Category: Book Review

Hub Fans Bid the Kid Adieu: On Ted Williams (2010 [1960]) by John Updike.

Good Reads Meta-data is 64 pages, rated 4.46 by 329 litizens.  

DNA: Baseball.

Genre: Belle lettre.

Verdict: One of a kind, both subject and author.

Tagline:  It’s gone and so is he.

28 September 1960 the Green Monster hosted an historic occasion, one of many over the years.  As totemic as it was, this essay, appearing in the New Yorker afterward etched it into the stone of memory.  It has been reprinted with supplementary material in a small book. 

Oh, the occasion?  The last home game for that rarity, Ted Williams. 

In the eighth inning of a meaningless game that became meaningful, Ted Williams (1918-2002), came the plate for what would obviously be the last time at Fenway Park.  At 42-years old he was baseball elderly.  By that day the record books were full of his extraordinary accomplishments with the bat. All the more remarkable considering that he missed parts of five seasons in his prime to war service where he flew combat missions in the Pacific and Korea. The only thing he could not do with a baseball bat was carry the Boston Red Sox to championships. 

There is no doubt the Red Sox Nation depended on him and they, like many drug addicts, hated him for that dependence, and he reciprocated.  Long before Steve Carlton made an art form of refusing to speak to journalists, Ted let his bat do the talking. He would not do interviews. Period.  It was his reaction to some early print criticism and once he set out to do it, he stuck to it. Stubborn does not begin to describe the man.  

There was a similar pique with the bleachers whose denizens had occasionally booed him when he played for himself and not the team, and he did do that.  Thereafter, he never acknowledged the fans. Never. He did not look into the stands. He was alone in the crowd, long before David Riesman coined that phrase.  

The baseball convention, for the benighted, is that when the crowd cheers a player, he tips his cap to the crowd.  Williams’s accomplishments often brought cheers but no cheers ever brought a tip of his cap in more than two decades.

Not even on that day of days in late September 1960.  

When he came to bat in the eighth inning, the members of the crowd rose to their thousands of feet to cheer this wayward idol, but he steadfastly looked at his shoe-tops and took his place.  In a similar valedictory at bat before taking position, Babe Ruth took off his cap and did a 360 turn to take in all the crowd.  Ditto many others from the pantheon. Not Ted. He took his stance and waited as though he was alone, just him and the pitcher in that forever war across the no man’s land between batter’s box and pitcher’s mound. 

The young fast baller on the mound, one Jack Fisher by name, a stripling at 21, reasoned that the old man would be tired late in the game and distracted by the occasion and the noisy crowd, so he decided to get to work with his tool of choice.  He drilled a fastball and Williams swung and missed, clearly off in his timing.  Puffed up with satisfaction, Fisher supposed what worked once would work twice, and served up another fastball high and in.  

The rest is history.  A William of old seemed to emerge and with that effortless and economical swing planted a home run into right centre. The crowd went crazy.  Video of the event can be found on You Tube. 

Now some players would have savoured this victory lap in a slow trot, lapping up the adoration of the crowd. But Williams never did that and he did not do it now.  As always he ran it out. Head down.  

Another player would have looked up at the crowd and acknowledged the ovation after scoring, or upon entering the dugout.  Not Williams he ran into the dugout never to reappear.  Another player would have emerged from the dugout to tip his cap, and, indeed, to his credit Fisher paused to allow this to happen, but there was no hat tipping now or ever. ‘Boo me once and I will never ever forget or forgive,’ was the subtitle of this final aria. 

The next day I read the line score for this game in the Hastings Tribune.  It seemed fitting that ‘Teddy Baseball,’ as he was sometimes called, and not always affectionately, should leave on own his terms.  He did play for himself but not always. In his playing days he drove the Jimmy Fund in Boston for children with cancer and his Cooperstown induction speech advocated the inclusion of the greats from the Negro leagues into that temple.    

