The Book Shopper

Baseball Respite

I usually read more baseball books in the off-season than during the summer months. Since the players and the owners are currently at an impasse with no end sight, my needs are even more pronounced. Moreover, baseball books provide me with more relaxed material in contrast to the intense fare that I have been reading lately. Books about climate (the eco-anthology All We Can Save), an explanative history of the rise of nationalism (Age of Anger) and the story of the London cholera epidemic of 1854 (The Ghost Map) have been interesting, but unsettling. None of these books are something you want to read in the evening near bedtime. That’s where a calming book of old-timey baseball stories can be most appreciated. And I miss baseball.

My solution has been Baseball: When the Grass Was Real (1976), by writer-poet Donald Honig who travelled around the country collecting the narratives of the men who played baseball in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.  Earlier Lawrence Ritter put together a similar book, The Glory of the Times (1966), which gathered oral histories of players who played in the early part of the 20th century. (Honig acknowledges Ritter’s efforts in his Introduction). To those viewers of the Ken Burns' documentary, some of the players have familiar sounding names ( e.g., Lefty Grove, Bob Feller). Honig also includes less familiar but melodic names (Big Johnny Mize, Max Lanier) made famous in Dave Frishberg’s musical paean to baseball players, "Van Lingle Mungo".

Honig allows the players to speak in their own vernacular taking advantage of their storytelling skills. But in addition to the 18 players selected, these players also include their personal anecdotes of being teammates and contemporaries of Hall of Famers, Ted Williams*, Joe DiMaggio, Dizzy Dean and Jackie Robinson to name but a few. Some notable stories include:

Billy Herman was a Hall of Famer who played from 1931- 47 mostly for the Chicago Cubs. He was an eyewitness to Babe Ruth's pointing to the centerfield stands and calling his shot before hitting a home run in the 1932 World Series. But from his position at second base Herman confirms that it is a great story but incorrect, because the Cub pitcher that day was the extremely competitive Charlie Root.  Herman says that Ruth was pointing two fingers at Root (not at centerfield) and that Root only had two strikes on him. “But he didn’t point," says Herman," “Don’t kid yourself. I can tell you just what would have happened if Ruth had tried that—he would have never got a pitch to hit. Root would have had him with his feet up in the air. I told you Charlie Root was a mean man on that mound.”

Herman also was an eyewitness to boxing match-brawl between Ernest Hemingway and his teammate Hugh Casey when they visited the novelist's mansion in Havana during Spring Training in 1942.

James “Cool Papa” Bell, was a star in the Negro Leagues for nearly two decades but was kept out of the majors because of the color barrier. Bell was a contemporary of Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige and he eventually was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1974. He describes his experiences in the Jim Crow South that sound all too familiar:

"When we played the Birmingham Black Barons in their park, there were always lots of whites in the crowd, but they were separated by a rope. You could be sitting right next to a white man, but that rope was always there. That was the system they had in those days. That’s what they called states’ rights. States’ rights doesn’t mean much to the Negro. You don’t get justice with states’ rights. Which is a bad thing to happen.”

Johnny Mize

Big Johnny Mize, grew up in Demorest, Georgia and played with the St. Louis Cardinals' Gas House Gang in the 1930s. The Cardinals general manager then was the famous Branch Rickey who later signed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers breaking the color barrier in the majors in 1947. (One of the chapters is on a lesser-known player Clyde Sukeforth, who after his playing days scouted Robinson and literally introduced him to Rickey.)  Mize didn’t think so much of Branch Rickey who low-balled Mize in contract negotiations, which was indicative of the complete control owners had over the players' livelihoods. Mize spent the last five years of his career as a pinch-hitter for the New York Yankees, playing in a string of World Series for the World Champions. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1981.

Honig saves arguably his best for last --  the story of Brooklyn Dodger Pete Reiser, who probably would have been a Hall of Famer had he not been injury prone. At his first Spring training, Reiser’s manager Leo Durocher, was the first to recognize Reiser’s speed once bet $100 with Dodgers General Manager Larry MacPhail that Reiser could be beat the fastest man in the Dodgers organization in a foot race. Says Reiser:

“So here all of a sudden I’m running against the fastest guy in the Dodger organization, and the manager and the general manager are betting $100 on it. And all I’d wanted to do was come down there and work out in a big-league camp and mind my business.

Well, I did beat the guy. Yeah, by 10 yards."

We end this posting with a baseball lullaby, "Van Lingle Mungo" by Dave Frishberg:

 

 

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P.S. The artwork at the top of the post is on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The mixed media piece "Strike Zone" by Mike Ross was inspired by Ted Williams' book The Science of Hitting. The photograph of Johnny Mize is from the HOF archives. