Book reviews, 2006

    The Duel
    The Lady With the Dog
    The Party
    The Wife
    The Witch
    The Bishop
    The Chorus Girl
    The Schoolmistress
                                        -- Anton Chekhov

    Volumes 2-9 of the complete short stories of Chekhov.  Good reading, though you can't take too much of it at one time.  Maxim Gorky said that Chekhov's basic message could be summed up as, "My friends, you live badly."  All of his stories are about wretched people who could be happy, but instead prefer to make themselves and everyone around them miserable.


    The Fight -- Norman Mailer

    Mailer attended the Ali-Foreman fight in Kinshasa in 1974, and this is the book he wrote about it.  I actually thought I learned more about that fight and what it meant to America and the black community from the documentary When We Were Kings.  I find Mailer's writing both precious and condescending.  What I get out of this book is Mailer saying "Ha ha, look at this clown who pretends he's a poet, isn't he amusing."


    Lanterns and Lances -- James Thurber

    I love James Thurber.  One time, when somebody asked Harold Ross why he published cartoons by a fifth-rate artist like Thurber, Ross drew himself up and said, freezingly, "Thurber is a third-rate artist."


    A Calculating People -- Patricia Cline Cohen

    Interesting look at the methods of teaching mathematics in the colonial United States, and the Rule of Three.  I never thought I'd say this, but the math classes we took in school when I was a kid were much better and gave you a much better understanding of arithmetical principles than the old method.


    Purity of Blood -- Arturo Perez-Reverte

    The sequel to the splendid El Capítan Alatriste.  Doesn't really have the fire and excitement of the original, but it's still a good adventure story, set in 1620s Madrid.


    The Computer and the Brain -- John von Neumann

    Notes for a lecture on logical structures that von Neumann was going to give, but never did because he died first.  It was von Neumann who applied a lot of Claude Shannon's information theory to design the digital computer (he coined the phrase "central processing unit.")


    Patriot Reign -- Michael Holley

    I was hoping for rather more inside information on how exactly the Patriots organization operates than this book gives.  Not a bad read, though.


    The Charwoman's Shadow -- Lord Dunsany

    Dunsany was sui generis.  I'm not sure how to describe this book -- it's sort of a strange lyrical fantasy written in the 20s.  Well-written.


    The Neighborhood of Baseball -- Barry Gifford

    Memoir of growing up a Cubs fan in a tough-neighborhood family vaguely connected to low-level organized crime.  I kind of got the sense the author had a high opinion of himself, but I could be wrong.  It was pretty good.


    John L. Sullivan and His America -- Michael T. Isenberg

    Very good biography of the Boston Strong Boy, with a lot of excerpts from contemporary news articles and woodcuts.  Great section on his fight with Jake Kilrain, the last bare-knuckle championship fight, which lasted seventy-five rounds, and took over two and a half hours, outdoors, in hundred-degree sun.


    A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cooperstown -- Mickey McDermott

    Man, I hated this book.  I bought it because Dad used to talk about McDermott when he was with the Sox in the forties, and what a flake he was, and how he used to walk the bases loaded and then strike out the side.  The ghostwriter performed acceptably, but as I read along I really started to hate McDermott, which poisoned the book for me.  He was a drunk, and never straightened out because he didn't have to because he was famous, which he thought was just great.  The book is mainly him reminiscing about how he got drunk and totalled Johnny Pesky's new car (ha ha, what fun!) and how he sponged off Walt Dropo and lived on his couch for so long that Dropo paid for an in-game ad on the Fenway scoreboard that read "Mickey, get out," and bragging how, when he was sentenced to prison after his tenth drunk-driving conviction, he was allowed to sit around while everyone else worked, and to go home on weekends, because he autographed baseball cards for the guards.  And so on.  It was bad enough before I got to the end of the book, where he basically concludes that people who have jobs and work and produce things are stupid losers.  It's just as well he died recently, so I'll never be tempted to sock him one if I run into him.


    Democracy in America, First Part -- Alexis de Tocqueville

    De Tocqueville spent five years in the US studying our republican institutions in the 1830's, then went home to France and wrote about them.  He had a lot of interesting things to say; I was struck by his comparison of the typical working-class American, who feels he has a personal stake in the country as a whole  and who regards public roads and parks as his own property, to the typical working-class European, who has no sense that he is in any way involved with his country's fate and who regards everything he does not personally own as "the property of a powerful stranger, whom he calls the government."  Interestingly, de Tocqueville was inclined to think that a Catholic nation would probably never spontaneously form a real republic.  He was a great admirer of the US in most things, though you can see some of his reservations in his chapter titles, such as "The Example of the Americans Does Not Prove That a Democratic People Can Have No Aptitude and No Taste for Science, Literature, or Art."  He was one of the first propounders of the middle-class theory: he thought revolution would be less likely in America because poor Americans believed they could become wealthy themselves.  He also thought that the American culture of equality would produce general resentment of elites; he therefore predicted that Americans with greater than usual powers of intelligence and energy, who in Europe would become powerful politicians, would be kept out of high position by the resentment of the middle class, and would either join "limited intellectual circles" (academia), and so become powerful through influence, or employ themselves in the American obsession with making money, and so become powerful through wealth.


    Theory of Prosody in 18th-Century England -- Paul Fussell

    I believe this was originally Fussell's Ph.D. thesis, which is probably why it's much drier and less readable than his other books.  It is, however, a very interesting and highly technical examination of the general use of meter in poetry by the Augustans.


    Loose Balls -- Terry Pluto

    Oral history of the old American Basketball Association.  Bizarre book, that reads like a pile of sketch proposals that somebody submitted to Saturday Night Live and were rejected for being too unrealistic, except it all really happened.  Not only was the ABA full of young black guys aching to get out from the stuffy confines of a sports world run by old white guys, the league encouraged everyone to be as wacky as possible, because they were always teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and they needed the publicity.  I read it on a plane flight and laughed out loud.  Plus it made me nostalgic for Doctor J.


    Cat Chaser, Cuba Libre,  Gold Coast, The Hunted, Mr. Majestyk,  Riding the Rap, Swag, The Hot Kid  -- Elmore Leonard

    Sadly, I have now read everything by Elmore Leonard.  (Well, he wrote some Westerns too, but I like to watch Westerns, not read them.)  At least he's still writing.


    Cinderella Man -- Jeremy Schaap

    Very engaging book about Jim Braddock, probably the worst boxer ever to be heavyweight champion, and how he went from walking miles each way every day just on the hope of dockyard work, and having to panhandle, to getting a shot at the title.  Actually my favorite thing about that story is that Braddock's manager never stopped working to help him, which makes him close to unique among boxing managers in not being a blood-sucking vampire.