A final note, in retirement this Achilles did do interviews and once an interviewer said to him, ‘I saw you hit a home run on a certain date years ago.’  Ted, who was a close student of his game, replied that in that at bat the pitcher was Bob Shantz, the count was 2-2, and he threw a fastball low and away. ‘I pulled it down the right field line into the third or fourth row.’  We idolators were convinced that he could recite the particulars of each of his 521 home runs, none chemically assisted as so many have been since his days.

See also Howard F Mosher, Waiting for Teddy Wiilliams (2005) a novel.  

My recent baseball reading led me to revisit this diamond on the diamond. Updike was never better. To this reader his essays have more depth than his fiction, or that small part of it which I have read.   Some have said that this essay is the best thing ever written about baseball, others say it is the best single thing Updike ever wrote.  Both could be right. 

The Crime on Cote des Neiges (1951) by David Montrose

Good Reads meta-data is 233 pages, rated 3.23 by 57 litizens. 

DNA: O’ Canada.

Genre: krimi; Species: Noir.

Verdict: Round and round we go, and finally land.

Tagline: Montréal sans Quebecois.  

Tough guy drinks himself silly, punches out old men, slaps women around and thinks that makes him Mike ‘The Man’ Hammer, or something.  He goes hither and yon in English Montreal, never crossing Boulevard Saint Laurent. Whew!  Everyone lies, everyone is crooked, everyone gets killed.  Well, almost.  Unravelling the plot is ingenious, but uninteresting.  

It pulls a trick I had never encountered before with the doppelgänger, but then did not make much use of it. Tant pis.  

It is all too obviously inspired by reading Mickey Spillane at the time.  But it lacks Spillane’s snappy dialogue. There are two or three  other titles by the author from the same period. But this one is probably enough for me.  

‘Neiges’ is snow for those that must know.  In Quebec the snow slope would that facing north. 

Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin (2007) by Nicholas Ostler

Good Reads meta-data is 382 pages, rate 3.77 by 455 litizens. 

Genre: History (not biography)

DNA: Linguistics.

Verdict: Granite.

Tagline:  Vivos lingua mortua.   

A zombie language, Latin has had a long half-life.  As late as 1840 it was the legal language of the political assembly in Hungary.  It remains the common language among scientists well into the Twenty-first Century and that fact lives on in the Latin names for plants and animals, including our bones.  Law schools test graduates on the use of Latin tags. In these ways, and a few others, it remains a universal language.  Sort of.  

In one of Ben Pastor’s World War II novels The Road to Ithaca (2017) an English prisoner want to tell a German officer something dark and deep but it is impossible to do so without being overheard, and so he tries Latin…and it works.  

Presidents of the European Union have, at times, communicated in Latin so as not to favour any one language of the Union.  To wit, a recurrent Finn in that office issued weekly summaries in Latin, thereby employing Latin scholars who had no students.  Perhaps somewhat in jest, two, at least, of the Harry Potter’s tales have appeared in Latin translations.  

In the Sixteenth Century Renaissance the tiny educated minority of men in Europe had a common language, Latin.  Erasmus from Holland, Thomas More from England, Niccolò Machiavelli from Italy could have all talked or corresponded in Latin. 

Or could they? Did they have regional accents that limited comprehension?  Did they all use the same syntax? German, Danish, and Dutch all evolved from the same Frisian core and geographically they are much closer to each other than the far flung Latin speakers, but they are not one language.  Did Dutch Latin, English Latin, and Italian Latin have similar differences? Then there was the Latin exported to the elites on the edges of the Empire in the Levant, or the North Africa of St Augustine, or Scots borderlands, or the Black Sea shore. I found no answer in these pages.  

Thomas Hobbes translated his book the Leviathan into Latin to insure its immortality, he said.  He had learned this from his employer Francis Bacon who wrote in English but had all of books translated into Latin to reach world’s learned readers.    

