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By Sean Clark, on June 3rd, 2011 Author: Jonah Keri
2011, Ballantine Books
Filed Under: Nonfiction.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
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As a Red Sox fan, I don’t really savor the recent success of the Tampa Bay (née Devil-) Rays. Thus far in 2011, it appears that for the third year running, the three best teams in the American League will play in the AL East, meaning no matter what, they can’t all be in the postseason. Before the Rays’ ascendance, I loved when the Sox played the Rays. It sometimes got a bit feisty, and the Sox would almost always take home 2 wins. Tampa was seriously a joke. Then came 2008, and with it mohawks and 9=8, etc. Now, as a Sox fan, I see Tampa as a bigger threat than the aging, overpaid Yankees.
In The Extra 2%, Jonah Keri starts with a team that was a perennial doormat and follows them as they scramble out of the gutter hand over fist. He is probing, funny, and critical, all of which make for an engrossing and revelatory read. I particularly like the angle Keri takes on the business side. His love for the sport is readily noticeable on every page, but his contempt for the league is almost palpable. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on May 18th, 2011  Author: Wilfred Santiago
2011, Fantagraphics Books
Filed under: Graphic Novel, Nonfiction, Biography
Get it at Powell’s
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
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| Art Style... |
9 |
My father loved baseball. When I was young, he told me stories of his favorite players as if they were superheroes. He held none in higher esteem than Roberto Clemente. As a result, I believed Roberto Clemente had superpowers. I believed he floated through the outfield and flew between the base paths. I believed the ball exploded off of his bat and that he had a cannon for an arm.
In the years since, I have read as much about Clemente as possible. And while each article or book reinforced my belief that Clemente was both an incredible ballplayer and incredible human being, none of them seemed to satisfy the childhood fascination I had for him. I should have known, given the superhero aspects of the image in my head, that I needed a comic book. With his graphic novel, 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente, Wilfred Santiago delivered exactly what I’ve been waiting for.
Take, for instance, one of the book’s first pages: …
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By Marc Velasquez, on May 5th, 2011  Author: Jon Krakauer
2011, Byliner
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Literary
[Only available as an ebook from Amazon]
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit excites me for a couple of reasons. First, I’m a big fan of Krakauer’s work. I find his writing entertaining, enlightening and accessible despite it being so heavily founded on in-depth research. Not many writers can make fact-reporting as exciting as Krakauer continually does. But I’m also excited by Deceit because I’m a huge fan of long form Journalism. At a lean 20,000 words, Deceit is longer than a magazine article but shorter than a book; it’s sort of like a nonfiction novella, and it’s the perfect length for its subject.
What excites me most is that Byliner, the company that published Deceit, has promised 20 similar projects in the near future. Unfortunately, Deceit and Byliner’s second title—Into the Forbidden Zone, William T. Vollmann’s first hand account of the nuclear disaster in Japan—are only available from Amazon as “Kindle Singles,” and if Byliner releases future titles with that sort of exclusivity, it could be pretty annoying. However, I have to admit that the exclusive release of Into the Forbidden Zone did force me to download the “Kindle for PC” deally, so they might know what they are doing.
If you follow news about books, or news about Afghanistan, or maybe just news in general, you know that Three Cups of Deceit is Krakauer’s fact-based gut-punch to Three Cups of Tea and it’s philanthropist author, Greg Mortenson. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 29th, 2011 [This entertaining baseball memoir is a C4 Great Read. Get The Bullpen Gospels and other Great Reads from our Powell's Bookshelf.]
 Author: Dirk Hayhurst
2010, Citadel Press
Filed Under: Memoir, Nonfiction.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
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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.