    An Education in Georgia -- Calvin Trillin

    Trillin's first book, about the first black students admitted to college in Georgia and what they went through.  As you can imagine, it's not really cheerful reading.  Also, it has that particular depressing earnestness that all books written in the sixties seem to have.


    Gentlemen's Blood -- Barbara Holland

    A history of duelling.  A lot of good anecdotes, though you often want to slap everyone involved.


    The Nuptials of Corbal -- Rafael Sabatini

    Minor historical novella set during the Terror in France.  Worth reading.


    Defining the World -- Henry Hitchings

    Good book on the process Johnson used to write his Dictionary.


    Ponzi's Scheme -- Mitchell Zuckoff

    Fascinating book on Charles Ponzi and how he scammed all of Boston.  Two things stand out for me: first, Ponzi must have been one of the most charming people of the 20th century; even his victims liked him (and many refused to believe he was guilty even after he confessed.) Even the author obviously likes him, and this leads him into some striking auctorial failures--for instance, he keeps coming back to the story of how Ponzi heroically donated a good deal of the skin off his back for skin grafts to help a destitute burn victim, apparently never considering that the only evidence that that happened is the word of Ponzi (a notorious liar) and that such an act would be entirely out of character for him; obviously Ponzi made that story up, but the author takes it as fact.  There are other examples, if none so egregious.  Second, it was surprising how phlegmatically the people of Boston accepted the collapse of the scheme; there are many quotes from investors (taken from the old Boston Post) along the lines of  "We have only ourselves to blame, we shouldn't have been so gullible, we should have known there's no way to double your money in a month."

    The Devouring Fungus -- Karla Jennings

    Collection of computer-mishap anecdotes from the early days of computing (the title comes from a kind of fungus that was found to be eating the magnetic tape on old tape-memory computers.)


    Blackbeard the Pirate -- Robert E. Lee

    (No, not that Robert E. Lee).  This is a pretty good biography of Blackbeard, and does a good job of examining the story of how he died--pointing out that the actions of the governor of North Carolina were questionable, both because he exceeded his authority in giving orders to the Royal Navy, and because Blackbeard had accepted the terms of the pirate amnesty of 1718 and there's no reason to think he had violated them.  Lee doesn't quite accuse the governor of murdering Blackbeard for his treasure, but you can tell that's what's in his mind.  (Lee also makes a pretty solid argument that what happened to Blackbeard's treasure was that same thing that happened to almost all pirate treasure--the pirates spent it.)


    Sea Change -- Robert B. Parker

    Even more of a horrible piece of crap than usual.  I skim through his books in the store these days, partly out of habit and partly for the same reason people slow down to look at car crashes.


    Drive -- Larry Bird

    This was ghosted reasonably well, and it's readable, but I didn't learn a whole lot from it.


    The Soul of a New Machine -- Tracy Kidder

    Probably the best account ever of what it's like to design and build an engineering project.  Won a Pulitzer in 1978 for its account of how a guy at Data General engineered their first 16-bit computer to compete with DEC...and since his design had been rejected, he had to run it as sort of a guerrilla project in a basement in Westborough, taking on the youngest, hungriest guys right out of school he could find, working everyone more or less around the clock for two years.  The book eloquently describes how what they all really got out of it was the satisfaction of finishing a working machine...and the reward would be the chance to work on another.  Really, really excellent book.


    The White Deer -- James Thurber

    Short, funny fairy tale.  I think I bought this at an Annie's in 1986 and just now got around to reading it.


    Shut Out -- Howard Bryant

    Depressing look at the history of racism in Boston baseball.  Bryant is inclined to put most of the blame on the shoulders of Mike Higgins, but insists it's Tom Yawkey's responsibility for hiring him.  Interestingly, he points out that the famous story about Jackie Robinson's tryout at Fenway, where some unidentified person called out from the front office, "Get those niggers off the field!"  may not actually have happened, since the only source for it was Clif Keane, who was not at Fenway that day. 


    The Evolution of Useful Things -- Henry Petroski

    Nice look at tool design.  His thesis is that every re-design of any tool is a response to a failure of the tool.


    A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers -- Henry David Thoreau

    Honestly, this book is pretty dull.  The parts where he actually describes the river journey are great, but that's less than half the book--the rest of it is taken up with filler like discussions of the Bhagavad-Gita and a 30-page essay on the nature of friendship, which really aren't worth reading.  Eventually I started skimming so I could just read the natural-history parts.  Those are very good.  Imagine if Dan and I built a raft and started poling around on the Concord River today?  How long before we were arrested?  Ten minutes?  Five minutes?


    The Rivalry -- John Taylor

    Entertaining look at the careers of Chamberlain and Russell.  His conclusion: Russell was better.


    The Big Con -- David W. Maurer

    Very entertaining book.  In the forties a professor of linguistics from Chicago set out to write a book about the slang of American con artists, and wound up having to explain how all the cons worked to illustrate the slang.  (All the information and slang from The Sting came out of this book.)  The title refers to the distinction between the "short con" (where you con a guy out of whatever money he's got on him) and the "big con" (where you get the guy to go home and get all his money and bring it back to you.)


    The Dyskolos -- Menander

    Farcical comedy about a grouchy hermit who gets what's coming to him.  I'm not big on farce, and actually my sympathy is usually with the grouchy guy.  Why not just leave him alone?


    High Fidelity -- Nick Hornby

    Very, very funny book about a guy who is obsessed with an ex-girlfriend.  I think we've all been there.


    Quite Early One Morning -- Dylan Thomas

    Essays on writing.  Thomas was particularly abusive towards Welshmen who moved to England and took up a pose of looking down on the Welsh.  He reaches great heights of vitriol in his discussion of how the London critics and writers scratched each other's backs.


    The War of the Worlds -- H. G. Wells

    I actually read this when I was about ten, but a lot of it went over my head then.  This time I can see what Wells is really saying: in his time it was a very common argument that it was morally right for the English to conquer other countries and kill their inhabitants; the fact that they could do it meant it must be right.  Their superiority in technology obviously meant God favored them.  Wells just extended this idea: logically, then, if there's a race of technologically advanced creatures on Mars, it must be morally right for them to take our planet and kill us.  It's very well written, with a terrific naval battle, and horrifying scenes of the aliens crushing humans and drinking their blood (apparently there was a rise in vegetarianism in England after this book came out) and a very evocative passage where the narrator realizes that Man has been dethroned, and humanity has been reduced to rats, hiding in dark corners from the new masters of the Earth.  Great book.