Much of the history of Latin is the history of Rome from Republic to Empire to its long decay.  Though curiously enough Latin did not always rule the roost in Rome itself where one important sign of distinction was to speak Greek.  Even in Cicero’s day as the Republic became the Empire, Greek was still the preferred language of the Senators who killed Caesar. In his exile Cicero literary efforts were animated partly by the goal of making Latin into a contemporary language.  Huh?

In the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium Greek was the language of culture and power, but even so, that European toe of contemporary Turkey was and is called Rumi for Roman.  

Emerging in Latium, Latin was the language of farmers with a rich vocabulary, mainly descriptive, for that bucolic life.  Poets long found it good for a pastoral celebrations of sights and sounds. But it lacked the abstract and conceptual registers of Greek, and these Cicero and others later set out to rectify.  The pendulum swung too far and for hundreds of years Latin became ever more elaborate, ornate, and rhetorical until the foliage overgrew the meaning.  

When Latin became the language of the Christian faith an effort was made to reverse engineer it, to simplify it so that believers could understand the services, the spoken texts, and the sacraments.  Ironic then that today Latin remains the language of Catholicism but the few if any of its followers understand the language now.  Protestantism spoke the vernacular when it split from Rome.  

The spread of Christianity travelled down Roman roads and was communicated in the language that the Romans had sown far and wide, but farther and wider in the West than in the East where Greek hung on as the language of the literate and the earliest Bibles.

Though Roman roads carried Latin, the Roman Republic and Empire made no effort to sow its language.  Where Rome ruled administration, law, army, and tax was conducted in Latin but there was no requirement of any local person to learn it.  The author makes a distinction, which eludes me, between Romance as the everyday languages of the Empire and Latin.  Best I can fathom is that Romance was like Chinenglish, Singleish, or Franglais, a miscegenation of Latin and the local vernacular, and so it varied for one place to another, spawning the family of Romance Languages.  

Latin was never the universal language of humanity, despite many claims to that effect, because much of the world never learned it in Asia and sub-Sahara Africa. By the way, it was exported into Latin America, and had takers up north, too.   

It was also gendered in that during the long history recounted in this book, few women learned it and fewer still used it.  It was a male prerogative, though the author pays due respect to some few exceptions.  Ergo, the Liberal Arts were the arts a free man was to learn to value, use, and keep that freedom.  Down my long bow I see a connection between the decline of liberal arts and the rise of general ignorance that now sweeps across many lands.  

Why is it called Latin and not Roman? It is a good question that the author raises but cannot answer.   

From Cicero on Latin modelled itself on Greek, and in the forensic investigation of Greek gave birth to the concept of grammar.  Centuries later this notion of an underlying structure would emerge in all those books or rules and usage. 

***

The book is replete with interesting tidbits of information but the prose is hard and far too technical for this reader, contrary to the newspaper blurbs quoted on the back cover.  I also detected the shadowy presence of Noam Chomsky, which I always find distasteful.  

If there is the appetite, this author has several other books on language.  

One Shot at Forever (2012) by Chris Ballard

Good Reads meta-data  is 255 pages, rated 4.28 by 2,867 litizens.

Genre: Non-fiction; Species: Condescension.  

DNA:  [Jaded.]

Verdict:  Clichéd.

Tagline: Meh. 

A small rural high school baseball team in Illinois succeeded.  This is so astonishing that Author investigates.  In 1971 this was a team that could sometimes field only nine players, with a coach who knew nothing about coaching, from a school with an enrolment of 250, and yet it defeated teams with professional coaches from schools enrolling 9000. Out of 370 high school teams in the state  this one emerged. What was the secret sauce to their success?  

What follows is an account of two high school baseball seasons.  It seemed to be written as an aspirant film script with villains, and climaxes.  Even so the odour of disdain arises from page one, and lingers.  The characters are too often painted as black or white to create tension.  The descriptions of the games are perfunctory as though watching animals in a zoo across a moat, through a steel fence, or behind unbreakable glass.  

