Author: Jerry West

2011, Little, Brown and Co.

Filed Under: Memoir, Nonfiction

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As a player, Jerry West won an Olympic gold medal and an NBA championship.He scored more points than any Laker not named Kobe Bryant ever has, and is in the Basketball Hall of Fame. As an executive, he put together the “Showtime” Lakers of the 80s, traded for Shaq and Kobe in the 90s, and turned the lowly Memphis Grizzlies into a playoff team in the 00s. He has been immortalized as a bronze statue in both Morgantown, WV (where he played in college) and Los Angeles. His silhouette became the NBA logo.

Despite this long, illustrious, and successful career, West is so emotionally crippled by loss that his autobiography, West by West, reads as if Glass Joe wrote it.

Truthfully, that’s a good thing. I can’t think of a sports autobiography more candid, more soul searching, or better written.

Autobiographies by former athletes usually contain some type of big (or maybe not so big) reveal. Jose Canseco admitted to using steroids, Pete Rose to betting on baseball, Andre Agassi to smoking meth, and Wilt Chamberlain to sleeping with 20,000 women. As such, West by West follows suit. Jerry West suffers from severe depression.

However most athlete revelations come across as hollow confessions. These confessions may be emotionally charged, but often they’re dealt with swiftly and tucked neatly between pages and pages of chest-thumping braggadocio. And this is where West’s book differs from other athlete authors: he doesn’t try to hide his admission among his career stats. Instead, West allows his depression to consume his book, much as it has consumed him since his childhood.

Take, for instance this conversation West recalls having with the widow of his friend and legendary Lakers announcer Chick Hearn:

“Chick never stopped talking about the time you hit that sixty-three-foot shot against the Knicks I the 1970 Finals.”

“Yeah, nobody does,” I said, “and that’s the problem. What they don’t talk about is that the shot only tied the score and that we lost in overtime, and we lost the series. There was no three-point line back then.”

Enough time has passed from the 1970 finals that most aficionados remember West’s buzzer beater for what it was—a no-doubt, 63-foot dagger that everyone knew would drop. Some even recognize it as the single best shot in the game’s history. Yet West hates talking about it; one gets the impression that he is ashamed it is part of his past. Should you corner him on the street and ask him about, not only will he remind you that the Lakers lost the game and the series, but he will probably remind you that he lost 8 of the 9 NBA championships in which he played, including 6 to the Boston Celtics in the 60s.

I was impressed by the amount West was willing to delve into the emotional root of his trouble instead of simply narrating his turbulent past. As such, West by West has a much deeper, much more philosophical core, which in turn results in a much more rewarding experience for the reader. I can’t think of another sports memoir like it.

That’s not to say that West doesn’t gloss over some of his faults. He mentions his marital infidelity and the deterioration of his first marriage almost matter-of-factly. His temper—which routinely pushes him to threaten to resign—is swept under the rug of, “that’s just the way I am.” And in a less candid memoir, those omissions would be alarming, but here, they are a non-issue.

In another deft choice, West allowed his co-writer, Jonathan Coleman, to separately interview key figures in West’s life. And while I assume West had final say in which parts of these interview to incorporate, the interviews help to cement the image West portrays of himself.

Some believe that the NBA chose Jerry West’s silhouette to be the symbol of the league because they wanted future basketball players to play the way West did. While I’m not sure about them emulating his playing style, I do know that if they decide to write a memoir, they would be wise to follow West’s example.

Similar Reads: A Sense of Where You Are by John McPhee is the greatest book about a man who happens to be a basketball player ever written. For a good, typical sports memoir try Ronnie Lott’s Total Impact or Mickey Mantel’s The Mick.

[A review copy was provided.]

Author: John Paul Stevens

2011, Little, Brown and Co.

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoir.

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In case you hadn’t heard, it’s Supreme Court Season again, which means our nation’s top judges are now hearing cases that will affect your life. Holding top billing, we have The State of Florida (and 26 other co-signing states) v. the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which will test the constitutionality of last year’s controversial healthcare overhaul. But this is only one case of many, and, as Atlantic legal correspondent Garrett Epps points out, the majority of the cases the court will hear this session “have huge practical impact but are devoid of drama.”

You might say the same thing about Five Chiefs. Without an ounce of sensationalism or any inflammatory rhetoric, it offers an insider’s perspective on the deliberative processes of our nation’s foremost deliberating body. Stevens presents a historical survey of the Court under each of its seventeen Chief Justices, focusing on the five who sat during the years he was personally associated with the Court, from his clerkship in 1947 until his resignation in 2010.

It’s an eye-opening look at how the Court actually works, from the influence of the Chief’s management style to the long-standing traditions meant to foster cordiality between people who are paid to argue with each other. Five Chiefs won’t keep you up at night, but it will make you think about how we decide some of the most important questions facing the country today… so maybe it will keep a you up at night.

What impresses me most about Five Chiefs–especially in today’s political climate–is its tone. Whether discussing the Court’s Christmas party or his 90-page dissent in Citizens United (which held that limitations on corporate campaign contributions violated First Amendment protections), Stevens is evenhanded and reasonable, even affable. He has nothing but respect for his colleagues and the institutions and traditions of the Court.