    Travels With a Donkey -- Robert Louis Stevenson

    Very cheerful book; an account of Stevenson doing something that would never be allowed now--he got a donkey, and stitched together a canvas bag to carry all his stuff and sleep in at night (because of this he is widely credited with being the inventor of the sleeping bag.  Seriously.)  and just wandered around France for a few months on foot.  That was a more civilized time.

    Boswell's Clap -- William Ober

    Book of essays on diseases of literary men, by a physician.  The only essay I was really interested in was the one on Boswell.  (I'm sure the others are well-researched and all, but I just don't want to read about Swinburne and masochism, okay?)  Did you know Boswell had at least eighteen separate attacks of gonorrhea in his life?  And he was married, too.


    The Justice of the Duke -- Rafael Sabatini

    A book of novellas set in Renaissance Italy, all of them involving Cesare Borgia cleverly outwitting, and then ruthlessly destroying, his enemies.  Very entertaining.


    The Only Game that Matters -- Bernard M. Corbett & Paul Simpson

    A year-by-year look at the Harvard-Yale game.  Lots of cool stuff in here.  Apparently they had to stop playing the game for a while in the late 1880s because so many people were getting carried off on stretchers.

    Cuckoo's Egg -- Cliff Stoll

    Excellent first-person account of a guy who worked at Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, and (ultimately because of a small discrepancy in user-account time) discovered that a cracker was using Berkeley's ARPANET connection (by dialling in on a 1200-baud modem) to set up Trojan horses and copy password files (for dictionary attacks) on many military computers across the US.  He eventually set up an elaborate hoax, inventing an imaginary SDI department at Berkeley, to get the cracker to stay connected long enough to backtrack him across several nodes to a basement in Hanover, where he was connected at the University of Bremen.  It turned out the guy had been selling all the stuff he found to the KGB.  It's a great story, both a puzzle and a mystery.


    A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland -- Samuel Johnson
    Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides -- James Boswell

    In 1773 Johnson and Boswell took a tour of the Scottish highlands and the western isles, and both of them wrote accounts of it.  Dad and I read them both at the same time; I liked Johnson better, Dad liked Boswell better.  It's best to read them in tandem, so you can see how they looked at things differently; there's a great scene in Boswell of how they were caught in a terrible storm off the Isle of Mull, and how Boswell bravely defied the elements, riding out the storm, while Johnson made his prayers below.  Johnson's account of the same day reads something like "Some small wind today; Boswell made rather an ass of himself clinging to the rigging, imagining we were all soon to be drowned."


    Giant Bones -- Peter S. Beagle

    Several very good short stories, especially "The Magician of Karakosk."


    The Investigation -- Stanislaw Lem

    This book was tedious; I would even call it obfuscatory.  At the end of it I had no idea what the book was about or even what had really happened.  I felt like Mom feels after watching a spy movie.


    The Adventures of Gerard -- Arthur Conan Doyle
    The Exploits of Gerard -- Arthur Conan Doyle

    Fun short stories told in the first person by a massively egotistical brigadier in Napoleon's Grande Armée.


    The Killer Instinct -- Bob Cousy

    Ghost-written acceptably.  Nothing really stands out in my memory from it.


    Under the Black Flag -- David Cordingly

    History of the pirates.  I never get tired of these, and there's always something I didn't know.  Who would have guessed the buccaneers' most common medical problem was constipation?  (Apparently this was because they were so dehydrated all the time.)


    Indian Summer -- Brian McDonald

    Biography of Louis Sockalexis, the Penobscot Indian who was a great player for the old Cleveland Naps at the turn of the last century--he was so good they renamed the team the "Cleveland Indians" after him.  The book is pretty good, but no first-person narrative survives from Sockalexis -- he may not have known how to write -- so the author has to keep saying things like "how it must have felt when..."  He came to a sad end, though -- he died from alcoholism.


    Uncle Bernac -- Arthur Conan Doyle

    Historical romance set in the Napoleonic Wars.  One of his minor efforts.


    Celebrated Crimes, Volume One -- Alexandre Dumas pére

    Volume one is all about the Borgia family.  Dumas was a notoriously uncritical researcher, so this isn't a history of the Borgias so much as a collection of every nasty accusation, slander, rumor, gossip, and invention he could possibly find; to read it you'd think that Cesare Borgia was the Anti-Christ.


    Homegrown Democrat -- Garrison Keillor

    Part autobiography, part musing on the collapse of civility in political debate.  Interesting side note on how he doesn't care that athletes are paid so much money, because he knows the reason a pro gets paid so much is that he has a rare skill that people are willing to pay for, not because his father owns the team, or because he and the manager belong to the same country club.


    The Great Shadow -- Arthur Conan Doyle

    Another minor historical romance about the Napoleonic Wars.  I don't remember much about it, so it wasn't very interesting.


    The Long Ball -- Tom Adelman

    Retrospective of the 1975 baseball season and the Greatest Game Ever.  Both well written and straight out of Nostalgia Central.  There's also stuff I didn't know--my favorite bit from the book is about how Charlie Finley, owner of the A's, saw a teenager named Stanley making money by dancing in front of a boom box in the A's parking lot, and hired him to be, essentially, the entire A's front office.  He also acted as a liaison with the players, who liked him; they thought he looked like Hank Aaron, so they called him "The Hammer."  After the other owners chased Finley out of the game, that kid went on into show business...and that's where he got the nickname "MC Hammer."  Can you believe that?


    Old Man's War -- John Scalzi

    This book had a great idea, but didn't use it.  The conceit is that the future army takes only recruits who are over seventy, cloning new bodies for them to use, on the theory that their accumulated experience and wisdom will make them better soldiers.  That could make a very good story, but Scalzi isn't a good enough writer to tell it.  His old people are indistinguishable from teenagers; their motivations are the acceptance of their peers and the approval of authority figures, just like all young army recruits.  If you didn't read the first chapter, you could never guess from the rest of the book that the heroes are supposed to be in their seventies.  So the book is a big disappointment, because it raises a great question -- "What if the old men went to war and the young men stayed home?" -- and doesn't answer it, or even address it.


    The Glass Teat -- Harlan Ellison

    I always find Ellison's non-fiction better than his fiction.  Particularly his long rants about how much he hates something.  Which, come to think of it, pretty much describes all his non-fiction.  This is a book of essays on how much he hates television.  The book was written around 1970, and his political references, and his self-conscious use of hippie slang, are very dated, but the TV criticism could have been written yesterday.

    The Other Glass Teat -- Harlan Ellison

    This book is a lot like the last, only with the addition of an entertainingly paranoid introduction claiming that his previous book would have been a best-seller except that Spiro Agnew personally ordered book companies not to sell it.  (You know, Ellison claims that he never used drugs, but things like this make me wonder.)


