BookEnds

While the health care debate looms as a major issue when Washington gets back from vacation, we’re planning to read a journalist’s look at health care systems in other countries after we get back from vacation. Start reading T.R. Reid’s The Healing of America with us after Labor Day.

When I interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frank McCourt back on Jan. 20, in anticipation of his talk at Purchase (N.Y.) College the following week, he sounded positively vibrant. His incisive remarks on the American education system, memoir writing and the inauguration of President Barack Obama bespoke a man who was still very much passionate about his life and surroundings. My friend, a university instructor and resident of Roxbury — McCourt lived there part-time — mentioned on Facebook that he saw the author six months ago at the supermarket, “and he looked great.”

So I was shocked and saddened when I read in the New York Times yesterday that McCourt had passed away in his Manhattan apartment. According to Malachy McCourt, his younger brother and fellow author, the 78-year-old Brooklyn native had been suffering from meningitis and had recently been treated for metastatic melanoma. He is survived by his wife, Ellen Frey and daughter, Margaret McCourt.

Though I was surprised by his death, I was even more astounded to learn during our interview that McCourt, now considered among the most brilliant writers of the 20th century, was once paralyzed by self-doubt.  It was the late ’60s when McCourt graduated from Brooklyn College and he decided to play it safe as he searched for a viable career.

“I didn’t have enough self confidence to say I was a writer,” he said. “I dreaded poverty. I had to find secure employment with a weekly wage. I didn’t see myself working for a corporation.”

So, he turned to teaching.

As a student reared in Ireland’s strict Catholic schools, he had rejected the system’s iron-handed pedagogy and dropped out when he was 13. He took that defiant approach to McKee Technical High School in Staten Island — his first teaching stint — where he engaged his pupils on a personal level. He shared stories about his childhood in the slums of Limerick, Ireland and moving to America and encouraged his students to share their stories as well.

His students may have been wary of those methods at first — McCourt observed they were more concerned with good grades than with actual learning — but eventually, they grew to enjoy his class and of course, his poignant and often hilarious anecdotes.

“And the more I talked about my own life, the more I found it interesting as well,” McCourt recalled. “That’s what made me decide to write.”

Click to continue reading

A few months ago I attended a talk by Tina Brown, part of a magazine journalism lecture series at Columbia University, where she mostly talked about her newest venture, The Daily Beast.

Brown is most famous for her stints as editor at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, where she helped launch the careers of many writers who are today household names (OK, in east-coast-media-elite households anyway).

Jeffrey Toobin is one of those writers.

After working as an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, Toobin resumed a writing career he began in college and took an assignment covering O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial. According to Brown, after initially filing straightforward accounts of the legal proceedings, Toobin came into his own, providing the rich textural detail the New Yorker is famous for, as well as the legal insight of a trial attorney.

These days, amid all the windbags on cable television news (the mere sight of Nancy Grace sends shivers up my spine), Toobin stands out and his New Yorker pieces are a pleasure to read, even when he’s not writing about the law.

CASE IN POINT: Toobin’s profile of Barney Frank.

–CP

I listened to The Leonard Lopate Show in my car on the way to grab lunch when I heard him mention that his guest was Jason Kersten, the author of “The Art of Making Money.” At first I was confused. That was the title of a really fantastic Rolling Stone article in 2005 about an expert counterfeiter from the south side of Chicago named Art Williams. I figured the show must be a rerun, until I heard a few seconds later that “The Art of Making Money” is now a book. I couldn’t be more excited. Williams is a fascinating guy, and this is a deeply interesting topic. It’s going on my to-read list, and I’m going to recommend it go on yours as well.

In order to get started on our book club choice, Roberts’s A-Rod biography, I had to finish the mammoth 1,160-page book that I had started in April, “The Power Broker” by Robert Moses. The book had been sitting in an accusatory spot on my bookshelf since I bought in 2004. I was supposed to read it before I started grad school. I did not.

I can’t recommend the book highly enough, but that’s not why I’m writing. Sprinkled throughout the book are references to the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit planning group that covers the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region. Not only does the RPA still exist, but it helped Stamford organize the Master Plan adopted by the city in 2002 and has since helped the Glenbrook and Springdale community groups write new zoning rules that residents feel will improve the feel of their neighborhoods.

What the RPA was asking for from Robert Moses (or as his men called him, RM) was something that would affect my everyday life in a massive way.