He does, of course, have his own opinions about the Court’s work, and he makes no effort to hide them. He spares a few paragraphs to rehash his thinking on Citizens United and some other notable cases, like Jones v. Clinton or Bush v. Gore, and he makes room to discuss his objections to the originalist interpretation of the Constitution flourishing in the Robert’s Court:

Though we do, and should, rely heavily on the wisdom of individual judges in making countless decisions interpreting and applying rules of law, judges are merely amateur historians. Their interpretations of past events, like their interpretations of legislative history, are often debatable and sometimes simply wrong. Historical analysis is usually relevant and interesting, but it is only one of many guides to sound adjudication.

On the whole, though, Five Chiefs has no obvious agenda. The book isn’t trying to sell readers on Stevens’s judicial philosophy or convince anyone to go back and retry cases where he dissented. His judicial philosophy and his dissents are all included, but they’re secondary to the main task of relating the history of the Court, its leaders, its decisions, and its impact on our republic.

When discussing specific decisions, Stevens doesn’t shy away from a little legal speak. It can take time to parse some of his sentences if you don’t have any training in contract law:

There, the Court held that it was proper to review such cases unless the state court made it clear that there was no federal issue to be decided by including in its opinion an unambiguous statement that its decision rested on an adequate and independent state rule.

But if you can read sentences like that without running off screaming into the night searching for a comma, then there’s nothing here that should turn you off from Stevens’s memoir. For anyone interested in history, politics, government, or the Constitution, I’d recommend putting in what little extra effort some of the subject matter requires. Five Chiefs is well worth it.

Similar reads: for a look at Stevens in someone else’s words, check out John Paul Stevens: An Independent Life by Bill Barnhart.

[A review copy was provided.]

2011

Filed Under: Memoir, Nonfiction, Short-run

Get a copy from Harvard Book Store

A self-published memoir by a twenty-something detailing that horrible, floaty time between college graduation and embarking on some sort of path into adulthood? You can’t get much lower on the list of books I’d expect to like. Despite that, when Jess Martin released her book through the Harvard Bookstore (where we run the paperback versions of our own literary ventures), I supported a local artist* and read it all the same. I’m really glad that I did. It is, by any measure, a very good read.

The plot, much like the point in her life Martin relates, appears pretty directionless at first. She writes about finishing college and returning home to her parents, where she intended to collect herself before stepping out into the real world. But she finds herself stymied and winds up napping on the couch and emailing the occasional resume.

As the book goes on, Open-Eyed Sneeze reveals a lot of gears turning: it’s at once wacky family drama, a coming of age from a second childhood, and a microcosmic metaphor, all speaking to a generation of talented young adults for whom college degrees are inflated and the job market is deflated.

It’s also funny. This is risky business, as there’s nothing more annoying than a book that continually tosses up taters for jokes and expects the reader to laugh as they continually fall flat. Luckily, Martin’s wit, while sometimes dry and acerbic, has a gentleness and graciousness that softens the edges. It works well:

It’s no longer enough to have a job, now it should be the job of my dreams.Which is what, exactly? I have no idea. I’m never working in my dreams. In my dreams I’m made of Fluff and can eat my own face. I’ll just take a regular job, thanks.

Humor alone can rarely carry a book, of course. Here it works as a reinforcement to a strong narratorial voice, one that somehow manages to be authorial in its timidity:

The difficulty in saying what I want lies in the fear of never having it, or fear of having it but not liking it. I bet that’s true for a lot of people…We’re a society obsessed with success and the first to ridicule those who find it. Thus, we try not to shout out what we really want so as to avoid anyone hearing it and holding us to it.

So she muses, and she plays, and she naps. She spends time with her grandmother who continually force-feeds her, and with her parents who think she still has a shot at being an astronaut. She’s back at home, afraid of being thought a failure. But for once she’s not doing what she’s supposed to do, and thus a sense of individuality seems to blossom. (Though given the idiosyncrasies she relates, I very much doubt uniqueness was ever a problem for Martin.)

Most importantly for a young memoirist, she’s quite insightful–see her tongue-in-cheek comparison of “Modern Artist vs. Realist”–and has an uncanny knack for drawing connections between her occasionally tangential musings and the bigger thought arc at work.

Trying to expound upon the arrested development, or failure to launch, or any other cliched term for the oft-delayed transition from child to adult, without coming across as whiny or, worse, arrogant, is no easy task. Always offered trophies and promised the world, many of us left college still sporting training wheels and expected to place in a bike race. But of course there is no on-switch for being an adult. For Jess Martin, like many others, all she could do was wander and wonder. As many have discovered, that’s an important step in the process. I’m glad Jess had the bright idea to document it.

Similar Reads: The Voting Booth After Dark (Garcia)

*[Disclaimer: I know Jess Martin. Our acquaintance is not of the variety where it would have an influence on my opinion of this book.]

Author: Grant Morrison

2011, Spiegel & Grau

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction, Graphic Novel

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In Supergods, a nonfiction exploration of superheroes as a fictive phenomenon, comic book writer and artist Grant Morrison argues that Superman is humanity’s greatest accomplishment. From anyone else that might be considered a cynical statement; of all the scientific and artistic achievements, across centuries, nothing scores higher than a gaudily costumed, flying strongman born in a medium that’s not even 100 years old?

But Morrison is absolutely sincere—he contends that superhero comics are not just entertainment for children and fodder for blockbuster movie adaptations, but windows into a separate reality populated by gods that fight intensely pitched battles for good, of which Superman is the best and brightest.

Morrison’s is a delightfully optimistic premise, doubly refreshing when considered next to the daily articles and blog posts about the imminent death of the comic book industry. Those writers worry (rightfully so) about relevance, demographics, and market share, while Morrison knows that the stakes are actually much higher. How appropriate that a book about the history and potential of superheroes aims to save the world.