    Alpha Beta -- John Man

    History of written language.  Readable.


    The Martian Chronicles -- Ray Bradbury

    One spectacularly good short story ("There Will Come Soft Rains") surrounded by a pile of crappy short stories.


    The Physics of Baseball -- Robert K. Adair

    Good book.  Proves, among other things, that the curve ball really does curve (it's not just an optical illusion.)


    The Merry Men -- Robert Louis Stevenson

    Two terrific short stories ("The Merry Men" and "Markheim") plus another four or five really good ones.  Dad likes to point out that "The Merry Men" is a sort of precursor to "Heart of Darkness", since it's about an isolated man driven mad by contact with Nature, and involves him moaning The horror! The horror!


    The Maltese Falcon -- Dashiell Hammett

    Good book.  James Thurber claims that Dashiell Hammett once told him that his biggest influence on this book was The Wings of the Dove by Henry James, but somebody's got to be pulling somebody's leg there.  Also, there's a plot hole that's even more glaring in the book than the movie: this falcon statue is a foot tall and made of solid gold; if you do the math, that statue would weigh almost 200 pounds.  And yet Spade can pick it up in one hand, which should have told him it was a fake.


    A Crack in the Edge of the World -- Simon Winchester

    I went to the Athenaeum to hear Winchester lecture on this topic, and he's a very good speaker.  This is a book on the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.  One of his points was that the city was about as ill-prepared as it could have been; the only competent city official was the fire chief, and he was killed when the fire station roof fell in.  Still, the collection of hacks and cronies that ran the city responded far more competently than anyone could have expected...and the federal government had relief trains on the way that day.  Of course, they had Teddy Roosevelt in the White House then.


    A Pirate of Exquisite Mind -- Diana & Michael Preston

    Good biography of William Dampier, one of the great figures of the seventeenth century: naturalist, explorer, pirate, and author.  His Voyages were the book that started the 18th-century craze for travel writing, which has never really subsided.


    Scaramouche the King-Maker -- Rafael Sabatini

    Alas, I think I have finally found and read every book by Rafael Sabatini.  It's the end of an era.  This wasn't my favorite of his, but that's mainly because I thought the end to Scaramouche itself was pretty much perfect and it didn't need a sequel. 


    Mad Ducks and Bears -- George Plimpton

    This is Plimpton's  ten-years-later sequel to Paper Lion; he went back and played another game at quarterback on an NFL team.  (Or, as his friends insisted on putting it, he "came out of retirement.")  As usual, it's both funny and full of cool insider stuff you couldn't learn anywhere else.  He tells a great story about the 1967 Pro Bowl: all the Pro Bowl players milled around for a while, and eventually the coach said "Okay, let's make a starting line-up," and the starting line-up just formed spontaneously.  Plimpton was amazed, but the players explained that everyone knew who was best.  "What if, like, one of the best guys just stayed on the sideline?"  "Then we'd wait.  You think anyone else is going to come out at halfback if Jim Brown is here?"


    The Idler and The Adventurer -- Samuel Johnson

    Johnson's periodical essays from the later 1750's.  Shorter than the Rambler essays and generally on lighter topics.  They are, of course, brilliant.


    Sweet and Low -- Rich Cohen

    Story of the guy who invented the sugar packet (and got swindled out of it) and then invented Sweet'N'Low, originally intended to be sold to hospitals for use by diabetics.  Also the story of the guy's massively dysfunctional descendants.  The book is written by one of the disinherited branch of the family, so you might want to be leery of accepting his judgement of the other branch of the family as criminal, incompetent, ungracious, and insane, but it is absorbing reading.


    A Whole Different Ball Game -- Marvin Miller

    Engrossing -- I read the whole thing in one sitting.  Miller was the first director of the baseball players' union (he was originally a labor lawyer in the steel industry) and he more or less personally forced the owners to give up their old feudal rights over the players.  He admits that the baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, did a lot of his work for him by being so incredibly stupid and arrogant.  He also says it was lucky for him that Charlie Finley was so abrasive, since he was the smartest of the owners, but none of the others would listen to him.  Miller also hates agents, and says he can't understand why players don't just hire lawyers who specialize in contracts to negotiate a deal and pay them by the hour, thereby insuring that the deal will be made in the player's best interests rather than in the negotiator's best interests.  It's a good question.


    Typhoon -- Joseph Conrad

    The title novella is really excellent, my favorite Conrad story after "Youth." 


    The Mind of Bill James -- Scott Gray

    Not exactly an unauthorized biography.  James was aware Gray was writing this, and didn't tell him not to, but he also didn't participate.  So there's no real personal information, which doesn't bother me a lot because I'm more interested in James' math work and his (generally very frigid) reception by the baseball world.  The one big disappointment was that I was hoping to get an idea of exactly what it is Bill James does for the Red Sox since they hired him a few years ago, but neither James nor the team will talk about that.  I can only guess that he's doing studies on injury-recurrence probability (otherwise the Sox wouldn't have gotten JD Drew) and also working on the Holy Grail of baseball front offices: trying to predict which minor-league pitchers will become good major-league pitchers.  Very interesting book.

    Briar Rose -- Jane Yolen

    A modern retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fable, recast as a Holocaust-survivor story.  Well written (and I liked it because it was largely set in South Hadley and Northampton) but any book that involves the Holocaust is depressing.


    The Perfect Mile -- Neal Bascomb

    Entertaining book about the race to be the first guy to run a sub-four-minute mile.  What I liked most about Roger Bannister (the guy who did it first) was that he was a genuine amateur -- all his attempts at the record came while he was a medical student or practicing physician; he had no trainer, and had to do all his practicing during his lunch hour.  Part of that was his conscious determination to show the world that it was possible to excel at something without allowing it to dominate your life.  Let's hear it for the British amateur ideal!


    English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages -- J. J. Jusserand
             (1888 translation by Lucy T. Smith.)

    Scholarly study of people who lived on the road in medieval England.  The great thing about British history is that all the parish records are kept forever -- if you want to know how many travelling musicians used the Sussex toll road in the winter of 1388, you just go to the records Office in London and they'll pull out a seven-hundred-year-old ledger and look it up.  The book is full of other fun oddities, too, like the procedure for building a Roman road.


    The King of Pyrates -- Daniel Defoe

    Fictionalized account of the life of Benjamin Avery, sometimes called the "King of Pirates" because he pulled off the single richest haul ever when he sacked the Mogul's treasure-fleet in the Indian Ocean.


