You used to be able to listen to the tapes at Cooperstown. A few years ago, I got my brother a 4 or 5 CD set of the interviews which he listened to over and over again on a 12 hour drive and back. The poet is David Kirby, whose work I know. I'm pretty sure he's sort of parodying extreme fandom and intends no real disrespect to Snodgrass. I like how manager John McGraw's responded to Snodgrass' error: he raised his salary. He was famous for reaming his players for mental errors, but he knew that physical errors are going to happen even to the best.
he was equally magnanimous to fred merkle, whose famous 'boner' most assuredly was a mental error. but mcgraw knew ballplayers, and considered merkle 'as game as they come' (i'm paraphrasing there).
Since my son is studying WWI, and loving it, and wanting to study the military history of the war. So, I need to brush up on my battles. Interesting premise thus far: the Germans had the better artillery and he considers Verdunne a victory for the Germans. While it was the French who did most of the dieing in the war, apparently Allied propaganda systematically overstated German losses and it wasn't until the arrival of the Americans and Gen Pershing that they utilized artillery on par with the Germans. Thus, the Germans "won" the battles but lost the war. Where have we heard that before? Could be one reason the Germans were so willing to buy into National Socialism...
For a good treatment of The Somme... Keegan pioneered the "military history from the perspective of the troops" approach. Why it took so for historians to focus on the guys who actually did the fighting rather than the generals is a mystery, but this is a damn good book. It also covers Agincourt and Waterloo.
Keegan's the best. I don't read as much history as I used to, but I have long thought that Keegan is the best historian, at what he does, than anyone I've ever read.
My doctor isn't terrifically happy about it, but I have become more and more of a fan of cocktails and distilled spirits in recent years, so I was delighted to receive Ultimate Bar Book from my wife as a Christmas present. I'm working my way through it from the beginning, but it's also great fun to simply open to a random page.
For an in depth look at that incident and that season, I strongly recommend The Unforgettble Season by GH Fleming. I think it will change your mind about the degree of blame Merkle deserved. It was more of a [opposite of a blunder] by Johnny Evers than anything else.
yeah, i'm aware that it was standard not to run those out. and one could just as easily call merkle a 'victim' as a 'culprit'. so, sure, that mcgraw didn't view it as the kind of 'mental error' that he might normally ream a player for is fair enough. my only point was - without in any way suggesting that john mcgraw was some kind of touchyfeely players' manager - that while he was, indeed, a hard and rough man, he wasn't some kind of baseball tyrant.* he knew ballplayers and pushed buttons accordingly. he was a bit more savvy than is often suggested; not that anyone here had implied otherwise, of course. *[edit] with his teams, anyway. bill klem and some 'administrators' of the game might take issue.
Speaking of baseball blunders, it's not in the same league as the other books mentioned, but it does shed some light on one of the biggest alleged goats in the history of the game. Ralph Branca's A Moment in Time, which is a decent ballplayer's "As Told To" memoir. It covers his career and the after-effects of serving up a mighty loud gopherball. A surprise is in store that I won't spoil.
usually this time of year is great for reading, but i've really been bogged down with a number of things, and good lord, it seems like i've been reading this for a month. i should be able to wrap it up tonight, though. Mao: The Real Story: two things about this book: a) it's big, and b) it's orange. ok, it's not that huge - less than 600 pages of text - but there are bits where it's a bit of a slog. real nuts&bolts chinese (and sino/soviet) politics going on here. not that it's not interesting (it very much is) but the introduction of myriad names, places, and organizations with which i was not previously familiar made some hard work of it in places, particularly early on. pantsov suggests that much of what's been gleaned from recently opened soviet archives tell a slightly different story than what's become accepted about mao and his relationship to soviet power. i'd probably be more impressed by the fact if i'd had a stronger base knowledge of mao coming into it, with which to contrast such revelations. at any rate, there's alot going on here, and in the spots where it really gets going, well ... it really gets going. that said, it doesn't always get going where you expect it to. 'the long march' gets covered in a couple-dozen pages, and military aspects of the civil war are little more than a loose framework for the inner workings of CPU/guomintang/soviet political machinations. oh well, it's probably for the better, as those are the bits i've already got a loose handle on, and i'd probably still be reading come March if it were in there. and what is in there is good. the 'great leap forward', the politics that drove the cultural revolution, all that sino-soviet stuff throughout, nixon's visit, even the titiliation of mao's relationships with wives and women, all offer considerable insight into one of the 20th century's greatest men. and, ok, i'm severely colorblind, so i'm not even sure that it's orange. that it's red might make more sense, actually. but it looks orange to me. so to review: it's not that big, and it's not that orange. but i'm giving it 8/10 anyway. not as a comprehensive biography, as i've not read any others with which to compare it; but as a shitload of information, where it surely rates.