Writing about Alain Resnais’s notorious experimental film Muriel, critic Gary Giddins states that “a reputation for difficulty is almost impossible to undo.” That’s true of individual texts, like Muriel or Finnegans Wake or Metal Machine Music, but also of entire careers. And perhaps no other comic creator’s career is as obscured by received wisdom about difficulty or inscrutability as Grant Morrison’s.

Part of the “British invasion” of writers in the early 80s that also included Garth Ennis, Neil Gaiman, and Alan Moore, Morrison’s interest in surrealism, cut-up narrative techniques, fringe science, and the occult marked him early as a creator whose comics couldn’t necessarily be digested in a single reading. As a result, Morrison is labeled a “challenging” writer, and his work often gets dismissed as “weird for weirdness’s sake,” or deliberate provocations meant to confuse and irritate readers.

What his critics so often overlook is Morrison’s solid storytelling instincts—his characters are never ambiguous, and his plots follow an internal logic that rarely wavers (even if they don’t resemble conventional plots). Supergods is just as readable, perhaps more so considering Morrison has nothing to gain thematically or dramatically by employing unusual structures or oblique dialogue. He keeps his prose light and often quite funny, reflecting the boyish enthusiasm that informs his thesis. Even when discussing difficult concepts like fifth-dimensional beings (more on that later), the text stays lucid and expansive, as Morrison clearly wants readers to follow along.

The structure of Supergods also contributes to that readability. It’s part history book, part treatise, and part memoir, with all three modes braided into a single coherent narrative. For instance, Morrison folds his recollections of childhood and his writing career into the history of superheroes, discussing the cultural impact of the Silver Age Kennedy-era superheroes along with his own first experiences with comic books as a boy growing up in Govan, Scotland.

Later, he breaks down the first page of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic series Watchmen, while expanding on how the deconstructed, realistic approach runs contrary to the very nature of superhero comics and their paper-god status. This structure is also key to the book’s appeal; there’s no shortage of superhero histories, but precious few with such a strongly defined point of view and direct access to a celebrated creator’s life story.

In fact, many of the most interesting passages in Supergods concern Morrison’s take on his own career, particularly his self-willed transformation from wallflower to bon vivant. Directly inspired by superhero comics, Morrison turned himself into the kind of person he often wrote about—confident, curious, open to every possible experience. Of those experiences, the most likely to get attention in reviews of the book is Morrison’s encounter with fifth dimensional beings in Kathmandu. I won’t even try to describe what happened—any attempt to summarize or condense the story inevitably leads to distortion and incoherence—suffice to say that it’s a surreal and highly entertaining tale that requires a bit of lateral thinking to comprehend.

It’s also the story detractors most often point to as evidence that Morrision is crazy, or a binge pscyhedelic drug user, or a fabulist who embellishes his biography to accumulate counter-culture cred. Morrison himself acknowledges that there are a number of ways to interpret what happened in Kathmandu, and doesn’t quibble with those who maintain it’s nothing more than a particularly memorable acid trip—what’s important, he argues, is how the experience changed his worldview and led to a fervid creative period he’s maintained for almost twenty years.

There’s an almost spiritual quality to the Kathmandu story, and to much of Supergods, but it’s a spirituality rooted in creativity. Morrison is aware that superheroes aren’t real people, that they only exist on paper (in fact, that’s a key point in his criticism of Alan Moore’s take on superheroes, specifically Watchmen—sure to be another flashpoint for controversy), but he maintains that those same characters can have a real, substantial impact on our reality, just as we can have an impact on theirs.

You can’t pray to Superman and expect him to save you from a burning building, but perhaps through fiction and storytelling you can interact with him, and draw hope from his example. For Morrison, superheroes don’t just represent warmth and bravery and loyalty and love; they’re a way to directly access to those very same qualities in ourselves, which too often go undiscovered and unexpressed.

Recommended reading: All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely; The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison and various artists; Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, by Gerard Jones

[A review copy of this book was provided by the publisher.]

Author: Bob Mould

2011 Little, Brown

Filed under: Memoir

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If you aren’t familiar with Bob Mould, listen to Hüsker Dü’s cover of The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”—the breathtaking speed, anger, and emotional muscularity of that performance will give you a good idea of the cultural shorthand that’s been attached to Mould’s name since the mid 80s. Not that he didn’t earn his reputation for peevishness and volatility honestly—he admits as much in this autobiography (note the subtitle: The Trail of Rage and Melody).

Mould and co-writer Michael Azerrad clearly haven’t set out to dispel the image of Mould as a temperamental rocker, but they do argue that the black-and-white image—a 21-year-old wailing his anger and frustration, throttling his guitar as he fronts a legendary post-punk band—that’s just one slide in the carousel. The Bob Mould of See A Little Light is candid and self-effacing, and eager to come to terms with his every incarnation. In fact, Light has more in common with Mould’s songwriting, which is often aggressive but just as likely to be tender and vulnerable.

The book’s principle arc concerns Mould’s sexuality, particularly his transition from a closeted gay man in the sometimes socially non-progressive indie music scene to a very public and very active member of the gay community who also happens to be a musician. And while sexuality isn’t the lens through which every chapter of Mould’s life is addressed, he does continually return to the question of whether being a bit closed off and sometimes militantly private affected the way he behaved as a member of Hüsker Dü, or his reaction to friend and manager David Savoy’s suicide, or even the success of his second band, Sugar. So it makes sense that the reading becomes far breezier about three quarters of the way through, when, following his public outing in a Spin Magazine interview and the dissolution of a long-term relationship, Mould chooses to enter fully into the gay community and begins leading a happier, more productive life. His narrative voice becomes lighter, and he tells more stories but with less detail, as if the years since that transition are pleasant enough that extra scrutiny or investigation doesn’t feel as necessary. That isn’t to say that the last few chapters aren’t still interesting, but just that the stakes feel lower, more like a genial conversation than a drive toward the end of a story.