    Meet You in Hell -- Les Standiford

    Account of the bitter feud between Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick.  Boy, those guys really hated each other.  Also, they were both creeps.  Did you know there are still some union men who won't go into any building raised by Andrew Carnegie?  The title comes from Frick's answer to a messenger who came to tell him that Carnegie wanted to meet to make up their quarrel, since they were both getting old.  Frick's answer: Carnegie wants a meeting, does he?  Tell him I will meet him in Hell, where we both are going.


    Out of My League -- George Plimpton

    At the 1963 All-Star Game, Plimpton went out to pitch to the lineups of both teams, minus the pitchers (the deal was that Sports Illustrated would give a thousand bucks to whichever lineup got more runs off him.)  Plimpton did surprisingly well for the first few batters, only giving up one home run, and getting a guy to fly out to center; but then Ernie Banks came to the plate, and I guess he really wanted that $125, because he took about twenty-five pitches before swinging.  Plimpton exhausted himself and eventually had to be relieved by the AL manager, Ralph Houk, who finished up.  It's another good reminder of just how much better the pros are.  The best part was actually the pre-game warm-up, when Plimpton was wandering around  the field at Yankee Stadium, joining in ground ball drills and pepper games, with kids asking him for autographs and the players wondering who he was.  I remember when Plimpton died, and his obituary said that everyone agreed that the reason he could get to do stuff like this was just that he was such a nice guy, no one liked to tell him no.


    Railwayman's Son -- Hugh Hawkins

    Tedious.  I think you'd only like it if you knew the author personally or you were really into trains.


    A Point of Law -- John Maddox Roberts

    Murder mystery set in the last days of the Roman Republic.  Considered as a mystery, not bad.  Though it's depressing to watch republican institutions crumbling.  Wait, are we still talking about the book?


    Set Theory, Logic, and Their Limitations -- Moishe Machover

    Most of this book went over my head, to be honest, but the parts I could follow were illuminating.


    The Nasty Bits -- Anthony Bourdain

    A bunch of short pieces by a professional ex-chef.  He's a good writer, though I think he over-romanticizes the dark side of the high-pressure food business a bit.  I mean, how can anyone look back nostalgically to his days as a heroin addict?  He makes an interesting point that you can't really continue as a chef after you're fifty or so (because the job involves standing on your feet at the stove sixteen hours a day.)  I thought the best piece in the book was the one piece of fiction, a Christmas story that starts out cynical and progresses to a fairy-tale happy ending,  and yet doesn't feel forced.  Very skillful.

    Between Boyfriends -- Cindy Chupack

    I had nothing else to read, okay?  I picked this up at my friend Cora's place when I was helping her move (to do her justice, it belonged to her roommate.)  The author is a writer for Sex and the City, as she never tires of reminding you, and basically the book revolves around the Two Pillars Of Crappy Chick Lit: 1) All men are scum, and 2) Every woman who is not married is a miserable failure who hates herself.


    The Calculus Wars -- Jason Bardi

    It's just amazing how two of the smartest, most accomplished people in human history -- Newton and Liebniz -- could be so unbelievably childish and petty and waste so much time accusing each other of stealing ideas.


    Flush -- Carl Hiaasen

    All right.  Not as good as his other kids' book.


    The Master of Ballantrae -- Robert Louis Stevenson

    Dark suspense novel, involving an older brother who goes mad and sets out to avenge all his troubles on his blameless younger brother, with Satanic gifts of deceit and manipulation, turning their father and his brother's wife and son against him.  Eventually this drives the younger brother mad, and the two brothers destroy each other's lives. 


    The Blank Slate -- Steven Pinker

    Great book on the nature versus nurture debate.


    Unfinished Business -- Jack McCallum

    A book about the 90-91 Celtics season.  This was pretty well written, but it didn't endear itself to me.  You remember back in the day, how people used to say you were either a Larry guy or a Kevin guy?  The writer is a big-time Kevin guy.  And while I enjoyed all the funny stories he told about McHale, I didn't like the way he kept slamming Bird.  One small example: everyone in the book is represented as speaking standard English, except Bird, who is represented as speaking in dialect.  (So the author would quote anyone else as saying I just thought that..., but he quotes Bird as saying Ah jist thought thet...)  This is  a classic way of  trying to make someone sound stupid. Which pissed me off.  Leaving that to one side, though, there's a lot of very funny stories about all the Celtics, and even some good insight into the way they thought.  (For instance, Bird had a sweet tooth, and if he felt like having cake for dessert he'd call a bakery and order a wedding cake.  His reasoning: "You know it'll be good.  Who's gonna screw up a wedding cake?")


    Flash in the Pan -- David Blum

    Really, really good book.  The author was in at the very beginning of a new Manhattan restaurant, and follows its story from the first idea, to the complications of getting off the ground, to the grand opening, to the ten months when the place was a success, to the collapse and bankruptcy.  All his sympathy is where it should be, with the kitchen and wait staff, who have to put up with two megalomaniacal, incompetent, and possibly criminal owners. 


    No Man's Land -- G.M. Ford

    What a piece of crap!  This book was so bad that now I can't even re-read earlier books of his that I liked.


    Finn and Hengest -- J.R.R. Tolkien

    Excellent collection of pre-and post-war Oxford lectures on the Finnesburg Fragment and the Finn Episode in Beowulf. 


    The Thirty-Nine Steps -- John Buchan

    Adventure/spy novel of World War One.  Apparently it was very popular among the soldiers in the trenches, but I thought the Hitchcock movie was better.


    Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs -- Chuck Klosterman

    This is a book on pop culture, so I didn't get a lot out of it--it's all about movies I've never seen, magazines I've never read, TV shows I've never watched, and bands I've never heard.  I was, on top of that, put off by the author's I'm-so-damn-deep poseur crap.  However, it does have one very interesting essay on what it's like to work at a newspaper.


    Genome -- Matt Ridley

    Book on the human genome project, with interesting side notes on statistics.


    The Kitchen -- Nicholas Freeling

    Great memoir of apprenticing in an old-school French restaurant before the war.  He emphasizes that in his childhood, there was no waste allowed -- lobster shells were ground up and fed to the chickens; the aromatic vegetables used to stuff roasted chickens were extracted afterwards and served as appetizers.


    Bringing the Heat -- Mark Bowden

    Bowden hung around with the Philadelphia Eagles for the 1991 season, and did a very good job of illustrating the pressures and conflicts in the locker room of an NFL team.  There's more small-mindedness than you'd think.  Team wives were leery of coach Rich Kotite because of his dark complexion--they kept asking his wife privately if he was an Arab.  There's also a great section on why most NFL players' marriages are doomed from the start, which has a lot to do with the players' mothers.  Captivating.


    The Cook Book -- Nicholas Freeling

    Not very interesting.


