BookEnds

Philip Gardiner, in character as the Joycean character Leopold Bloom, for Stamford's first-ever Bloomsday celebration.

Chris Preovolos/Staff photo

Our colleague Jeff Morganteen wrote an article about Sunday’s celebration of perhaps the biggest novel of all, Ulysses, by James Joyce.  Read the article from Monday’s paper here.

Rightly or wrongly, a lot of the criticism of the A-Rod book can probably be attributed to the columns Selena Roberts wrote for The New York Times when Duke lacrosse players were accused of rape in 2006. Charges were later dropped, but not before the three accused young men had been named in the national media in several articles. Roberts, perhaps more than most, criticized the players and the sports-playing culture to which they belonged. Also, probably in part because of the big platform the Times gave her, she has since been criticized more than most for her coverage. The criticism extends to her book about A-Rod, as Elizabeth mentioned in her earlier post.

A former colleague pointed me to the best case I’ve seen made for doubting the veracity of some points made in the Roberts’s coverage of A-Rod: here’s Jason Whitlock’s column for the Kansas City Star.

Proven inaccurate, Roberts never wrote a retraction for the columns that contributed to the public lynching of Reade Seligmann, Colin Finnerty and David Evans.

Instead, she moved on to Sports Illustrated, a seat on ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters” and a new target, baseball slugger Alex Rodriguez. . . . .

Roberts’ book is a long-winded blog. Why it’s being treated as an unimpeachable piece of journalism can only be explained by the cushy position she’s been handed by The New York Times, ESPN and Sports Illustrated and the unchallenged institutional bias found within the elite sports media institutions.

I recently finished reading “Saturday” by Ian McEwan, an author whose books never cease to amaze me. He has a very precise, detailed style of prose that can adapt itself to any subject — he mastered the big sweeping wartime epic with “Atonement” and captured the essence of British journalism with cruel accuracy in “Amsterdam”. With “Saturday,” he manages to consolidate an
astonishing array of themes and events into a concise and easily paced novel.

Henry Perowne is a neurosurgeon who wakes early on a Saturday morning to the sight of a plane heading in a fiery wreck across the London sky. This would be a horrific vision in any circumstance, but this particular Saturday is February 15, 2003 and the sight brings to his mind a terribly familiar jumble of possibilities — a violent tussle in the cockpit, a furtive shoe bomber sneaking aboard, a blurry, triumphant video of Al-Quaeda claiming credit. This is life in our post-9/11 world and McEwan examines its
implications with perceptive clarity and crisp description.

Click to continue reading

Nancy Pearl, a librarian, author, and critic, visited NPR’s morning edition today to recommend newly-released books for your summer vacations. On the show’s site, you can vote for the best beach book ever. What are yours?

As far as the best sports books, two to me are head and shoulders above the rest.

The first is John Feinstein’s “A Season on the Brink,” his fascinating look inside the Indiana basketball program and, in particular, coach Bobby Knight, a unique and polarizing personality. Feinstein was given tremendous access, which Knight probably regrets. The result is an utterly absorbing book.

The second is H.G. Bissinger’s “Friday Night Lights,” in which he tells the story of the 1988 Permian High School football team in Odessa Texas. The book was made into a decent movie and an outstanding television show — the best currently on the air in my opinion. The book is equal parts inside-sports look and sociological study, and it stays with the reader long after the final page has been closed.

Another reason I was interested in reading the A-Rod book is because of the reception it got from the sports world. The Huffington Post had a nice run-down of how some have done a 180 on Roberts:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kyle/the-decline-and-fall-of-s_b_196747.html

And here is the review from the Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/books/15book.html?scp=5&sq=Selena%20Roberts%20book&st=cse

The Ferguson Library dedication in 1982

It took me five months, but I finally finished “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” by Alex Haley. The thick novel has been sitting on a bookshelf for longer than it should, one of the many “to-dos” that I don’t always have time to do. I was too young to read it when it was published in 1976, though I recall watching parts of the ensuing (and highly successful) miniseries, which aired a year later.

The 500-plus page book is a narrative account of one of Haley’s descendants, Kunta Kinte, who was captured near his home in the Gambia in Africa in the mid-1700s and brought to America where he was sold into slavery. The story tracks every successive generation up to the life of the late author, who spent about 12 years in the 1960s and ‘70s, traveling across multiple continents, visiting numerous libraries and institutions and poring over many documents to authenticate the stories that had been passed down through the generations.

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.