But Mould hasn’t sanded off all of his corners and become just another elder of the indie world, and his cutting intellect is nowhere more evident than in his matter-of-fact assessment of the discord within and dissolution of Hüsker Dü. The acrimony that ended that band is well documented by music writers and historians elsewhere (including co-author Michael Azerrad’s excellent Our Band Could Be Your Life) so the details of the break-up aren’t new. Still, it’s exciting in a voyeuristic way to read Mould’s take on the conversation in drummer Grant Hart’s kitchen that ended the band, to find that twenty-three years later his contempt and disappointment haven’t abated, even if he’s matured beyond active participation in a feud.

Maybe it reflects poorly on me as a reader and a fan that I responded better to the sections where Mould revisits those beds of emotional quicksand than the pleasant denoument, but I think it also speaks to the nature of autobiography and memoir. We know that Bob Mould turns out okay in the end, not only because his foreward says so, but because he’s written the book in the first place, so any dramatic tension is replaced by a desire to see just how low the lows got.

That said, I do think Mould succeeds in creating a multifaceted narrative voice in See A Little Light, moving between introspection and exposition with ease, never straying too far into the twin pitfalls of overly frothy humor and melodrama. I particularly enjoyed the chapter detailing his brief stint with the creative team behind World Championship Wrestling, a career detour that only seems odd if you don’t also know that Mould’s wrestling fandom dates back to his childhood. He doesn’t narrate those sections any differently than he does, say, the passages on recording Copper Blue or touring with Hüsker Dü; the light bits get a touch of humor, and the serious bits are analyzed and plumbed for meaning.

It’s that evenness of approach that sells Mould’s thesis—if disproportionate space were given over to the Hüsker Dü years, or his solo work, it would be harder to buy the idea that all of his various identities are important—but it also leaves the reading a little flat, particularly when delving into the creative process. Mould does discuss his songwriting and reveals some of the stories and experiences that inform specific songs, but much of the discussion of writing feels too vague. Maybe preserving some of the mystery of the creative process is good, but it feels like an oversight, particularly juxtaposed with the dozens of pages dedicated to various tours that start to feel a bit redundant.

My favorite chapter of Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life deals with Hüsker Dü, but it always felt unfinished—Azerrad ends the chapter just after the band signed to Warner Brothers and then imploded, but abandons narratives about the individual band members, particularly Mould and his sexuality, that made the chapter more interesting and relatable than those covering other bands. See A Little Light takes that thread and follows it backwards and forwards, showing where it frays, becomes knotted, loops back around on itself, and eventually binds with others.

Similar reads: Our Band Could Be Your Life, by Michael Azerrad; Deflowered, by Jon Ginoli; Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds

[A review copy was provided.]

Author: Patton Oswalt

2011, Scribner

Filed under: Memoir, Humor

Get it at Powell’s

Anybody familiar with Patton Oswalt’s stand-up comedy career knows the man can spin a good yarn. His act is peppered with seemingly unrehearsed tangents, thoughtful wordplay, and absurdist ramblings that could be cobbled together and written down to form, at the very least, a collection of cracked-out short stories.

Oswalt’s success as a comedian relies on his ability to acutely observe the human condition and his willingness to root around in his own neurotic life, but it’s always a question whether the funnyman’s gift can function within the confines of a page as well as atop the stage in a dimly lit club. Oswalt answers well: the man can write, and his debut book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is hopefully the first of many more to come.

A word of warning: those expecting a light-hearted, funnyman’s romp may want to browse further along in the humor section of their local bookstore. Make no mistake, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is a very funny book, but like Oswalt’s stand-up, the laughs come from a dark and truthful place. The book is a series of autobiographical essays, broken up from time to time by less serious “filler” material (a satirical wine tasting menu, punch-up notes on a fictional, idiotic comedy, etc). The essays detail Oswalt’s childhood and adolescence in the Washington D.C. suburb of Sterling, Virginia, his rocky road to a successful stand-up career, and his life in the entertainment-biz bubble of Los Angeles.

Nowhere in the book’s criminally short 192 pages does Oswalt forget that he’s a comedian. However, couched within tales of suburban wage-slave woe lurks a clear agenda. These memoirs are written with the express warning that our lives are miserably short, and becoming inert or satisfied with mediocrity is a criminally self-destructive act. Oswalt unflinchingly exposes his feelings towards those middling souls he has encountered on his journey to artistic fulfillment (equal parts contempt and heartache), but Zombie Spaceship Wasteland never feels angry or didactic.

In a chapter titled “Peter Renfola,” Oswalt discusses his complicated relationship with a mentally unhinged uncle, who, despite his own personal failings (or perhaps because of them), helped the author see past the neighborhoods he was born into. In a pivotal scene, Uncle Peter reads young Patton “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe:

…he read it like a little kid discovering it, making a poem about adult regret and loneliness seem like the greatest thing to a kid who thought coolness acted like the Fonz, sounded like Kiss, and rode a motorcycle like Evil Knievel.