    Ghosts -- Ed McBain

    I didn't like this book.  First, as far as I'm concerned, any mystery story that has a ghost in it is a cop-out.  Also, I refuse to believe that Steve Carella would cheat on his wife--I don't care if it was with a ghost.


    Saturday Night -- Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad

    Highly entertaining account of the first five seasons of SNL, and all the insanely weird stuff that was going on behind the scenes.  The author thinks that the first five years--the era of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players--was the real show, and all the rest is an inferior sequel, and I have to agree.


    The Radioactive Boy Scout -- Ken Silverstein

    Bizarre account of a high-school kid who made a working nuclear reactor in his backyard shed as a Boy Scout project.  It's a fascinating story, but the book is marred by two things: first, it is clearly a magazine article that was padded out to make it book length--there are whole chapters that are nothing but pointless filler.  Second, the author is not the sort of person who understands or sympathizes with the sort of kid who runs his own science experiments; he takes it for granted that all his readers will agree with him nuclear power is evil; and he quotes on several occasions from a book the kid owned, a 50s-era book on chemistry, mocking its you-can-do-it tone.  I personally think that's the best kind of book for kids interested in science -- I'm pretty sure I had a copy.  Seems to me this author was the kind of kid who liked to make fun of the smart kids, and he clearly delights in the part of the story where the kid got in trouble for irradiating his shed and couldn't go to college.  (He wound up joining the Navy instead.)  So the facts of the case were interesting, but my own sympathies were not at all in the direction the author tried to lead them, which made me dislike both him and his book.


    Dance Me Outside -- W.P. Kinsella

    The first of Kinsella's books of short stories set on the fictional Hobbema reservation in Alberta.  The stories manage to be both funny and sad without being depressing.


    Kidnapped -- Robert Louis Stevenson

    Fun adventure story set in the Scottish Highlands soon after the Jacobite Uprising.


    Dzur -- Steven Brust

    First book of his I've read that was downright dull.  The hero is faced with a problem; immediately sees the solution; and then spends the entire book sitting around thinking about it before going and doing exactly what he was going to do anyway.  The characters are shallowly drawn, the motivations are obscure, the actions are unrealistic.  It's never good when you read a book and think, "Wait, no one would ever do that."  Also, in a larger sense, I think this book is a failure because it could have addressed a bigger question but doesn't.  We've seen the hero previously in two distinct phases of his life: first as a small-time crook in a big organization, and then as a fugitive with a price on his head.  Now he's entering a third phase: as a powerful player, a major force to be reckoned with.  We knew what his motivations were before.  As a small-time crook, he wanted to maintain and extend his power and influence.  As a fugitive, he wanted to stay alive.  Those days are over.  What does he want now?  That's what the story should have been about, and it wasn't.


    Three Days to Never -- Tim Powers

    Weak story.  In Powers' other books, most of which are excellent, he gets you to suspend disbelief by going to a great deal of trouble to make, for instance, voodoo seem believable.  However, the McGuffin of this book deals with psychic powers, and apparently Tim Powers believes that psychic powers are real, so he doesn't see the need to make them seem believable, so they don't.  Also, there's no real protagonist; you don't wind up knowing a lot about, or liking, any of the characters.  Also there's a good deal of weak writing, things that show the author doesn't trust either himself or the audience.  For instance, there's a minor character who speaks in iambic pentameter.  Fine.  But the omniscient-narrator voice says things like "There was something odd about the way <character> was speaking.  Finally she put her finger on it: he was speaking in iambic pentameter."  That's a textbook example of show-me-don't-tell-me bad writing.  Plus it assumes the reader is too dense to notice it for himself.  Plus the plot is full of holes.  Waste of time.


    Love and Other Near-Death Experiences -- Mil Millington

    I got ten pages into this before throwing it away.  Ordinarily it takes me a while to build up dislike of a fictional character, but since by page six I already wanted to beat the hero of this book to death, it seemed prudent to stop reading, for the sake of my blood pressure.


    The Fourth Bear -- Jasper Fforde

    Kind of a cross between a whimsical police story and a send-up of conspiracy theorists.  Also there's a great shaggy-dog story in it.  I laughed out loud reading this, which doesn't happen often.  I loved it.


    Lost in Yonkers -- Neil Simon

    This was very depressing, all the more so because I expected it to be a comedy.


    Santiago -- Mike Resnick

    Kind of a futuristic Western.  Weak on plot, but worth reading for the larger-than-life characters.


    Hotel Bemelmans -- Ludwig Bemelmans

    Memoir of working as a waiter and cook at the Ritz-Carlton (which he disguises as the "Hotel Splendide.")  Pretty funny.  There's a good story of the Ritz's legendarily imperturbable maitre d', who was faced with a problem one day when he had only one open table and Mrs. Astor and the King of the Netherlands both arrived unannounced at the same time; he introduced them to each other and sat them at the same table.


    How to Travel Incognito -- Ludwig Bemelmans

    In the early fifties Bemelmans went on a long visit to France, where he made the acquaintance of an indigent nobleman who made a living by feeding off other people's snobbery; they decided to pretend that Bemelmans was a Bavarian prince and see how far they could get.  This book is a somewhat fictionalized account of what happened.  Very funny.


    The Talented Mr. Ripley -- Patricia Highsmith

    Very creepy. 


    The Game -- Robert Benson

    Awful book, dripping with self-conscious pseudo-lyricism about baseball.  Also, someone should have told the guy that people who read baseball books are picky about facts, so if he wants to constantly wax poetic about the glory of Sosa and McGwire chasing the home run record in '99, he should look it up first, since that actually happened in '98.  Also, I don't give a crap how cute your kids are, okay?  And neither does anyone else in the world who isn't related to you.


    Tales From the Drones Club -- P. G. Wodehouse

    Short stories about what all Bertie Wooster's friends do when he and Jeeves aren't around to advise them.  Most of them are very good.  When I read this I also read an interview with Wodehouse, where I was glad to see he happily re-read his own books.  I have to like a guy who, at age 92, can look back on his life and say. "You know, I don't think I've really had any bad times."


    O, How the Wheel Becomes It! -- Anthony Powell

    Meh.  Neither funny nor interesting.


    Friday Night Lights -- H. G. Bissinger

    Good look at the powerful hold high-school football has on small-town Texas.  This book just re-confirms my opinion that I have no desire to visit Texas for any reason ever.


    Her Majesty's Spymaster -- Stephen Budiansky

    Biography of Francis Walsingham, chief spy for Elizabeth I and the man who lobbied the hardest for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.


    The Manly Art -- Elliott J. Gorn

    History of bare-knuckle prize-fighting.  Not bad.


