It should be obvious given the subtitle, but suffice it to say that Dan Epstein’s book about baseball in 1976 has little to offer people who aren’t serious baseball fans with a keen interest in the history of the National Pastime. However, for diehard seamheads like me, Epstein’s panoramic look at baseball at a turning point is a thoroughly enjoyable read, even if his level of detail can be mind-numbing at times. Baseball was in an interesting place in 1976. The reserve clause, which had […]
Portrait of the Artist as a Dirtbag
Three or four years ago I read Women just so I could cross Bukowski off my list of “important” American writers. I found the book and it’s first-person, semi-autobiographical narrator so deeply unpleasant that, upon finishing the book, I stood up, walked to my kitchen and deposited the book in my garbage can. My first inclination was to set it on fire using the burners of my stove, but I decided that was a little over-dramatic and potentially unsafe. So I suppose you could say […]
Sherlock, Through Modern Eyes
Why do authors keep writing new stories about Sherlock Holmes? There are obvious reasons, of course, including the financial. Holmes’s fans are so zealous that Conan Doyle’s output is nowhere near sufficient, so a steady audience can be counted on. And then there is that signature style, so easily imitated but so damnably difficult to master. While many authors have attempted to recapture the magic of 221B Baker Street, Anthony Horowitz is the first to do so with the explicit blessing of the Conan Doyle […]
The Fastest Man Alive
I have an odd relationship with superheroes. I love the movies and TV shows, to the extent that I recently realized that I watch DC television series four nights a week. However, I’ve never been a comic book reader. I don’t know why really, but I never read them as a kid and don’t really remember my peers reading them. But all of a sudden these movies come out making billions of dollars and everyone I know is debating which minor characters are going to […]
The War at Home
When a book has over 18,000 Amazon reviews with a five-star average rating, that is a book I am going to think about reading, especially when it’s on sale for $1.99 on Kindle. Kristin Hannah’s World War II saga about French sisters who fight the war on the homefront in two very different ways is indeed well-written, but it’s adherence to genre conventions and an overly formulaic plot ultimately render it somewhat unworthy of those gaudy reviews. Two sisters who are very different, a dead […]
Long Title, Short Book
By the time you’ve finished reading the title of Dave Eggers’s 2014 novel, you’re practically halfway done with the book itself. At 230 pages it is not exactly a back-breaking tome, and since it is written entirely in dialogue, it moves even faster than its brevity would suggest. Unfortunately, the book is light in more ways than one. Despite some clever writing and a few hints at a more meaningful story, Eggers’s title is much more memorable than his story. As for that story, it […]