BOOKS THREAD

The City Game by Matthew Goodman (2019). Stellar tale of the CCNY basketball point-shaving scandal of the early 1950s. Gritty, with lots of cool insight into larger-than-life NYC pols like Mayor William O'Dwyer (who resigned during the investigation) and Manhattan D.A. Frank Hogan (who replaced Thomas Dewey).

 

Not to be confused with "The City Game," by Pete Axthelm, which describes the Knicks' 1969-70 season intertwined with basketball life on the NYC playground level.

 

"Deer Man," by Geoffroy Delorme.

A young man turns his back on society and lives in the forest - for seven years. He forges relationships with deer and learns to live like them.

The first part of The Guardian's review:
"There’s a dreamy moment halfway through Geoffroy Delorme’s brief, sensuous book in which one of the young deer he gets to know curls up beside him, its head resting on his leg. The image is both touchingly familiar and surreal. A couple of walkers nod in greeting as they pass, as if it’s customary for a wild deer to snooze in the lap of a human. No doubt, Delorme notes, they mistake the deer for a dog."

Heartily recommend.

 

The translation of the Odyssey by Emily Wilson that came out in 2017 is outstanding. I got way more from reading her introduction and translation than I did from reading the book in college.

 

My wife looked at my Libby app and saw that the last five audiobooks I had listened to at work were about David Koresh, Rudy Guiliani, cults, cults and James Garfield’sassassin…who was in a cult.

I was asked, “Are you okay?”

 

Reading the publication of the original, unedited version of “On the Road,” with the original names, scenes that didn’t make it into the book, etc. I used to like to say that anyone over the age of 35 still into Kerouac needs help, but I’m really digging this experience. It’s one long, unending paragraph, which has its challenges, but you get past that pretty quick.

 

"Haven't They Suffered Enough?" is the biography of Beano Cook. It was written by his long-time personal assistant John Lukacs and chronicles his start as an SID all the way to his career at ESPN. Some great stories in there about his time as PR man for the Dolphins and his impact on ABC's televising of college football when he worked there in the 1960s and 70s.

 

The Washington Post’s book reviewer gives a 30,000-foot overview of the books about Trump during the time of Trump. Often they were rash and reactionary, but as he sifts through them he finds a set of books that explained how we ended up here and the important things to take from it all.

 

This was interesting, well-researched and well-written, but damn, it left me in a funk. I knew a bit of what happened at the Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont race track, but knowing what led up to the show and how easily it could have been prevented just made me sad. The entire production was thrown together at a facility totally unsuitable for the number of people that organizers had predicted would show up, much less for the 300,000 that actually did show up.

The Hells Angels, obviously, come off looking pretty bad, but the Stones - especially Mick Jagger - aren't really painted in a shining light either.

I'm glad I read this, but whatever I pull out of TBR pile has to be lighter fare.

Joe Bob says check it out.

 

Great book. You Can't Always Get What You Want, written by Sam Cutler, who was their tour manager, is a pretty good read on Altamont too as he was the guy who was left to clean up the mess.

 

btw, Daniel Mendelsohn is coming out with his own translation, I think next year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Mendelsohn

Long admired his essays about antiquity, mainly in The New York Review of Books.