    Baseball Between the Numbers -- ed. Jonah Keri

    A collection of terrific essays by the people who write for the Pro Baseball Prospectus.


    The Making of a Chef -- Michael Ruhlman

    I wanted to like this book but couldn't because I conceived a strong dislike of the writer.  The book purports to be an account of being a student at the Culinary Institute of America, but adding it up, I believe that out of an eighty-one-week curriculum, the author only attended about twelve weeks.  He skipped all the classroom work and only took the kitchen practicum, which is just lazy.  He also gets all bent out of shape when he calls in to skip an exam because of a blizzard, and the chef (quite correctly) tells him that in the restaurant business there is no make-up work -- the food is either on the table when the customer wants it, or it isn't.  If it isn't, it doesn't make any difference why; the customer will not come back.  The author considers this to be pointless snobbery, and is angry because he thinks the chef is calling him a wimp.  (When what is actually happening is that the author really is being a wimp, and the chef is just politely pointing it out.)  I also found it off-putting that at the end of the book he praises himself to the skies, and carries on about "Now I am a real chef," when all he really did, essentially, was learn how to cut an onion the right way. 


    Play Money -- Julian Dibbell

    Another book where the concept was much better than the execution.  The author decided to spend a year exploring the strange virtual economy of on-line multi-player video games, where people get so absorbed in the game they'll pay other players real money for things that only exist inside the game.  However, the book shows clear signs of being under deadline pressure--there's obvious filler like pointless name-dropping digressions on Max Weber, and about the author's divorce (which he assures us has nothing to do with him spending all his time playing computer games.)  He obviously couldn't get the book done in time, because he has to fill out the last section with verbatim excerpts from his blog.  It was embarrassing.  Plus, again, I'm sure your grandmother was a wonderful person and all, but you know what, I don't care, and neither does anyone else in the world except people who knew her personally.


    Blood is a Beggar -- Thomas Kyd (pen name)

    This was actually written by Alfred Harbage, Dad's Shakespeare professor from Harvard.  It's a fish-out-of-water story, with an uneducated but street-wise ex-boxer turned policeman investigating a murder at an Ivy league college in the forties.  It was competent but not particularly interesting.


    The Author's Farce -- Henry Fielding

    Nothing really stood out from this for me.  His novels are better.


    Consider the Lobster -- David Foster Wallace

    Pretty good book of essays.  The title piece is tedious--it's an extended piece of hand-wringing over whether it's morally okay to eat lobster--but the book also contains two really, really good long pieces: a strangely-footnoted but excellent essay on talk radio, and a jaw-dropping essay on the porn industry.  (Did you know that porn movies gross twice as much money every year as regular movies?  I didn't.)


    In the Midst of Life -- Ambrose Bierce

    Ghost stories and psychological-thriller Civil War stories.


    The Lost World -- Arthur Conan Doyle

    First of the Professor Challenger books.  It was all right.  Challenger is not as believable or as endearing an eccentric as Holmes, though.


    The Great Interlude -- Francis Russell

    Essays on notable Boston characters from between the wars; good stuff on Curley and Honey Fitz.  Also a good picture of the evolution of Dorchester.


    Something Wicked This Way Comes -- Ray Bradbury

    I find Bradbury is hit-or-miss; this one's a miss.  I didn't finish it.


    The Nautical Chart -- Arturo Perez-Reverte

    It was all right.  I had the nagging feeling the translation wasn't telling me everything.


    Blue Screen -- Robert B. Parker

    I can't even pretend to take seriously a mystery whose premise is that the National League puts an expansion team in Hartford.  Like Steinbrenner would ever allow that!  Plus no one would ever go.


    Fragile Things -- Neil Gaiman

    I like Gaiman less than I used to.  As he ages he becomes more and more infected with the modern British writer's disease: there are no good people, everyone is secretly a monster.  Which makes his stories less interesting, since if you know beforehand that all the stories will be confound-your-expectations, the-good-guy-is-really-the-bad-guy stuff, they become very predictable.


    Scars -- W.P. Kinsella

    More stories of the Hobbema reservation.


    The Knave of Boston -- Francis Russell

    More character studies of Bostonians.  Some of the same pieces that were in the last one, plus stuff on Calvin Coolidge.  I liked the story of how, when Coolidge was sworn in as President (in a small town in Vermont, where he happened to be when Harding died) he walked over to the convenience store afterwards with a reporter and a local friend, and they had three five-cent glasses of root beer, and when they were done Coolidge took a nickel out of his pocket and put it on the counter and left.


    In the South Seas -- Robert Louis Stevenson

    This book actually makes me think less of Stevenson as a person.  It's his journal of two sea voyages he made to Polynesian islands.  While I agree with some of his sentiments -- his indignation at the poor treatment of the natives by the French, for instance -- in general his attitude really annoyed me, since he was a dreadful snob, thinking nothing of landing on an island where he'd never been before and demanding to see the king.  He and his party stayed on one island more than a month, in their own little compound where no islanders were allowed but the king, and got the king to declare the town's only well off-limits to everyone but them -- and Stevenson clearly thought the islanders churlish and rude because they resented having to walk around his compound and travel a long way to the next nearest well.  He was terribly condescending, too, calling them "my black boys" and constantly referring to them as savages and children.  But what really got to me was his description of a night he spent on an island where there was a native feast going on, and their resentment of the white invaders was such that Stevenson and his party (and a local barkeeper) were really in danger -- but they deliberately did not go spend the night on their yacht, where they would have been unassailable, instead preferring to get out their guns and hole up in the bar waiting to be attacked.  The open blood-thirstiness -- they were positively drooling at the chance to use their guns and kill some natives -- is positively nauseating.  No attack developed, clearly a disappointment to them.  He also gets a lot of mileage out of poking fun at the islanders' pidgin English; it apparently didn't occur to him that maybe they spoke his language poorly, but he didn't speak theirs at all -- so who's the stupid one here?


    The Thin Man -- Dashiell Hammett

    This has the record, I think, for "book I've owned the longest without reading it," since I believe I bought it in an Annie's Book Swap in 1983.  It wasn't worth the wait; the movie was much better.


    Wintersmith -- Terry Pratchett

    Entertaining.  The parts about Miss Treason were my favorite.


    The City Game -- Pete Axthelm

    A book about the Knicks of 1970-71 and the street basketball culture of the time.  Pretty good, though I would have dropped the Knicks stuff and just concentrated on playground basketball--I'd rather read about the Goat and Helicopter than about Clyde Frazier and Bill Bradley any day.


