Watch as Mariotti uses his brain! (to unmold lumporious cornmeal mush, loosen edges with a rancidious spatula)
As someone who makes a living having to deliver harsh commentary at times, I am not scared to articulate thoughts about subjects that have included Reinsdorf, Williams and Guillen. The difference is that I use my brain; Guillen and his son do not. The minute Ozzie wrote that Sox management “touched me where it hurts most’’—all because they won’t let him have a personal Web page after agreeing to let him tweet and do all his other nonsense—it should have been the final straw inside any clear-thinking, self-respecting organization. But Reinsdorf, as vindictive a man as you’ll see in sports, adores Guillen because he has taken on some of the owner’s biggest critics. Never mind that Guillen, in the process, also has turned the Sox into a shameful and ridiculous franchise. Reinsdorf keeps looking the other way even when Guillen is politically incorrect in the worst and most insensitive ways, which contradicts everything the owner claims to stand for in regard to diversity and equality.
...“Kenny’s my boss, he’s always going to be and I respect that. I don’t think [Yankees GM Brian] Cashman and [former Yankees manager] Joe Torre got along that well and they won six [bleeping] championships.’‘
How insulting to suggest that Cashman and Torre, two fine gentlemen, ever behaved like these children. And how interesting that Guillen conveniently left out this little fact: Torre was forced out two years ago. The Yankees, under Joe Girardi, won the World Series last year. The White Sox, under Guillen, won’t win the World Series again.
The Blizzard of Oz was a good story when the Sox were champions in 2005. But it’s now 2010, and the statute of limitations on lunacy expired long ago.
For the sake of everyone involved, mostly Ozzie Guillen, please end this hideous sideshow at once.
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Here's a fresh new way that's trouble-free,
It's got Paul Anka's guarantee...
Lisa: Guarantee void in Tennessee.
All: Just don't look! Just don't look!
Just don't look! Just don't look!
Just don't look! Just don't look!
I do not recommend reading Mariotti.
I just checked out Hyperion based on a recommendation in an earlier thread. I'm looking forward to reading it.
It's funny how many books I've read because of BTF threads.
Yes, a fine book, made extra fine by Capote's creepy interest in Perry Smith. Capote knew how to make a genre. How weird is it that he was childhood friends with Harper Lee?
I live in Olathe, Kansas (where part of the story takes place, briefly), and the first time I read In Cold Blood was while back from school for Thanksgiving break. I sat on the patio in the backyard in a chair at 2 in the morning reading it with the wind blowing fairly strongly. It was awesome.
Also, Harry Potter.
I haven't read every book on Vietnam. But one I highly recommend is A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan. An interesting compliment to Bright Shining Lie is Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Dan Ellsberg. Sheehan is a character in Ellsberg's book, which was written much later; and, of course, Ellsberg plays a role in Sheehan's Vietnam history.
I think what you get out of A Bright Shining Lie, beside a very interesting character in Vann, is a good understanding of how lost the war was when Kennedy was president. I also concluded from that (not conclusively, but close to it) that LBJ's idiotic policies in Vietnam, like Nixon's, were in line with Kennedy's idiotic policies in Vietnam, and that the murder of Kennedy probably made no difference in how our policy played out*. (Had Nixon lost in 1968, which he nearly did, I think Humphrey would have reached the lost-peace of 1973 by 1970.)
* I realize that JFK's fans vehemently disagree with this and have cobbled together microbes of evidence to argue that after he was re-elected in 1964, Kennedy (who was in fact a much more fierce anti-Communist than LBJ) would have pulled all of our forces out and let the Commies win. They say he never would have escalated, as LBJ did in 1965. But I think the JFK fans are .... quite wrong.
The LRB & TLS sites work for me, but I'm a subscriber. Don't know how much is free.
How about a bag of dicks?
Devil in the White City, the story of the 1983 Chicago World's Fair, was fantastic; I learned quite a bit about the city I've known my whole life.
Seconded. Probably one of my 10 favorite books. Larson is an amazing writer.
No it isn't. You're better off seeing some mediocre war movie.
Agree 100%. I didn't find myself sympathizing with the kid much but Krakauer is such an outstanding writer that I couldn't put it down.
The only reason I might believe that Kennedy might (meaning about 1 chance in 3 or 4) have gotten us out earlier than LBJ is that he was more self-assured when it came to standing up to the military. Not only the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs but his service in WWII gave him a lot of experience in military disasters and near disasters, and he may have been more inherently cautious. He was also a fairly serious student of contemporary world history, and that never hurts when it comes to making key decisions. And I know that it's a longstanding cliche, but I do think that JFK "grew" in office more than any president since Truman.
That said, I doubt if any president would have avoided Vietnam. Before the casualties began piling up, the Republicans were gung ho for it, most of the Democrats were hawks in 1965 and remained behind LBJ until Tet, and the elephant in the room for every Democrat was the spectre of "Who lost China?" From JFK on down, with a tiny handful of exceptions, they were afraid of being red-baited. In many ways Vietnam was Joe McCarthy's worst legacy.
