it has that going for it, ahaha.)
• Don Drysdale with Bob Verdi, Once a Bum, Always a Dodger: My Life in Baseball from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. I usually hate player autobios, but Big D got himself a good ghostwriter, and I thought it was an incredibly funny and interesting book. He’s not afraid to tell silly stories on himself and he has a lot of good stories about the people around him, from his teammates on up to Walter O’Malley. It also broke my heart because he died three years after it came out and it’s clear from reading the text that he expected to live much longer. But I don’t regret reading it at all.
• Nolan Ryan with Harvey Frommer, Throwing Heat: The Autobiography of Nolan Ryan, and with Jerry Jenkins, Miracle Man: Nolan Ryan, The Autobiography. Yes, two autobiographies for one man. I don’t care, I loved them. The first one is straight-up autobiography through the ‘87 season and the latter picks up where that one left off, plus it has a whole chapter on What Nolan Thinks About EVERYTHING (some of his opinions, especially on things like the DH, are super insightful; others are just entertaining).

I hope that’s a good start! LOL.

I finished reading And Another Thing...

It only took me, you know, forever. Or a month, anyway.

Dear God, it was depressing. Or the end of it was. And how strange is it for a Hitchhiker book to have an actual plot, with a beginning, middle, and end? (I did laugh at the final line. Very Douglas.) I feel like I’ve just had a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster and need to lie down.

It’s a better ending than Mostly Harmless was for the series, that is for sure.

How I organize my library

I live basically in the basement — a finished room in the downstairs part of the house — and my walls are cement. Two of the walls have shelves molded in them. The one on the right side has most of my books. I can’t use the other wall because the windows are there, and I can’t even use the entire right-side wall because the circuit breaker is over there. (Protip: don’t live in the basement.)

The wall-shelf has most of my nonfiction books and some of my reference books; I’d venture there are 110 or so books there.

I have a TV stand on the floor in the corner of that wall and the window wall. The top shelf has my DVD/VCR and the second has my N64 and GameCube. The bottom shelf is tall enough to hold most of my oversized books: The Sports Illustrated Baseball Book, high school yearbooks, The Celebrated Method for Clarinet (best known as “the Klosé” or “that horrible orange book I am going to light on fire”), big photography books, that kind of thing. The shelf itself is actually overfull; I filled it spine-side-out and now there are books on it cover-side-out.

The only other book shelf in the room is — wait for it — an actual bookcase. It’s small, maybe 3/4 the height of my headboard, and fairly narrow. This has my itty-bitty collection of fiction books. It, too, is full spine-side-out/upright, and there are books stacked on the second shelf spine-side-out/sideways. (It’s the only shelf with the room for this awesome method of storage.)

It works fine except for the fact that I have NO ROOM ANYMORE. Seriously, the bookcase and TV stand are overfilled and the wall is now filled because it has reached the circuit breaker…again. So if I ever get around to redoing my room, I’m either filling one wall with a huge bookcase or I’m having my dad install shelves on one or two walls. Because the easy solution, “stop buying books,” is also the unacceptable solution.

David Halberstam

is my favorite author (nonfiction division). The only problem with that is his more journalistic writing suffers from the same diarrhea-of-the-typewriter disorder that, well, all of my writing does.

Between my current reading (I’m partway through The Fifties) and my to-read list, I have just under 4,000 pages to read just of his writing. And by “just under” I mean “3,990.” And by “3,990” I mean “six books.” Surely you’re joking, Mr. Halberstam.

How I am going to read those, the other 20 or so books on my to-read list, all of my academic reading, and the other two dozen books I am sure to buy this year, plus the other three books I’m still reading, before the end of this year, I don’t know.

But it’ll be fun.

My aunt feeds my addiction.

She gave me a $50 Barnes & Noble gift card for Christmas. I just spent it on…

• Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O’Malley, Baseball’s Most Controversial Owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles by Michael D’Antonio
• 100 Things Dodger Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die by Jon Weisman
• Lefty, Double-X, and The Kid: The 1939 Red Sox, a Team in Transition by Bill Nowlin

I can find the third one here in New England (and it’s really surprising I didn’t buy it the first time I saw it, considering my love affair with the Foxx/Grove Ath-uh-leh-tics of Philadelphia), but bn.com is currently giving everyone the member price on books. So rather than renew the membership ($25) and buy the book in a store, I bought it online.

I like books. I like baseball. Hence.

Also, I still have $56 in cash from my grandmother. A visit to the brick ‘n’ mortar B&N might just be on the agenda. Hmmm.

I'm a little more than halfway through And Another Thing...

And…I don’t know how to say this. So. I’ll just say it.

I don’t hate it.

(Yes, that much buildup for a largely ambiguous statement. Let me Spillane.)

I keep marking things I like and things I don’t like, and the only thing I outright don’t like is this (p. 9 in the U.S. hardcover edition):

What would his obituary say in the Hitchhiker’s Guide? Ford wondered. It would be brief, that was for sure. A couple of words. Perhaps the same two words he had used to describe Earth all those years ago.

Mostly harmless.

I’m picking nits, probably, but it’s pretty well known going back to the first book in this series that Ford spent years on Earth researching the place for his Guide article, submitted something of considerable length, and later, it was cut down to “mostly harmless” for space reasons.

Or maybe I’m not picking nits, since if you’re going to write a damn book for this series, you should probably know where “mostly harmless” came from.

But that’s okay, because a few things have made me laugh out loud. Page 111 (not that context helps in a book this weird, but Zaphod is in Asgard, the home of the gods in Norse mythology, on a mission, and he is about to embark on a challenge before Heimdall lets him visit with Thor):

Heimdall adopted a heroic stance, which is not easy when one is clad in a garish ski suit, but in fairness the god carried it off. He raised his horn and blew a long, undulating series of notes that sounded suspiciously like the old Betelgeusean nursery rhyme “Arkle Schmarkle Sat on a Schmed,” but with a semitone more implied violence.

Page 142 (Zaphod is trying to make his way down to Thor’s hiding place):

There was a customs Viking in a reinforced booth who seemed a little surprised to see a mortal coming onto the platform. In fact, he was so surprised that his eyes popped right out of their sockets.

“Whoa,” said Zaphod. “That is truly disgusting. Can you do it again?”

“No, I cannot,” said the Viking, twisting the eyes back in. “Who the Hel are you?”

(Don’t ask, I just laughed at it and stuck a Post-It on it. Or, yes, you can ask — Hel is both a place in Norse mythology and the name of its ruler. And for what it’s worth, they had mentioned Hel earlier in this subplot. I don’t have a working knowledge of Viking fairy tales.)

There are really only a few things I absolutely cannot abide, namely Random (who is Douglas’s fault, so I can’t really blame Colfer for the fact that she’s insufferable), the return of Fenchurch in the form of a computer that Arthur has so far become obsessed with (like, way to bring back THE WORST BOOK IN THE SERIES — we’ll see how that goes), and something else that I’m not going to talk about on the off chance that someone wants to read this book with as few spoilers as possible.

Honestly, it’s no better or worse than Mostly Harmless, which I just re-read on Sunday night before reading this. And that’s pretty high praise, considering I was expecting to loathe it.

I’ll let you know if I learn to loathe it by the time it ends.