Sunday Book Banter: May 2, 2010

As promised here is the return of Sunday Book Banter. I swear I'm going to be a better blogger...

In today's Washington Post, we get a review of former MLB-er Doug Glanville's new baseball memoir, The Game From Where I Stand. Glanville never really made it onto my radar of players I cared about, but the new book sounds like it could be a fun (and probably quick) read. Dave Sheinin writes:

Glanville, who contributes a column to the New York Times, is a witty, insightful writer, and his detailed descriptions of the unseen banalities and secret vanities of the baseball life -- how players pass the time during rain delays, the proper way to pack an equipment bag after you've been cut, the admission that players practice signing their autograph -- are sometimes riveting and often amusing, even for those of us already intimately familiar with that life. 

Sheinin, I should note, wrote one of the better baseball stories I've read in a while for last Sunday's Post; a great write-up on Stephen Strasburg's first weeks in professional baseball.  If you haven't had the chance to read it, do so, it's got a certain poetry to it. (I kind of love the old-school Romanticism of baseball, and Sheinin does a great job of bringing that back).

Back to the book at hand, apparently it isn't too big on naming names or avoiding clichés (player superstitions!), but Glanville does provide a nuanced approach to the steroid controversy. As a player representative to the union, one expects Glanville to want a hush-hush over steroids, but he also claims to have never used them (and with anemic power throughout his career, I think we can trust him). So he has to be conflicted between his commitment to player privacy and his anger at those who tried to get ahead of him by using drugs. I'll certainly be looking for the book. Seems like it should be a quick read, and it will probably have the little day-to-day baseball stuff that I am always eager to read about (see this review).

Review: The Guns of August

My Aunt May has been telling me to read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August for what seems to be ages. Boy was I stupid not to do so as soon as she recommended it. Tuchman's work recounts the first month of World War I: August, 1914. I have to admit to knowing very little about WWI, but this made for a great primer into the causes of the war as well as the reasons it got bogged down in the trenches.

A few things surprised me about the opening month of the war. The first was the transitional state that war was in. We tend to think of war as something that happened before mechanized weaponry or something that happened after. WWI shows that this was not the case. Weaponry used in battle of course included heavy artillery, rifles, airplanes, and machine guns. But it also included lances, bicycles, horses, and bayonets. Some of the massive casualties were undoubtedly caused by these discrepancies in firepower. I had the hardest time wrapping my mind around the idea of war that wasn't quite 19th Century but also wasn't firmly 20th Century either.

But the highlight of this book is Tuchman's writing. It took me a while to read, but a lot of that was owed to thesis writing. Tuchman's prose is absolutely gorgeous, and it draws you in. Throughout the book, I found myself angry and sympathizing with the Germans, British, French, Russians, and Belgians. She didn't allow retrospective history to get in the way of writing: the Germans aren't evil, and the British aren't demi-gods. All of the participants are instead just fallible human beings. Its devastating to realize how much human life was lost in the stupidity, and Tuchman really details the magnitude of tragedy involved, regardless of side.

While a lot of people who read the book focus on the (admittedly wonderful) first paragraph, I had a different favorite that really shows Tuchman's style. In Chapter 22, as she is setting up the Battle of the Marne that was to decide the fate of France, Tuchman writes this:

September 4 opened with a sense of climax felt in widely separated places; a kind of extra-sensory awareness that great events sometimes send ahead. In Paris, Gallieni felt this was the "decisive" day. In Berlin, Princess Blücher wrote in her diary, "Nothing is talked of but the expected entry into Paris." In Brussels the leaves had begun to fall, and a sudden wind blew them in gusts about the street. People felt the hidden chill of autumn in the air and wondered what would happen if the war were to last through the winter. At the American Legation Hugh Gibson noted a "growing nervousness" at German Headquarters where there had been no announcements of victories in four days. "I am sure there is something big in the air today."

What a beautiful way to set the stage for one of history's most important days.

If you haven't read The Guns of August and you have even a modicum of interest in history, pick up a copy. It is easily one of the best history books I've ever come across.

Like Douglas MacArthur, I Return

Hi there blog! It's good to see you again. Sorry I've been away for nearly two months, but thesis writing got in the way. After doing 80 pages of "The Manipulation of the Perception of Time in John Adams's Doctor Atomic," I didn't want to write any more. But that's all done now, so here I am again. I'll have a new review of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August up tomorrow. (Sneak peak: I loved it).

While writing, my to-read list apparently took the rabbit spirit of Easter and multiplied like crazy, so you can expect some new stuff coming relatively regularly again. I've got William Manchester's biography of Douglas MacArthur, Chuck Klosterman's IV, Jack Lynch's The Lexicographers Dilemma (check out this review at VPO), Gabriel García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm thinking of taking a trek through some Shakespeare this summer, maybe the histories. And, despite finishing the thesis, I'm already starting some reading in anticipation of the dissertation, so if I find anything interesting, I'll pass it on! I'll see if I can't restart Sunday Book Banter again too.