In terms of books, the best one I ever read about the reality of North Vietnam in the 1950's was Hoang Van Chi's From Colonialism to Communism, which pretty much eradicated the myth of Ho Chi Minh as some sort of benevolent father figure. It wasn't only American propaganda that caused so many Vietnamese to head south after the partition---Ho may have been a great patriotic nationalist, but he was also one murderous SOB. The Sheehan book's pretty good, too, as well as Michael Herr's classic Dispatches. And for a good one volume reference work there's David L. Anderson's The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War.
The movie eats. Sean Penn's romanticization of McCandless will actually make you realize how restrained Krakauer was in the book.
If you haven't read Into Thin Air, you should. One of the best books of its kind that I've read. A total sphincter-clincher from start to finish. Though certainly controversial, it's a lot easier to accept the subjectivity seeing as how Krakauer himself was right in the middle of the insanity.
I finished Let the Great World Spin not long after, a wonderful kalideoscope of voices centered around the story of a car wreck in early 70s NYC. Colum McCann. A great book.
Now I'm mired in grad school stuff. Sigh.
Heh. That book may or may not end up being a life changer for me. It's inspired me to drastically later my PhD research...we'll see if it actually pans out.
I just finished The Unnamed this weekend. It's not great and tapers off towards the end, but it's a good read and definitely worth picking up if you enjoyed TWCTTE so much.
Currently reading: the oral history of The Simpsons by John Ortved. After growing up on The Simpsons (born in '81) there's not too much I didn't know, but I could read about Whacking Day, well, all day.
Next: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
DB
Loved that, too. I've lived in Chicago for 30 years. Frederick Law Olmsted's landscaping is still awesome ground to play bocce.
I know someone who is one of those pay the big $, climb the big mountains tourist guys. He said the characterizations were not right, he knew several of the professionals in the book, but the risks, experiences, and overall process was about right. He hasn't climbed Everest and thinks he is too old to consider it.
Shortlisted.
I enjoyed it, but it had some very serious structural problems. It does seem to me that it may have won a Pulitzer for the same reason that Toni Morrison won the Nobel.
When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block,
Death of a Doxy by Rex Stout, &
Acquired Tastes by Peter Mayle (ok, not a mystery).
Highly recommend all three, although if you've never read a Nero Wolfe mstery before, you might want to start with something other than Death of a Doxy.
I admit my lack of Spanish may have crippled my enjoyment. But I disliked the informal narrative tone and the structural problems are as clear as day.
What I recall most from Under the Banner -- beside the fact that so-called plural marriage is largely just a scam (started by the original scam artist, Joseph Smith) in which old guys start raping teenaged girls before their victims are old enough to know what is happening is wrong and know how to get away from these beasts -- is how theologically similar Mormon fundamentalists are to Islamic fundamentalists. While their cultures are quite different, their ideas are not.
Haruki Murakami is my favorite current writer. His novels are at once totally realistic and wondrously surreal, and deal with the themes of alienation in the modern world in a thought provoking way.
I really liked Dance Dance Dance (I'd recommend that one to anyone wanting to try a novel of his), After Dark, Norwegian Wood, and Kafka on the Shore, although the Oedipal subtext in the latter is rather, um, extreme. But I’ve liked everything I’ve read of his.
Yeah, that's what I thought. I mean, it's not exactly bad. It's just not that great. And it is trying WAY too hard to be "cool."
I have that book on my bookshelf, but have not read it yet...I had him once at U of Alabama as a History professor, liked him a lot.
Currently reading Public Enemies which is already better than the the movie (I thought the movie sucked ass). Just finished reading In the Woods by Tana French, which was really good I thought.
oh and I always recommend anything by Tony Horwitz.
A book I recommend reading on Chinese history, focusing on Mao, is The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr. Li Zhisui. It gives you an idea how sick, literally and figuratively, Chairman Mao was.
The author was his personal physician for most of Mao's reign, save the times Mao forced him (and all educated Chinese) to become peasants. The story is well told. However, it's hard not to think when reading his book that the author was himself guilty of, if nothing else, doing nothing in the face of evil.
Yet, had he killed the bastard or just left Mao (and somehow survived), we wouldn't have his story. After Mao died (of ALS, by the way) and Dr. Li worked vigorously to keep Mao's rotting corpse from falling apart (which it did), Li eventually was permitted to go abroad and he made his way to Chicago.
Latest books: Under the Dome, Stephen King. Recommended, although it's huge and I read it on Kindle rather than lug around the actual book. Also, for baseball fans: Heart of the Game, about the death of Mike Coolbaugh. It's broader than that, and gets repetitive sometimes, but I choked up more than once.
Also to Cardboard Universe, by Christopher Miller. Glad to see the Pale Fire ref above, this is a great take on the Nabokov work.
Also, Woodhouse. The Wooster/Jeeves stories are a particular high point of the old E.L.
These two words could be used to describe every Michael Mann movie ever made.
The Magic Mountain is definitely too talky in places, but as a character study it's working fine.