Yes, it is true that I did not warm to the book.  While the story is great, the telling does not match that.  

In addition to the undertone of snobbery from the big city boy author about small town life, it ignores much of the full story.  Most, if not all, of these boys played American Legion baseball in the summer after the high school season ended, where they had much more practice and coaching, and this is mentioned, well, I can only remember one time but let’s say twice.  Would this experience have not affected their skills and attitudes?  One way or another, the answer is yes.  

While the context of the Vietnam War is underlined how it applied to these boys on graduation is omitted.

It is no surprise that it gets a higher Good Reads score than a far better book, i.e., Bottom of the 33rd.  That fact simply confirms my prejudice about those who contribute to that source. 

To judge from the blurb, the book had noble ambitions but…  [See above.]  These include the impact of high school sports on the players and on their families and communities.  The roles of teachers as catalysts to stimulate the formative years.  The glue of teamwork. That the purpose of the strong is not to bully the weak but to help them, making both of them stronger.  It is a good list but it does not grow from the text.  

Bottom of the 33rd (2011) by Dan Barry

Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages, rated 4.08 by 2,415 Scrooges.  

Genre: Nonfiction; Species: ‘Informed Imagination.’ 

DNA: Horsehide, Grass, and Ash.  

Verdict: Wonderful!

Tagline: Hope. Frustration. Redemption. Resignation. Life.

Things went wrong from the start.  In the dilapidated stadium, the lights would not go on for the 7:30 pm start time.  An ominous portent. When a technician summoned on that cold night of April 18, 1981, Saturday before Easter Sunday, found a way to turn them on, the payback was that they remained on … until 4 a.m the next day. The site of this marathon  was McCoy Stadium of P’tucket in the Ocean State of Rhode Island.  

Stop right there!  Any 108-stitch baseball fan knows that date and place.  If not, get thee to Cooperstown, right now! 

In this early season AAA International League game the Pawtucket Red Sox hosting the Rochester Red Wings (Orioles) entered the Twilight Zone with no way out.  Jean-Paul Sartre said, in Hui Clos, ‘Hell is other people’ (Amen!), in this case it was another inning.  And another. Thirty-three times, while each team waited for Godot to deliver the game winning hit and to set them free.  

‘Baseball is life and life is baseball’ sums up this story of the players, umpires, fans, families, passers-by, owners, managers caters, groundskeepers, who populated this bittersweet moment, ah, hours, and hours, as the temperature fell.  If life has meaning, debatable I know, then so does baseball, and, perhaps, vice-versa, if baseball has meaning, then so does life.  

What brought these people together in this performance of the theatre of the absurd? How did they react to this Sisyphean labour? Where did they go after this purgatory?  Did those endless innings scar them for life? Some answers to these questions are gleaned in micro-biographies on more than a dozen of them.

Taking this extraordinary game, the longest ever played in ‘organised baseball’ (i.e., the North American Major Leagues and their minor league affiliates), as a case study, the author dissects the allure of the diamond for players (who hope to rise to the top in MLB, or reluctantly realise that they are sinking not rising), spectators, families, batboys, teenage girls in the concession stands, and lonely old men who prefer to sit apart in the stands. 

The result is a tour de force.  

In the course of the game, it is clear that some players are destined for the Elysian fields of the Bigs, while others need a day job – soon. The hopes of the latter have grown old and brittle in an Odyssean  journey around the minor leagues; among them is an infielder for whom the Red Wings is the fourteenth team he has played for in just over a decade of wandering through the minor leagues, earning just enough…to need a working wife. At twenty-eight or even twenty-five, most of these men are baseball-old, in a game where youth is almost everything.  