It’s through passages like these that Oswalt brings new life to common coming-of-age memoir tropes. He continues:

Uncle Pete was the first one ever to heave open the gates that sealed ancient pages and make me suspect there were worlds within and without the world I was in. That there were worlds outside of the time I was living in. All of this he carried against his will, in his head. But unlike the other adults, with their resentments and their anxiousness or anger, he seemed eternally, uncontrollably entertained. I really envied him.

As the chapter concludes, the disparity in potential between the worlds raging in Uncle Pete’s head and his own insubstantial lot in life grows, affecting the young Oswalt most profoundly when he is informed of his favorite relative’s demise.

At this point in my life, I’d traveled over a fourth of the planet…I was still hungry to travel and move and create and connect—and I always will be—but I’ve got to admit something. There’s a little bit of Pete in me…I still don’t agree with spending a life the way Pete did, but I understand it and respect it. Who knows how many lives have been saved and villains vanquished by those who sat still?

Simultaneously conversational and elegant, Oswalt’s voice engages at a level that’s both persuasive and informative. Describing one of many revelations that led to his exodus from Virginia, Oswalt writes:

It’s only now, as I write it, on another coast, that I see what the time in the echo chamber of the ticket booth did. There were future musicians standing at the back of Fugazi shows, watching the band and the crowd and drinking in the pulsing thrum. They galvanized their identities while, at the same time, they bled faceless into the crowd, the band, the walls, and the memory of the evening. The book and the cassette tape—they did the same thing for me. People will find transformation and transcendence in a McDonald’s hash brown if it’s all they’ve got.

Encapsulated in these sentences is the overriding theme of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland: inspiration comes for us in the smallest of ways, and we have the power to self-start and improve our situation beyond our meager beginnings. While the memoir trope of “if I did it, so can you!” is as tried and true as they come, Oswalt’s examination feels fresh and encouraging, and in uncertain economic times, fledgling creative minds may find solace, and yes, inspiration, in the author’s words.

Similar reads: On Writing, by Steven King; Fargo Rock City, by Chuck Klosterman

Author: Dirk Hayhurst

2010, Citadel Press

Filed Under: Memoir, Nonfiction.

Get a copy at Powell’s.

Dirk Hayhurst was a pro baseball player. A long reliever in the San Diego Padres’ farm system, he was mostly a career minor leaguer. This memoir is an honest and quite fun look at a life that is often not fun. Hayhurst is slightly eccentric, a not-that-jocky dork (just google “Garfoose”). For much of the book, he is more an observer than a participant, which would feel weird if we didn’t know he was a tee-totaling, twenty-something virgin during the majority of this story–not at all the type of guy you imagine in a farm league locker room.

Although the book opens with a minor league postseason series and a few key games and plays punctuate the book, the majority of the memoir occurs off the field–sitting in the bullpen, in a team hotel, or aboard a cross-country bus. Near the beginning of the book, we see Hayhurst in the off-season after a bad year in a AA league, living on his curmudgeonly grandmother’s floor and working at a local batting cage in order to afford time to work on his slider. Throughout the Gospels we learn more about Hayhurst’s unenviable home and family. His father is disabled and emotionally unresponsive; his brother is an abusive drunk; his mother is a frazzled victim caught in the middle. Mostly estranged from them, Hayhurst struggles though the minor leagues with middling success and a craving for his familial approval seemingly his only motivator to keep trying.

It’s hard not to sympathize with Hayhurst, perhaps all the more so because he’s often an outsider. I can’t help but wonder what his fellow players and managers think of him in the wake of being mentioned in his book. He writes about them candidly–and is less than flattering–but is also deferential and affectionate. Still, he’s a likable narrator and writes with a playful and self-deprecating tone. While reflecting on a period when he considered quitting the game and ending his career, Hayhurst touches on some deep stuff. This memoir is a soul-search conducted from the corners of musky locker rooms.

Luckily, the stuff that goes on in those is damn entertaining. Bullpen Gospels is full of colorful characters and their antics. There are jokes and pranks perpetuated by guys with names like Slap-nuts and Blade. There are a few congresses of Kangaroo Court that are particularly humorous, and plenty of oversexed locker room banter to keep readers laughing. Recognizable baseball personalities such as Trevor Hoffman, Chase Headley, and Kevin Towers make appearances as well.

The hijinks and jokes are fun to read and all, but at its heart, this is a genuinely strong memoir. Hayhurst paces his narrative nicely, striking a fine balance between anecdote, reflection, and introspection. As Dirk begins to pitch better and turn his career around (the majority of the book occurs in a season that began for him in A ball and ended with a AA championship), his chances at a big league call-up improve. It is then the deeper themes become more readily recognizable. Hayhurst learns, then relates, that even when baseball consumes a player’s (or fan’s) life, baseball is not life. Nor is living merely for the approval of others. Only when he started doing things for himself did he really break out of his shell.

Fun, honest, and engaging, The Bullpen Gospels is one of the best baseball books I’ve ever read, and very much a Great Read.

Similar Reads: Into the Silent Land (Broks)

Author: Andre Dubus III

2011, Norton

Filed Under: Literary, Memoir, Nonfiction

Get a copy of Townie at Powell’s

I had well-defined expectations about Townie before I’d ever actually opened it. I’d read too much about it going in, about the violence  and the street fighting, the one-punch knockouts that sent men to the hospital choking down their own teeth. Even the cover and the flap copy will lead you to believe that this book is about a street-tough kid punching his way through the world.