    The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier -- Jakob Walter

    This is a journal of a soldier who participated in Napoleon's march to Moscow in 1812.  It's the only record of that campaign kept by a private soldier.  Really interesting stuff, mainly about how he stayed alive on dough balls made from stolen flour and muddy water, and when even that failed, on horse blood.  What's interesting is that the march to Moscow was just as bad as the march back.


    It's Superman -- Tom De Haven

    I didn't expect to like this, but I did.  I picked it up in the book store, figuring it would stink, but it kept me reading, and eventually I bought it.  I guess Superman is sort of like Robin Hood now -- part of our cultural furniture.  The author does a good job with a difficult task -- telling a story everybody already knows as if it were new.


    Hundred Dollar Baby -- Robert B. Parker

    I remarked to a friend of mine that Parker's last 20 Spenser books have all started the same way: hot chick walks into Spenser's office to hire him; she invariably turns out to be a murderer, and insane, and to have hired Spenser for no reason anyone can explain.  My friend answered philosophically, "Well, Raymond Chandler used a formula, too."  I said, "Chandler only wrote eight books, not fifty!" 


    I and my Chimney -- Herman Melville

    Short appreciation of his (still-standing) house and its startlingly large chimney.  I get the feeling from this that Melville and his wife did not get along at all.


    Archer's Goon -- Diana Wynne Jones

    Silly crime-fantasy story.  Nothing really striking about it except that it had not one but two plot twists I didn't see coming, which is pretty rare.


    Following the Equator -- Mark Twain

    Twain's journal of his trip around the world late in life.  Includes his thoughts on Cecil Rhodes, concluding with, "I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake."


    Chances Are... -- Michael Kaplan & Ellen Kaplan

    Informative and readable book on probability theory.  Really good.


    Cover His Face -- Thomas Kyd (II)

    Another book by Harbage.  This one involves a nebbishy English teacher travelling to England in search of a letter written by Samuel Johnson.  It would have been better had there been a lot more stuff about Johnson in it.  As it was, I know it's part of the formula for this sort of book for the protagonist to do ridiculously inane things, and then make them worse for fear of involving the cops, but this goes beyond all bounds.  The cops would have been doing everyone a favor if they'd just shot the protagonist halfway through.


    Yeats is Dead! -- Joseph O'Connor (ed.)

    Collaborative effort by a dozen or fifteen Irish authors, who each wrote a chapter and then passed the book on to the next.  It has its moments, but it goes on too long.


    In Dubious Battle -- John Steinbeck

    Powerful and depressing novel about labor organization in the thirties.


    Samuel Johnson as Book Reviewer -- Brian Hanley

    Kind of dry, but the excerpts from Johnson's book reviews are good (those have not been collected anywhere, so far as I know.)


    Dearth, Public Policy, and Social Disturbance in England, 1550-1800
                               -- R.B. Outhwaite

    Pamphlet sponsored by the British Department of Agriculture to examine specific instances of public unrest in England in relation to the closest periods of dearth.  Dry but informative.
     

    The Broadcasters -- Red Barber

    This book annoyed me because it was mainly Barber doing character-assassination jobs on co-workers he didn't like and then excusing himself for it by crying crocodile tears over how much he prayed for them.  Jerk.


    Feeding the Monster -- Seth Mnookin

    A lot of good behind-the-scenes dirt from the first four years of the new Sox ownership.  I hear that Curt Schilling was seen reading it "with great attention."


    Ripley Under Ground -- Patricia Highsmith

    Ripley as a wealthy married dilettante is less interesting than Ripley as a penniless psychopath with nothing to lose. 


    The Fool on the Hill -- Matt Ruff

    Funny novel set at Cornell in the late eighties.  My favorite line: "Of course a few scientists have to go mad every now and then, just to keep up the tradition."


    The Blind Side -- Michael Lewis

    I'm pretty sure I didn't take away from this book what the author intended.  What I saw was two people with more money than is good for them who cynically manipulated the NCAA's joke rules to get their adopted son into their alma mater.  I particularly didn't like it when the parents were angry because their adopted son's high-school football coach didn't agree that the sole function of the team was to give their son as much playing time as possible so he could get into the NFL.  I think Lewis made a mistake writing this book because the parents in it are close friends of his, so he doesn't see what they look like to a disinterested observer.


    King Leopold's Soliloquy -- Mark Twain

    Savage hatchet job on the Congo and its brutal king, and the Europeans who put him in power, and the American press who went along for the ride.


    Death Comes for the Archbishop -- Willa Cather

    Nice evocation of time and place -- the 1850s and New Mexico.  More of a character study than a story.


    Tales of Pirates and Buccaneers -- Howard Pyle

    I was very happy to find this book until I opened it up and found that it was an abridged version for younger readers...which is strange because Pyle wrote for teenagers anyway.  I guess they think kids are dumber now than in the 1880s.  In any case it was dumbed down and dull as dishwater.


    Created in Darkness By Troubled Americans -- Dave Eggers (ed.)

    Collection of pieces from McSweeney's humor magazine.  Uneven quality, but a lot of them are good.  I particularly liked the one where Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn did a DVD commentary for the Lord of the Rings movie.


    The Last Commissioner -- Fay Vincent

    Embarrassing valentine to himself.  It's also pathetic to see him fawning over people who treated him like dirt, like Joe DiMaggio, and making excuses for them because they were famous. 


    Born Indian -- W.P. Kinsella

    Back to the Hobbema reservation again.  Still good.


    The Unknown Shore -- Patrick O'Brian

    Some of O'Brien's juvenilia, a novel about a ship wrecked off Cape Horn in the 1740s.  Gripping.


    Love Letters From Spike: A Telegrapher's Lament -- Bill Holly

    An edited edition of letters written home by a telegrapher in Portsmouth, NH in 1914.  Interesting period piece, though I thought the telegrapher was a bit of a whiner and complained too much in his letters.


    A Soul in a Bottle -- Tim Powers

    So-so ghost story.


    Personal Memoirs -- Ulysses S. Grant

    These were really good.  Dad was in sympathy with Grant because he never wanted to join the Army in the first place and spent all his time at West Point in the library reading novels.  Of course by far the greater part of the book deals with the Civil War--he doesn't even discuss the Presidency.  What really amazed me was that after he was in command of the Army of the Tennessee, he was in enemy territory nearly all the time, with savage fighting going on and tens of thousands of men killed or wounded--and he would still ride around alone and unarmed.  He even occasionally stopped for lunch at the houses of Confederate partisans -- people who knew who he was -- and would sit on the porch talking for a while afterwards before riding on.  That was a different time.  He notes particularly that by the end of it all there was no real animosity among the men who had actually done the fighting; all the people preaching divisiveness and hatred had stayed home.  He blames the failure of Reconstruction on Andrew Johnson, and I think he's right.