At times it is the team manager’s job to tell one of them that this is it. He will never ascend. Yes, he can hit.  Yes, his glove is good.  All true here in AAA. But the rosters are full of just such athletes, and he does not stand out among them.  Enjoy the moment, because – look up – the curtin is falling ever faster with each birthday.   

Pedant’s Corner. It seems the curfew rule was accidentally omitted from the AAA Umpire’s Handbook that year, and so the umpires had no express authority to end the game.    

* * *

The author did impressive research with even more impressive empathy, developing biographies of dozens the participants it seemed, giving many of them their own voice from the inside out to reflect on baseball, that game, and their lives.  It is touching, amusing, and poignant all at once.  

Needless to say, but say it I will, the pygmies have reviewed it on Good Reads.  (Apologies to pygmies for the comparison. If someone can suggest another metaphor for the small-minded gnomes who just have to criticise for its own sake to feel, briefly, smart, please let me know below.) 

P.S. One golden summer while I was in college, I was the official scorer at Legion games for the local paper, and I read much of this story from the standpoint of that job. How in the world would a scorer fit at 33-inning game into a scorebook. The ones I used allowed 3 extra innings.  Moreover, how would a publishing deadline be met. Ah, yes, the author not only explains how this scorer dealt with these problems but shows us the result. Ingenious, if nearly inscrutable.  

The Revolt of Gunner Asch (1954) by Hans Helmut Kirst 

Good Reads meta-data is 240 pages, rated 3.90 by 330 litizens.

Genre: Fiction.

DNA: Deutsch; Species: Nazi.

Verdict: Meticulous and boring. 

Tagline: One man’s war against the Wehrmacht from within.  

In late 1938 or early 1939 in a small garrison town in northern Germany Herbert Asch is a reluctant draftee who observes the absurdity of military life.  In the main the insanity is common to all armies. Any veteran will recognise the characters and situations, though in this case there is the added frisson that we know which way the wind of history is blowing, but Asch does not.  

As is typical in all-male groups, efforts are made to identify and abuse the weakest link.  For simplicity sake, Kirst limits this behaviour to the NCOs, and they focus on a harmless and hapless conscript who is a friend of Asch.  Driven nearly to suicide by the relentless abuse, Asch saves this friend and declares his private and personal war on the Wehrmacht. 

His heavy artillery are the many convoluted, contradictory, and obscure rules and regulations that govern army life.  Think of Jim Kirk talking a computer to death and that is Asch’s approach. With a blizzard of references to regulations, sub-paragraphs, dictates, and more, he soon rattles the leader of the NCOs into a blunder.  

For armour Asch uses the general indifference of officers to events in the barracks, as long as it does not blot their own personal careers.  The best way to insure that does not happen is never to record irregular occurrences, like fights, like lost ammunition, AWOLs.  If these things happen, and they do, and if they are recorded, then it means the relevant officers have failed!  Although daily reports are written in indelible ink, where there is a will, there is a means…  If they happen and are not recorded, well promotion remains within sight. 

Asch’s infantry are the records he makes himself by observing the petty grifting, marital infidelity, and absences of the NCOs.  This black book of data settles much hash.  

The telling is precise, but, well, holds little interest to this reader.  Asch’s campaign is the subject of at least three over novels by Kirst, but I am not at the moment motivated to continue.  It bears a passing resemble to Catch-22 but it is neither as funny nor as poignant as that novel.  Moreover, the shadow of hindsight darkens it.  

The End of Baseball (2008) by Peter Schilling, Jr. 

Good Reads meta-data is 340 pages, rated 3.85 by 209 litizens.

Genre: Alt History.

DNA: Baseball.

Verdict: What a ride!

Tagline: If only.

In Hollywood where fiction is fact the publicity for this book would say ‘inspired by a true story,’ almost.  Bill Veeck, baseball fans need no explanation, lived and breathed baseball, and kept himself alive through 36 operations after losing a leg on Guadalcanal (1942) in the USMC dreaming of hit-and-run, sacrifice bunts, faked cut-offs, catcher pick-offs, and line-drive doubles.  An invalid, he returned to the States in 1944 to light up the world of baseball for the next forty years, wooden leg and all.