My last two: Mark Twain -- The Innocents Abroad Philip K. Dick -- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge Now I'm on to Ubik.
Damn. DFW followed by PKD, with a little SLC thrown in. The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory ofJack Kerouac (2012), by Joyce Johnson. I didn't think Kerouac needed another biography, but this is different enough to be worthwhile. Also hanging out in my backpack, getting read every now and then Charles Ives Remembered: an Oral History, by Vivian Perlis. Interesting biographer of an American composer.
I forgot this one. I like local history, and this is quite skimmable. Quite a few major performers made their way to town and played in some high quality (and mostly lost) venues.
I know that we have a few poets and poetry lovers here, so I thought that this would be of interest to some. 50 Unpublished Kipling Poems Found He might have been called the "jingo imperialist" by George Orwell, but Rudyard Kipling's "If" is one of Britain's favorite poems. And now, more than 50 unpublished Kipling poems have been found by American scholar Thomas Pinney. Pinney, an English professor at California State Polytechnic University, said he looked through family papers, the archive of a former head of the cruise ship company Cunard Line, and inside a house in Manhattan. The collection includes works written during and after World War I, which Kipling initially supported, and he helped his son John gain a commission in the Irish Guards. He regretted his decision, however, after John died at the Battle of Loos in 1915, and Kipling writes about it in "Epitaphs of the War": "If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied." The 50 poems will be included in the three-volume The Cambridge Edition of The Poems of Rudyard Kipling, out on March 31." http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2013/02/26/50-unpublished-kipling-poems-found.html
Good lord. I remember talking to my dad (who was a career soldier) when I was 16 and I told him I was thinking of joining the Army. He was sitting at the table reading the paper and he sat bolt upright and said "Hell no."
i've got alot on my plate for reading at the moment (like most moments, i suppose), but i took a copy of this on my lunch break last night, and i know that i'm not getting to anything else until i've consumed this (probably over the next day or two): Detroit: An American Autopsy former NYTimes journalist charlie leduff heads home to detroit, takes a position with the Detroit News, and digs in to the cesspool of civic dysfunction that is detroit, michigan. it makes for some pretty grim reading, but is well done, utterly readable, and - as distasteful as amusement at the expense of human wretchedness may be - rather entertaining. it's all a bit personal - lots of leduff - but it's to be expected in a piece like this, and is no worse for it.
Lately I've been reading poetry. A friend of mine once told me poetry makes more sense when you read it aloud. Which brings confused looks from my wife when I do. I've found poetry to be helpful with dealing the slings and arrows of middle-age.
Totally agree. When I lived in Chicago, I used to be guaranteed a seat to myself on public transportation when I did this. Hell, with Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," I could get a whole car on the el. I volunteer at a nearby convent to read to a couple of elderly (and nearly blind) nuns. This week, about 8-12 poems from... Poems of Gerard "Lightning" Hopkins. Been practicing for an hour a day for about ten days. Also, a dozen from If I Had Wheels or Love: The Collected Poems of Vassar Miller, whose a really good poet who i many ways is in the same tradition as Hopkins, but without the knotted syntax. Doesn't take nearly as much practice.
Oh yeah, me too. Took me forever to get through Iliad and Odyssey but it was the only way I could finish them.
Just finished Harlan Coben's "Stay Close" Not a bad story line and I admit I didn't see the killer until it was revealed. I just don't enjoy his stand alone novels as much as I do his series featuring the Sports Agent "Myron Bolitar."
I have this on order with the library. Most of the reviews talk of the pro German Bias "The Battle of the Marne was not a German defeat but a strategic withdrawl!" http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Grea...2/ref=sr_cr_hist_all?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 Got to look at this one as well. Especially if it features Agincourt and Waterloo. For another WW1 book from the soldier perspective is "Tommy" I think we've had it up in this thread before.
Elmore Leonard - City Primeval Meh. About every 10 years I get another Elmore Leonard book and am completely underwhelmed. I think it's his completely sophomoric attempt at being colloquial, but his syntax is awful. Constantly mixing up his 2nd and 3rd person point of view. It's almost a primer on how not to write.
Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady Finally getting around to The Portrait of a Lady and have, to date, read about a third of it. Quite an interesting mix of characters James has set up by this point (having just brought in Madame Merle). I quite enjoyed the other two, particularly The Bostonians.