Moses was a master planner, wielding power throughout New York City and the state for about 40 years to build the public works he wanted built. He started out building much needed public parks on Long Island, and acquired an overwhelming amount of WPA funds during the Depression to build highways into and out of the city. He also used proceeds from toll revenues, and bonds backed by future proceeds, to build highways. The Cross-Bronx, the West Side Highway, the Hutchinson Parkway, The Saw Mill, the B.Q.E. Highways, but never train tracks, which by the 1930s were, it was clear to most planners, necessary to take the vehicle burden off the roads. Reformers began begging for some share of the money for mass transit, arguing that a little extra money and space would help alleviate the traffic problem. Moses believed the solution for road problems was more roads. The desire to bridge toll revenues with mass transit funding is part of what undid his power under the Rockefeller administration.

In the late 1930s, Moses was building the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge to alleviate the traffic problems that started almost immediately after the Triborough — now RFK — opened. RPA asked Moses to consider building the Whitestone strong enough to carry a train as well. Even if he didn’t build the tracks right away, they asked him to build it strong enough for it to happen later. He did not. All of it’s right there on page 519.

Out of curiosity, I asked David Kooris, an RPA vice president and head of the Connecticut office, in Stamford, whether a train over the Whitestone could ever be possible.

Click to read what Kooris said

Liz and Dave, I’ve read through the prologue and first three chapters of “A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez,” and so far my initial response is the most important: I’m done reading prologues. I always find them frustrating. In this one, I feel as though Selena Roberts is trying too hard to place herself in the story for no good reason — she talks about walking up to A-Rod in a gym where he wasn’t expecting to find such a dogged reporter — and to psychoanalyze A-Rod. Also, she poses a question at the end, a point-blank, “I think you used steroids,” question, but she doesn’t let him answer. She’s trying to build tension, but it’s just frustrating.

The first chapters are full of Stuart Smalley-esque aphorisms, in which she places blame for A-Rod’s perceived desire to be loved at the feet of his father, who left the family when A-Rod was 10. It’s all about A-Rod wanting to be good enough to please others, and you can imagine A-Rod staring at himself in the mirror, “And doggone it, people like me!” I have to admit, I nearly chuckled out loud when I read one paragraph:

All Alex had ever wanted was to stand out. Baseball made him special. He loved the game, and it loved him right back. Baseball gave and gave to Alex. It supplied the attention he craved. It soothed the insecurities he battled. It filled holes opened by childhood abandonment. Baseball wasn’t like his father. Baseball never left him.

Click to continue reading

Elizabeth and Dave, thanks for reading the book with me! I’ll think we’re in for a really interesting discussion.

To answer your question, Elizabeth, I’m going to ‘fess up and admit that I actually am not a big sports fan. And by that I mean, I usually hate sports. I haven’t played any team sports since junior high. I haven’t watched basketball since the University of Arkansas Razorbacks won the NCAA tournament in 1994 (woo! pig! sooey!).

Which isn’t to say sports doesn’t sometimes interest me. I would have liked to see LeBron James play Kobe Bryant this year, but it wasn’t meant to be. And while baseball hasn’t interested me as a sport, baseball writing intrigues me because it can be more about the people who play than the action on the field. I had a professor once who believed that was the reason Americans liked baseball, and probably explains why I don’t; fans are devoted to the histories and personalities of their teams, and watching the game on the field allows you to take part in the story-telling. I have a friend who goes to as many Mets games as she can, no matter how badly they’re doing, because she and her dad went throughout her childhood.

There are two sports books on my to-read list in addition to the A-Rod book, however: “A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot 8-Inch, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays Football with the Pros” by Stefan Fastis, and “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game” by Michael Lewis.

Thanks, Monica and Dave, for inviting me to join the fray and kick start the book blog. Since you took me up on my suggestion to start off with Selena Robert’s book on Alex Rodriguez, I’m preparing to shoulder the blame should it somehow fail to be blog-worthy material. My hope was that, at the very least, the subject matter and writing will serve as lightening rods for other issues that matter to us as journalists and sports fans.

So I guess it’s only fitting that I begin my first post by explaining why I wanted to read this particular book in the first place. It has nothing to do with being either a Yankee or A-Rod fan. (Full disclosure: I grew up in Queen as an angst-ridden Mets fan.) My ears do, however, prick up at the scintillating gossip surrounding A-Rod. Like most people who thumb through the tabloids at the supermarket checkout line–Monica, can you tell I’m desperately in need of book club salvation?–I am curious to learn about the exact nature of A-Rod’s relationship with Madonna–did she brainwash him to the point where her videos put him in a trance? did the two really have Sabbath dinners together?

On that and any matters related to Kabbalah, I’m hoping this book settles the score once and for all.

Click to continue reading