The premise of this novel is that Veeck acted on his oft stated ambition to break the colour bar in Major League Baseball, hatching a complicated plan to do so in a coup de theatre that would surprise and defeat the many opponents of this change.  The nub of the plan was that he, with his $500 payout from the Marines, would buy two baseball teams, one all-white and one all-black, and Hey Presto! Switch the one for the other on Opening Day!  Genius! So he thought, but well, what did the elder von Moltke say, no plan survives first contact with reality, and neither did this one.  

FYI the two teams were the catastrophically broke Philadelphia Athletics in the American League and the unloved Philadelphia Stars of the Negro League.  This latter team was hardly better off financially than the A’s, but had many talented athletes.  Veeck assembled investors who had profited from some of his legerdemain before the war to funds the deals without knowing his master plan, and off he goes in this roller coaster ride of one imaginary season.  

The cast of characters ranges from Satchel Paige (whose autograph I once had), Buck Leonard, Roy Campanella, J Edgar Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Judge Landis, and a great many more. What a kaleidoscope of the times and places of 1944.  

Post Script. By the way Veeck did break the colour bar in the American League when he ran the Cleveland Indians by signing and playing Larry Dobey.

Precipice (2024) by Robert Harris.  

Good Reads meta-data is 464 pages rated 4.21 by 1107 litizens. 

Genre: Historical fiction. 

DNA: Edwardian England.

Verdict: Not for me.

Tagline: …. (Meh.)

The book is very well written, well researched in keeping with Harris’s other historical fictions, but….  Yes, there is a ‘but’ because, well, the story is depressing and boring.  British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928) went sleepwalking into the Great War, daydreaming about his mistress in cabinet meetings, only occasionally noticing what went on, and even more remarkable, throwing secret state papers into the street for the German sympathisers and agents who followed him around to collect, so preoccupied was he with his lady love; this sixty year old man in a teenage hormone haze barely knew what he was doing. When confronted with this fact of the state papers, first he denied it, then, then excused it, and then…continued it.  

All in all, he must be a candidate for the Donald Trump Prize for the most vacuous head of government.  Yet he was PM for nearly a decade and Liberal Party leader longer.  Asquith’s entitlement mentality and monumental incompetence is so tedious that I started flicking pages, and pages.  

The woman was far more responsible than he was on this telling. She secreted his nine letters a day, tried to stop his littering with state papers, and finally broke with him to go to France to drive an ambulance. His reaction to the latter was to feel sorry for himself rather than snap out of his stupor. 

Bring on Lloyd George!

Grey (sometimes ‘Gray’ in the Kindle text), Kitchener, and Churchill were the only ones in these pages who realised from the off that there would be a long and terrible war. Grey tried to prevent it, while Churchill savoured the thought but was realistic about what had to be done, and Kitchener feared it. None of them got any help from Asquith who drifted.  

By the way, Harris claims both in a forward and an afterward that all of this is true.  I believe him.  

The Way of the Bear (2023) by Anne Hillerman 

Good Reads meta-data is 281 pages rated 4.17 by 634 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Navajo 

Verdict: Overcooked.

Tagline: The evil Barbies did it.

Mostly Bernie and her bottomless portfolio of worries – career, sister, mother, neighbours, weather, parking, etc. If it’s there she will worry about it.  

Over-plotted, too much exposition, too much ‘How I am feeling.’ 

The snow and quick changing weather certainly dominate as are the distances with attendant loss of cell phone coverage but all rather mechanically.

Leaphorn’s name is on the cover but has but a few lines on the telephone at the end of the book.  

The two villains were obvious from the get-go. Both quickly crossed the border of my suspension of disbelief.  Each seemed too incompetent to pull off anything.