BOOKS THREAD

Jerry West is a good man and a better person.

 

Stephen King and his family get the New York Times magazine treatment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/magazine/stephen-kings-family-business.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hpw

 

I finally finished "The Last Boy" about Mickey Mantle. Man that was depressing. It's getting donated to the library because I don't want to revisit some of those details.

 

I've been reading The Last Boy on and off for the past few weeks, which is unusual for me as once I start a book I feel compelled to finish it. Got about 50 pages left. Appendix 1 is nine pages in length and lists all the people Jane Leavy interviewed. Amazing. Joyland was one of the books I read during this period and found it a quick, enjoyable read. Also have been picking up Ron Kaplan's 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read Before They Die. I am surprised at some of the books Kaplan selected that were new to me and I'm a baseball book junkie. He chose to leave out some of the books that always appear on bests lists.

 

I recently started reading books on Kindle, and, being cheap, I sifted through the offerings of "Free Kindle Books."

Most of these books are out of copyright and into public domain, so you get a lot of century-old stuff.

Two I have enjoyed a lot are "Base-Ball: How To Become A Player," by John Montgomery Ward, 1888, and "Pitching in a Pinch, or Baseball from the Inside," by Christy Mathewson, 1912.

Both Ward and Mathewson were New York Giant stars famous for being highly literate college grads (Ward was a lawyer who helped found an early player's union) so it's probably pretty likely they did both write the books mostly by themselves.

Ward's book is great because it gives you a look at baseball as we know it literally in the delivery room. Overhand pitching had only been really legalized in the past couple of seasons, the pitching distance was not yet standardized (that wouldn't happen until 1893), and gloves were only starting to come into widespread use.

But still MOST of the strategies and playing techniques are recognizable to today's game. Ward peppers his how-to sections with game anecdotes which give you an idea of what playing in the 1880s had to be like.

Mathewson's book is pretty similar: a lot of nuts-and-bolts strategy mixed in with a lot of tale-spinning about the game in the first decades of the century. Some of it is actually pretty revealing --although no "Ball Four" beaver-shooting exposes -- but Matty does convey a lot of what it actually must have been like playing in the Polo Grounds a century ago.

I believe both books were highly recommended by Bill James in his Historical Baseball Abstracts, but I had never had the chance to read them.

In fact, as I recall, James particularly cited a chapter in which Mathewson goes into a discussion of some length about how pitchers of his day were not expected to "pitch their heads off" on every pitch and instead should save their best stuff for the "pinches," and cited young pitchers (including himself) who had disastrous results from trying to go all out on every pitch.

And while we think of the old time pitchers as invulnerable iron men who pitched inning after inning without breaking a sweat, Mathewson stated he only threw his famous "fadeaway" (which actually sounds more like a modern slider) 10-12 times a game because his arm couldn't take throwing it any more often. So in fact even some of the Giants of legend may have been just as tender-armed as the young whippersnappers of today.

Anyway they are pretty interesting books. Anybody who likes the baseball oral-history books like "The Glory of their Times" should probably enjoy either of them.

 

Ha!

I loved the book. I didn't know what to expect, but was pleasantly surprised. He has to write a second book, right? So much more has happened.

Now, I'm back into the Reacher series. About two-thirds through Running Blind.

 

Klosterman's new book is meh.

 

I'm a history buff and just finished reading "A Higher Call," by Adam Makos. It's a great, well-paced book about a true-life World War II mid-air encounter between the critically wounded crew of a badly damaged American B-17 bomber and a German 109 pilot, Franz Stigler.

Stigler, upon encountering the B-17 flying alone in enemy airspace, was a German Air Force ace who easily could have blown the Americans out of the sky. After seeing the badly damaged, open-to-the-air plane, its already-dead tail gunner, and the rest of the crew hanging on for dear life and trying to care for each other while their pilot, Charles L. Brown, worked to keep their defenseless, lame-duck plane aloft in enemy territory, however, Stigler made his own unauthorized decision not to shoot the Americans down.

Instead, he flew in formation on the B-17's wing and escorted it safely past a coastline full of German flak gunners in a tense encounter that was considered classified information in the U.S. for years afterward. It was an act that also could have meant death by firing squad for Stigler if he was ever connected to the incident.

The book tells the stories of both pilots over the years, puts the reader right in the middle of their transcendent Dec. 20, 1943 encounter, and follows them right through to their eventual in-person meeting with each other in the U.S. nearly 47 years later, despite the fact that they had never spoken, didn't know each other's names, and had no current information on each other's whereabouts.

I highly recommend this book if you're interested in this kind of thing. It's compelling material, and it was easy to read. I was hard-pressed to put the book (or rather, my Kindle) down once I got started, and I polished it off in two days.

 

Interesting tale, WT.

I found a short recap on Wiki: http://bit.ly/sHCE9H.


And not to steal the thunder from the book, but CNN had a really nice version of this story earlier this year:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/09/living/higher-call-military-chivalry

 

A Higher Call is a great read. Good recommendation.

 

I just ordered a copy of this because of your descriptions, gang. Sounds like an amazing story.

Thank you!

 

Read the following over the past weekend away:

1) The Paperboy by Pete Dexter -- his one book which I hadn't read. Really enjoyed it and I love the spareness of his writing.

2) The Cut by George Pelecanos -- I've only read a few of his earlier books. I liked this one, but it seemed a little breezier than his usual fare. He introduces a new protagonist and it read like a pilot for a show that I liked, but for which I'm not yet committed for the season pass.

3) Anonymous Sources by Mary Louise Kelly -- this was an enjoyable and easy read. She's a good writer but the spy novel isn't my normal genre.