A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan. I usually like Egan's books. This one is about the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920s. This book puts paid to the stupid Mike Pence comment that Hoosiers don't do hate. It's a depressing, but necessary read.
Read that last year. It's a great one. I think I mentioned that what I found most disturbing is that to book had me cheering for Notre Dame. Why? Because the Klan marched in South Bend. . . and ND students turned out en masse and kicked klan ass.
came across this John Grisham book while browsing in the library. It tells the story of Joe Castle, a sensational rookie who took the baseball world by storm—arguably the greatest rookie of all time. Children across America idolized him, including young Paul Tracy, whose father, Warren Tracy, was a journeyman pitcher. Paul happened to be in the stands the day his father threw a fastball that would change both their lives forever. The book was exceptionally well-written—far better than I expected.
Desolation Angels - Jack Kerouac "It's easy enough to understand that as an artist I need solitude and a kind of 'do-nothing' philosophy that does allow me to dream all day and work out chapters in forgotten reveries that emerge years later in story form."
The Imitation Of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. This is a medieval theological work. The foreword suggests that a Kempis merely compiled the work from other writers. It's still interesting.
High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism a more or less biography mixed with literary criticism covering the life and writings of Hunter S. Thompson, by scholar and editor of the beat generation journal Beatdom, David Wills. A pretty decent guide to the best of Thompson’s work as well as the worst.
The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy. This book is Tolstoy expounding on his Christian pacifism. I'm not a Christian pacifist, but I enjoy it all the same. Food for thought.
In which Ortega predicts the downfall of liberal democracy because most people crave kakistocracy. He wrote this almost a century before Donald Trump.
The Butcher – John Sack 1950 first ascent of Yerupajá, 21,768 feet, in Cordillera Huayhuash of Peru. At the time, the tallest unclimbed mountain in the Americas. No fatalities, but an exciting rescue of a climber who summited, and fell on the descent.
Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight For the Soul of America, a damn fine book about writer Will Bardenwerper's summer following the Batavia Muckdogs, a summer collegiate league in upstate New York and the full context of why Batavia had a summer collegiate league instead of the Class A minor league baseball that was in the town since the 1930s, with other professional teams dating back to the turn of the century (the reason: ********ing Major League Baseball contracted a quarter of its minor league teams, saving them roughly $700,000 per team (serious chump change to the MLB). Bardenwerper gets to know the fans, a few of the players, and the history and weaves a pretty entertaining narrative complete with vitriol directed at the uber wealthy owners and commissioner of Major League baseball.
I have a lot of catching up to do. I absolutely picked up these books because of the cover art; they are Tamsyn Muir's Harrow the Ninth and Gideon the Ninth. These center on necromancy and complex puzzles and are billed on their covers as being some light-hearted and fun romp when they are decidedly not. One is odd (Gideon) and the other is positively bizarre (Harrow) to a degree that I skipped the third (a fourth is planned). The mystery in the first is played out very well. Sort of fantasy, and gothic, and horror, and sci-fi all in one.
The Red Prince by Helen Carr. It's a historical tale of John of Gaunt, third surviving son of English King Edward III. Should be an interesting read.
Sandow The Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding, an interesting entry in the University of Illinois Press series Sports and Society, though given that musclemen (and occasionally women) were part of the vaudeville circuit, it has more to do with show business at the turn of the 20th century as it does sports (though Sandow and most of his fellow strongmen would occasionally engage in "scientific wresting," the version of the sport that, unlike current pro wrestling, wasn't fake). Good details on how some of these guys perpetrated fraud in the name of entertainment, though Sandow, for most of his career, was legit. And prone to exaggeration (the biggest challenge faced by David L. Chapman was dealing with multiple conflicting versions of the same events as narrated by Sandow himself.
Does it also talk at all about the LGBT+ angle of the circuit at all, or is that out of the scope of this one?
That's in there tangentially. Sandow had some seriously out (for the time) supporters, many from the art and music world (he toured with a flamboyantly gay pianist for awhile, and it's hard to tell if the news articles about the pair are deliberately coded or just inadvertently homoerotic), though there's no real documentation of any physical relationships in letters, etc, so it's hard to tell just how gay Sandow actually was, if at all. But Chapman does bring it up. I mean, he's a historian of bodybuilding AND an author of hundreds of articles in magazines like Muscle and Fitness, so he has to know about it... it's just hard to document in this case.
For some reason, Inter-library loan hasn't sent that one too me yet. When it gets here, it will join the pile.