But Andre Dubus III’s memoir is much more than a fighter’s tale. It’s about filling the voids in one’s life, voids left primarily by absent parents. It’s about the wounds violence creates; about the emotion, or lack of emotion required to be violent towards another human being. It’s about the difference between creativity and destruction. And ultimately, it’s about redemption, not only for the memoirist, but for his father as well.

In other words, it wasn’t at all what I expected, but it turned out to be a whole lot more.

The older Dubus (for clarity, I’ll call the father Dubus, and the son, the author of Townie, Andre) plays a large role in Townie—it would be fair to say that his presences and absences in young Andre’s life do as much to move the narrative forward as does Andre’s penchant for violence. Andre could have been upset with his father—Dubus divorced his wife and basically abandoned his family—and yet Andre is even-handed when portraying his father’s shortcomings.

In one of the book’s more poignant scenes, Dubus attempts to have a catch with teenage Andre while the two grill outside Dubus’s house where Andre doesn’t live. While they are able to find a ball, neither has a glove. Not only is it the first time Andre has ever played catch, it is the first time he has ever even heard of baseball. Dubus—an ardent baseball fan—is stunned at this strange gap in his son’s development, and a bit ignorant that he is mostly at fault. Yet the memoirist writes those pages without judgment, letting the moment stand for itself, sad and powerful. That power would have been lost had Andre used the moment to tell us how he felt.

The last quarter of the book centers on Dubus’s tragic accident.* In those pages, we see Dubus—an avid runner who could have been devastated by the amputation of his leg and permanent confinement to a wheelchair—deepen his faith and become a more attentive father, grandfather, and friend. Again this is a deft choice as Andre uses his father’s redemption as a parent to mirror his own redemption from violence. It’s admirable, in fact, that he writes of his father with such love, forgiveness, and empathy.

But that isn’t to say there is no violence. There is plenty of skull crushing in Townie, plenty of knockouts and bloody faces. And Andre portrays the adrenaline-fueled experience of fighting quite accurately. If you’ve never hit someone, the seconds before you do feel a lot like this:

Somewhere in the shadows of myself, a small quiet voice said, That’s enough. Just leave it here. Don’t do anything unless they do… But the man was sneering up at me or maybe he wasn’t, maybe it was fear I saw, or appeasement, but I’d forgot how hard it was to stop the movement once it started, and I didn’t want to stop it anyway.

The violence and destruction in Andre’s life takes a deep emotional toll, and he isn’t afraid to mine those emotional depths for meaning.Yet his self-examination never comes across as a preachy warning or as extended, superfluous navel-gazing. Throughout it all, Andre is an apt and entertaining guide out of the depths in which he once found himself.

Townie is a well-crafted memoir written by an author who knows when to speak and when to let the story stand for itself. And there are knockouts, too. It’s well worth the read.

Similar reads: All Souls, by Michael Patrick MacDonald. I also found myself wanting to read the work of the older Dubus. Readers of Townie will find the older Dubus’s short story The Winter Father and his essay Witness of interest.

___

*Dubus pulled over on I-93 to help a car stranded in the middle of the road. He helped the car’s two passengers, a young man and woman, out of their car. Dubus then tried to flag down an oncoming vehicle which inexplicably swerved towards the young man and woman. Dubus pushed the woman out of the way, but the car struck both Dubus and the young man. The young man died instantly; Dubus was severely injured.

Author: George W. Bush

2010, Crown Publishers

Filed Under: Memoirs, Nonfiction

Two things immediately came to my mind after reading George W. Bush’s Decision Points: a joke and an ancient Chinese novel Journey to the West (His-yu Chi – Xiyou ji). First the joke: once a professional consultant/adviser came across a shepherd with a large herd of sheep. He said to the shepherd, ‘I can tell exactly how many sheep you have.’ The shepherd apparently amazed at the claim asked him to go ahead but the consultant/adviser said that he will charge one of the sheep as a fee for telling him the exact number of his sheep. The shepherd gave it a thought and agreed to the deal. The consultant/adviser then took out his laptop and portable internet connection, got connected to the satellite monitoring system, browsed for the area where they were present, zoomed-in on the herd of sheep, counted them, and after consuming an hour or so told the shepherd that he had 139 sheep. The shepherd confirmed the number and the consultant/adviser took one of the sheep as a fee for the service. The shepherd then said to the consultant/adviser, ‘if I tell you your profession can I have my sheep back?’ Curious, the consultant/adviser agreed. The shepherd said, ‘You must a consultant or an adviser somewhere.’ The consultant/adviser was totally startled and asked the shepherd, ‘Yes I am a consultant/adviser, but how do you know?’ ‘Two reasons.’ The shepherd replied. ‘First, you created a job for yourself when there was in fact no need of it and told me something which I already knew. And the second is that you don’t know a shit about your job, now give my dog back.’

Thomas Cleary, in his introduction to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, mentions Journey to the West – one of the four most extraordinary books of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). It is a novel with a magical monkey as its central character. The monkey establishes a territory and founds a monkey civilization. When confronted with a devil, he is strong enough to overpower the devil and manages to steal the devil’s sword. Back home, he starts training his brethren in swordsmanship and also teaches his subjects how to make toy weapons. Then a thought runs across the mind of this magical monkey king and he wonders about the response of his neighbouring nations to their play. He concludes that his neighbours may assume that his nation is planning to wage a war on them and, therefore, initiate a pre-emptive strike against them. In that case, the monkey king thought, his nation would have to go to an actual war with fake weapons. He, thus, starts stuffing his arsenal with real weapons.