As for right now, I'm reading a new anthology of essays on my favorite composer (and likely dissertation subject), Benjamin Britten. Edited by Lucy Walker of the Britten-Pears Foundation, the book is a collection of essays written by mostly new scholars. I'm particularly interested in Cameron Pyke's analysis and comparison of Britten's War Requiem with Dimitri Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony.

So stay tuned! There's plenty more on the way, and this blog will be rolling regularly again!

"Last Train From Hiroshima" Withdrawn

I wrote about Charles Pellegrino's Last Train From Hiroshima a few weeks ago. Since then, the books publisher has been alerted to several glaring factual errors in the book. In a recent post, Jacket Copy does a great job of detailing what has happened. But it's your typical history book story of "My sources lied!" That seems fair enough, but as the publisher has dug more deeply into the book they've found more and more problems, including the inclusion of someone who doesn't exist (Pellegrino says it was a pseudonym).

An interesting question that Jacket Copy raises is: how much should publishers fact check? Obviously, they can't check everything. There are bound to be errors. But in a book that received so much press and attention, why did it take Henry Holt (the publisher) so long to check it out?

Needless to say, the book is no longer on my to-read shelf. And as far as Pellegrino? He appears to have taken his cue from Major Kong and ridden The Bomb to his own death.

Review: Odd Man Out

Aside from music, one of my biggest passions in life is baseball. Since 1994 I've been a huge fan of the Seattle Mariners. I care far too much about baseball and spend far too much time reading about it online. But one thing I don't read enough of is baseball books. When I read The Boys of Summer by George Kahn, I loved it (or at least the first half of it). I've read some other baseball stuff that is just superb. But then you get the real clunkers. And when a baseball book stinks, it's just unbearable. I want them to be good so badly that it upsets me when they are not.

Well I was killing some time at the UMD bookstore the other day, and came across Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit by Matt McCarthy. I'm not sure why it struck me, but I looked it up on my Kindle and downloaded it there. I've never been happier with a baseball book in my life. It doesn't have any of the sabermetric statistics that I'm learning to like, and it isn't really advanced technically. What it is is a superb recounting of McCarthy's year in the Anaheim Angel's farm system.

McCarthy was a left-handed pitcher for an abysmal Yale team. In 2002, after graduating from one of the top universities in the world, he was picked in the 21st round of the amateur draft by the Angels. 21st-round picks are usually people that will never make an impact on the big-league team. And the same is true of McCarthy. But his assignment to the Provo Angels, based in the geographic heart of the Mormon religion provides for some fantastic stories, and we're lucky they were experienced by someone who can write as well as McCarthy does.

He tells of extended spring training and his time in Provo, UT. But the best part of the book is the detailing of the players themselves. We get some big names (new Mariners 1B Casey Kotchman's dad is McCarthy's manager in Provo. White Sox closer Bobby Jenks makes a cameo as a drunk blowhard [which in turn makes me like Jenks even more now that I see his complete transformation], Joe Saunders is hated by his teammates, Ervin Sanatana puts no effort into his game, and Alberto Callaspo engages in hijinks galore), and we get some people that even the most avid baseball fan hasn't heard of.

These are the people that make the story special. Two players come immediately to mind, and both were (at one point) McCarthy's roommates. The first roommate, always referred to as Sunshine, was a bit of an eccentric player, who most of the team thought was only there as a favor. He served the season as the bullpen catcher, one of the least glorious jobs in all of baseball. After initially disliking him, McCarthy seems to end up with a great fondness for the crazy Californian.

The other is Randy Burden, a devout Christian who tried to push the Bible onto McCarthy while also trying to be supportive in a non-imposing way. McCarthy details the brusque manner in which he treated Burden, and then reveals that Burden died after the 2002 season. You can sense a profound regret in McCarthy's writing both that he wasn't there for his teammate in life, and afterwards. These segments must have been very difficult for McCarthy to write, as he lays himself out as kind of an ass.

The other truly inspiring character is Tom Kotchman, the Provo Angel's manager. The way he is described, he is truly a "player's manager."If his team plays baseball the "way it was meant to be played" he'll do anything for them. At one point, Kotchman offers any money that his players need with no strings attached. For some, this was they only way they could eat on the meager rookie-ball salary they received. As clichéd as it sounds, I absolutely loved this bit from Kotchman:

If you play hard for me, I will do anything for you. Anything! And to see some of you just going through the motions... it kills me. You're disrespecting the game!

These kids were given the chance to live the dream of thousands of people. To play professional baseball. And while you can't blame them for taking it for granted (most people who routinely do amazing things take them for granted), you have to appreciate what Kotchman is trying to instill in his players.

The author is very straightforward about the fact that he wasn't a very good pitcher. Without fear of spoiling anything (it pretty much gives the ending on the back cover), I note that even though McCarthy got cut in Spring Training of 2003, he's not doing too shabbily for himself: having attended Harvard Medical School.

If you're looking for a good baseball book, but this one now. The pace was fast and the story telling was phenomenal. I can't recommend it enough.