…
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By Marc Velasquez, on April 15th, 2011  Author: Andre Dubus III
2011, Norton
Filed Under: Literary, Memoir, Nonfiction
Get a copy of Townie at Powell’s
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
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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. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 14th, 2011 Author: Robert Weintraub
2011, Little, Brown and Company
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Historical.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
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8 |
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7 |
Here’s a good reading choice for the start of the baseball season (although I can’t help think that I’m partially to blame for the Red Sox’s abysmal stumbling out the gate by reading a book about the Yankees’ first world series win. Oh well, at least we took 2 out of 3 in the NY series.). Ostensibly about the creation of Yankee Stadium, this is a book about a changing of the guard in baseball, when small ball National League play fell second-fiddle to the power-hitting American League. Weintraub writes like a Yanks fan, but I can’t begrudge him that, since the team is the star of his show. This is a fun and accessible book that takes a look at a just a few years in the long history of baseball. …
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By Sean Clark, on March 11th, 2011 Author: Sean B. Carroll
2009, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Filed Under: Nonfiction.
Get this book at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
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7 |
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9 |
Remarkable Creatures is a somewhat deceiving title. It’s not about ancient creatures, but rather the men and women–geologists and paleontologists, naturalists and anthropologists, chemists and geneticists–who have strived to uncover how life works. This is a popular-science-angled history of evolutionary science.
Carroll aptly depicts a universal desire in humans to understand the structure of the larger world around them. The question of human origin has always been buried in that desire. Religions have been fielding this question for millennia and, for almost that whole time, faith has violently monopolized the official answer. And so, the study of evolution has required cautious steps. Carroll begins his story with Darwin, and with those who inspired him (Humbolt, et al). From there he travels through eras and schools of thought, documenting how our knowledge of the world and of ourselves, well, evolved over the past 150 years. …
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By Sean Clark, on December 23rd, 2010 [This creative exploration of neuropsych is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Paul Broks
2003, Grove Atlantic
Filed Under: Nonfiction
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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I’m not particularly well-versed in neurospsychology, but I find it endlessly fascinating. The human is brain is impossibly complex, as it must be to allow us our existences as impossibly complex creatures. Neurospych appeals to me because it walks a somewhat precarious line between science and philosophy. (I personally consider all psychology to be a primarily philosphical pursuit–despite the empirical evidence the field has compiled–and the flip side to the physical study of the brain approached through neurology.) In this book, Broks, an accomplished neurospsychologist, writes of his field with the air of a skeptic. He’s sold on the science, but not on all the assumptions that are drawn by his contemporaries. He questions just what is buried in the mind. As a casual reader, he appealed to my sense of curiosity, and informed my layman knowledge. He also turns out to be strong with words, so reading the book was a pleasure.
This book is unique from other nonfictions I have read. Please note, I don’t read all that much nonfiction, so I can’t make the best comparison. I’ve seen Broks compared to Oliver Sacks more than once, so if you’ve read him, that might give some idea. This is not the type of causal, watered-down lecture science book that I expected. Unlike books like How We Decide or Bonk, Into The Silent Land features a strong narrative and a strong narrator. The book is subtitled Travels in Neuropsychology and the verb choice is apt. There is a strong sense of exploration or journey that arises while reading this book. …
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By Bilal Ibne Rasheed, on December 13th, 2010 
Author: George W. Bush
2010, Crown Publishers
Filed Under: Memoirs, Nonfiction
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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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.’ …
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By Marc Velasquez, on November 11th, 2010  Author: Sebastian Junger
2010, Twelve
Filed under: Literary, Nonfiction
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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In War, Sebastian Junger attempts to chronicle the emotional experience of battle and the mental toll combat takes on soldiers. To do so, Junger embedded himself with a platoon of American soldiers during their tour of Afghanistan’s front line. Thankfully, Junger doesn’t pretend to be an objective journalist reporting impartially. Instead, he uses his embedded experience to deliver a first-person portrayal of the psychological turmoil of war.
In 2007 and 2008, Junger made several prolonged visits with “Battle Company” in and around the Korengal Forward Operating Base in Eastern Afghanistan. Charged with holding the Korengal Valley from the insurgents, Battle Company constantly found themselves under enemy fire. Because a reporter on the front line and a soldier on the front line are the same to the enemy, Junger also found himself looking for cover after hearing the crack of passing bullets. And in Junger’s reaction to the threat of enemy fire, we get our first insight into a soldier’s mentality. …
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