Shakespeare's Language is catnip for a Shakespeare and etymology geek. I don't care who "really" wrote the plays; I just enjoy the words. Fun to watch Kermode's mind work.
When I was younger I used to read a lot of books by an author consecutively. I did this with Vollmann and Nabokov, to name a couple of writers already mentioned here. I'm not sure it's advisable, although I think it gave me an insight into their obsessions and world views. Authors repeat themselves from work to work, perhaps not surprisingly so. Vollmann stood out as the most obsessed and insane writer of the bunch. He's so prolific, it's incredible.
Going through the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and Timothy Zahn Star Wars books as of now, while I wait for Inverting The Pyramid to arrive on my mailbox.
I love Baker's work, and would recommend Dreamland to absolutely everyone. Also, I'd echo Rifkin's recommendation of the Mao biography.
I like what Vollmann I've read, although he's pretty bleak.
Did not like Oscar Wao. Ditched it after 100 pages which is my limit for books I don't like. Life's too short.
Going onto another track here, but if you've never taken a tour of Graceland Cemetery on the north side (Clark & Irving), you should; Burnham is one of many historical figures buried there, and many of the others actually engaged in a can-you-top-this monument building competition.
Really great. Same author wrote The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams, much different style and no, its not about Ted's head.
Anyone even contemplating reading Jay's rant?
Who's Jay?
I loved Then We Came To The End. I really hated The Unnamed. Way too repetitive for me.
Another book I liked recently: Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger. Very "goth" ghost story by the author of The Time Traveler's Wife.
Thanks for the tips on Devil in the White City, just picked it up. A few years ago, at the last-ever Aurora Book Festival, I got the author of Sin in the Second City to sign her book for my dad just before the title blew up. Nice Xmas gift.
Anyone with a Kindle or a Sony Reader looking to kill time on your lunch hour, I have a lot of free (public domain) pulp fiction on my non-porn site. (That's the fast version for Kindle browser, version with cover images is here.
For whatever reason, people on my site seem to really like Ed Lacy, a white dude who lived in Harlem and was an inspiration for Easy Rawlins. (The racial aspects, and the fact that Chester Himes, say, had to live in Paris, could be why Lacy's not so well known today.)
He has his moments, but I got Willeford, Paul Cain and others too. Have to put in a shout-out for Dan Marlowe, especially Backfire. Marlowe, a huge Chandler fan from the '50s and '60s, is not well-known today, but he also wrote smut, which still sells. (There are printed editions of most of the above-mentioned titles on Amazon, but who cares?)
And if it's any consolation, I'd much rather be killed in any kind of violent fashion than succumb to ALS. Mao went out pretty much the last way I'd want to go.
Now I'm reading Peter Biskind's biography of Warren Beatty. Biskind can be a little annoying, but Beatty is such a great character, and has led such an amazing life, that it's still highly entertaining.
I am curious, with all of the book readers here- does anybody find that using the Internet hurts their ability to concentrate when they are reading for pleasure? I saw an article on that about a year ago and was wondering if anybody had that issue. To be honest I do find it harder to concentrate on what I am reading than I did ten years ago.
I do, but I think that's more because I no longer have massive blocks of time to read like I used to. I just squeeze reading in when I can.
Anyway, recent books...I finished the History of the Peloponesian War which was surprising an excellent read one I got into the habit of skipping some of the particulars. The similarities between the Athenians and the good ol' US of A are pretty striking. I just finished The Big Short by Michael Lewis which was a fun read. Lewis is a really funny writer, something that he doesn't get enough credit for. And it's also nice to get confirmation that Goldman Sachs is as populated by as many a$$holes as I've always thought. Right now I'm meaning a collection of short stories issued by McSweeney's that was edited by Michael Chabon. It's hit and miss, like most anthologies, but the hits so far have been damn good (the misses have been pretty awful, though). I'm also wading my way through The Varieties of Religious Experience. I can't really offer an opinion yet as I don't think I've gotten to the meat of the book yet. Next up is Alice Munro's last book and I need to finish James Kelman's You've Got To Be Careful In the Land of The Free. Talk about needing concentration. That book ahs no chapters or breaks of any kind. If I keep reading Kelman I'm going to develop a Scottish accent. (Seriously, though, James Kelman is awesome. Forget that Irvine Welsh stuff and check Kelman out.)
It depends on the book. Reading books that require sustained concentration - like Gravity's Rainbow and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - is more difficult than it used to be for me. Books like the Krakauer ones mentioned above or the O'Brian books I just finished are still 100% pure effortless pleasure.
I don't blame the internet though, or not exclusively. Being married and owning a house provide ten times as much distraction as the 'net.
Which translation? I just picked up the Landmark edition from the library, and the addition of maps makes it a lot easier to follow. The writing is surprisingly engaging considering the translation is from 1874.
That book was terrible. One of the most disappointing books I've ever encountered. I suppose it makes sense given what happened to her own family udner Mao, but the bio is dreadful. I had to stop reading it, something I rarely do, it was so bad.
Ever heard the phrase "Give the devil his due"? Well, Jung Chang never has.
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