After going through Decision Points one can draw strong parallels between the thought process of the above-mentioned monkey king and that of George Bush’s. His decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes have left the world much unsafe than it was before his presidency. Bush’s decisions have not only severely affected the lives of the people of countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan ordinary Americans have also received a heavy thumping. If I were an American it would have given me an extremely sickening feeling that my hard-earned money is first used to ‘attack’ countries thousands of miles away so that I may remain ‘safe’ and once a country is destroyed it has to be rebuilt, again by using my taxes.

One thing which Decision Points makes amply clear is that Bush neither likes to reason arguments not likes to listen to them. He does not like weighing pros and cons of an issue before arriving at a decision and yet arrives at ‘logical conclusions.’ ‘The only logical conclusion was that he [Saddam Hussein] had something [weapons of mass destruction] to hide, something so important that he was willing to go to war for it.’ ‘There was only one logical explanation: Iran was enriching uranium to use in a bomb.’ But the ‘logically concluded’ presence of WMDs could not be corroborated with facts once Iraq had been invaded and Saddam Hussein tried and killed. Soon after the 9/11 attacks Bush called a national security meeting and declared ‘we are at war against terror. From this day forward, this is the new priority of our administration.’ Unlike a visionary statesman he did not bother to ask the reasons of attack, the motives of the attackers, and should the US goes to war against the attackers what would be its likely impact on the peace of the world and especially on the lives of innocent American who had voted him to the office of the president. His approach is not that of appreciating a particular situation but that of situating his appreciation. He arrives at a ‘logical conclusion’ and then asks his consultants and advisers to build arguments in favour of his ‘logical conclusion.’

In his memoirs Bush tries to portray himself as some kind of James Bond. ‘He [Andy Card] told me there had been a bomb threat to the White House. The Secret Service had relocated the vice president, and they wanted to evacuate me, too. I told the agents to double-check the intelligence and send home as many of the White House staff as possible. But I was staying put. I was not going to give the enemy the pleasure of seeing me hustled around to different locations again.’ Like most accounts written by public figures Decision Points is also self-serving.

An important aspect not only of Bush’s personality but of the American system of government which comes to light after reading this book is the dictatorial powers of the president. A president has to select his team to run the administration and if someone like Bush selects his advisers and consultants who had been telling the exact number of sheep to shepherds all their lives he cannot be questioned. Most of these advisers and consultants are understandably from the elite colleges and universities and as William Deresiewicz argues in his brilliant essay, The disadvantages of elite education, it is because of this elite education that they are ‘incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.’ So a president like Bush would pick up only those who talk and think like him, those who arrive at ‘logical conclusions’ without bothering to listen to and weigh arguments in favour of and against a certain issue. And if someone dares disagree with the ‘logical conclusions’ they can always be fired.

A very important trait of Bush’s personality which has come to light after the publication of Decision Points is his dishonesty and his remarkable ability to unintelligently expose it. Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post has highlighted sixteen instances of plagiarism in Bush’s book. It leaves one amazed at Bush’s chutzpah or probably he deluded himself into thinking that his plagiarism would go unnoticed just like the way he deluded himself that military action in Afghanistan and Iraq would bring freedom and democracy. A particular example of his dishonesty apart from lifting passages from others’ books is where he writes about the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear program. The NIE confirmed that Iran had operated a secret nuclear program but in 2003 ‘Tehran halted its nuclear weapon program.’ To Bush this was a bolt from the blue because he had already ‘logically concluded’ that Iran would have to be attacked militarily. ‘The NIE didn‘t just undermine diplomacy. It also tied my hands on the military side. There were many reasons I was concerned about undertaking a military strike on Iran, including its uncertain effectiveness and the serious problems it would create for Iraq‘s fragile young democracy. But after the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?’ (emphasis added) In this utterly unintelligent manoeuvre he amply demonstrates that his plans of attacking Iran had more to do with some other ‘reasons’ and less with the nuclear weapons. Of course, politicians are not expected to be absolutely transparent but what makes Bush stand out is his ability to expose, albeit unwittingly, his own hypocrisy.

A very important conclusion which can be made after going through the book is that the so-called top intelligence agencies in the world have intelligence only in their names. All the major agencies were convinced that Iraq has WMDs before the invasion. This is quite remarkable that not even a single intelligence agency of Europe of America with their astronomical budgets and state-of-the-art gadgetry was able to have a difference of opinion regarding the WMDs. Or was it that Bush wanted them to show the WMDs in Iraq so that it could be attacked?

Under the garb of freedom and democracy the US is structurally colonising countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan but at the same time these expansionist ambitions of the Americans are showing their ineptness too. It is the lack of understanding of social, cultural, and political dynamics of these countries which makes it difficult for the American decision and policy makers to arrive at a decision which is beneficial to the ordinary Americans.

Decision Points should be read by the ordinary Americans, despite its banal prose and clichés, so that they may know the thought process behind the decisions of a former president. The consequences of many of these decisions would probably outlast the lives of a vast majority of Americans. They should know that while one of their former presidents did whatever caught his fancy he did not like to be judged. ‘Whatever the verdict on my presidency, I‘m comfortable with the fact that I won‘t be around to hear it.’

Similar Reads: A Journey, by Tony Blair.

Author: Mitt Romney

St. Martins Press, 2010

Filed under: Nonfiction, Memoirs

[Reviewer's note: As with my previous review of a political book, I want to be honest. I am not blind to the fact that my opinions of this book are skewed by my political beliefs.]

I wanted to like this book.

No Apology is Mitt Romney’s attempt to express who he is politically, and he makes that intention clear in the second paragraph of his introduction. Of his three political campaigns he writes:

each time, when the campaign was over, I felt that I hadn’t done an adequate job communicating all that I had intended to say…. This book gives me a chance to say more than I did during my campaign.

And the truth is, I believe him. It’s impossible to deny this guy’s qualifications. In 1994, he came points away from stealing a MA Senate seat from Ted Kennedy. As the CEO for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, he inherited a financially and politically disastrous situation and turned it into a success. And he more or less did the same as Governor of Massachusetts, turning Jane Swift’s mess into a successful, one-term tenure. Had he not decided to forgo a second term in order to make a serious run at the ’08 presidency, he’d probably still be governor. Politically, he had something special. He was Scott Brown back when Scott Brown was just some dude in the state chambers who once dangled balls for a Cosmo spread.

But that Mitt Romney isn’t the one who showed up to the ’08 primary. Instead, he came across as stiff GOP avatar who couldn’t distinguish himself from a pack of surefire also rans.

So I was rooting for No Apology, rooting for the likable and charismatic Mitt to resurrect himself. Instead, I got the ’08 stiff.

No Apology is not really a memoir. It’s not a personal account of running for office. It’s not very personal in any way. It is a Manifesto, and I’m sure the well-educated Romney would have labeled it as such if that word was not so closely linked to the word “communist.” It’s about as exciting as chewing on a dry rag, and you probably already know everything this book says. Its table of contents reads as a list of current hot-button political topics. Each chapter reads as you would expect it—the same stale GOP rhetoric with a few personal memories in between. And honestly, even the memories are stock and stale.

It’s clear that Romney wrote his book while making several assumptions about its readership. If you’re reading, he assumes that you are on his side. He assumes that you are anti-bailout, and anti-health-care, and pro-current-military-engagement, and anti-bowing-to-other-world-leaders. He assumes that you are unhappy with the current administration and Congress, that you see their policies as threatening to American Life, and even more threatening to American Sovereignty. He assumes that you see America getting weaker, and that you won’t stand for it.

Like Romney, I believe that a strong America is essential to world stability. But I think we have different opinions of what it means for America to be strong. It would be possible to provide counterpoints for each Romney chapter, but doing so just mimics the political ping-pong happening daily on Capitol hill, and that’s not necessary in a book review. But it is nice to highlight how one’s political differences might affect one’s enjoyment of the book.

Take, for instance, Romney’s view of diplomacy. Both Romney and I see diplomacy as an essential component to American strength and security. However, that is about the only thing our viewpoints on diplomacy have in common. Romney refers to diplomacy as “soft power,” and sees it as an offshoot of military strength.  He writes:

It is, of course, hard power—military might—that concentrates the minds of our adversaries. Nations with substantial hard power are generally the most able to influence the actions of others.

While I’m sure some diplomatic negotiations need an iron fist to force them through, I don’t think that is  good approach to all diplomatic relations. Think about it: the class bully used hard power to negotiate your lunch money from you. And you hated that time the teacher assigned the two of you to work together on a science project because you ended up doing most of the work. You spent all of your elementary years building up resentment towards that lardass, so much resentment that it delights you that he now smokes crack and lives under an overpass (or is that just me?).

I also don’t think a hard-power-guided diplomacy is what George Washington had in mind when he created the Departments of State and War (now Defense). In fact, as a baby nation with tiny military juevos, we used diplomacy to keep us out of war. It saddens me that our defense budget since 2000 drove us from surplus into deficit and yet every employee of the State Department can fit on one aircraft carrier.

The book’s most interesting chapter, and the chapter that will undoubtedly be most scrutinized during Romney’s next run at the White House, is the chapter on health care. It is essentially a political tap dance—Romney pointing out the differences between the Commonwealth Care for which he is responsible, and the health bill that passed this past winter. The differences aren’t as apparent as Romney pretends, and if anti-health-care sentiment carries all the way to the next presidential primaries, Romney’s opponents are going to use Mitt Care to run him into the ground. Romney needs to start practicing a refrain, one he more or less already employs a few time in the health care chapter: “It should be up to the states…” The health care chapter is also the most personal chapter; it’s interesting to read how Mitt’s health care plan came to fruition. I wish the rest of the book followed the same mold.

But I’m not trying to say that he doesn’t have some valid arguments. He’s probably right about some things. This book shows that Romney not only knows what he believes, he also knows why he holds those beliefs. I respect that most about No Apology. I may not agree with Mitt’s viewpoints on many things, but at least I know he’s willing to participate in the conversation, which is not true for many politicians in the “party of no.” In that way, this book is hopeful, because political conversation forged the constitution and passed amendments, created laws and strengthened democracy. So thank you, Mitt, for being proof that some in your party remember how to be part of the conversation.

Ultimately, I think the success of this book will be determined by another Romney assumption: the assumption that, in two years, the Obama administration will be viewed as an absolute failure. If that comes true—if financial regulation and the jobs bill don’t pass, and if Wall Street tanks again, and if swine flu kills a few thousand, and the BP spill ruins the Gulf Coast and all of the Caribbean nations, if Venezuela invades Colombia, and Russia invades the Czech Republic, if Iran goes nuclear and sells the technology to Al-Qaeda—and Obama’s approval rating dips below 25%, No Apology could be the cornerstone for a successful 2012 run. If all that happens, Romney won’t even need to regain his political star; the stiff will be enough.

Similar books: Going Rogue: An American Life, by Sarah Palin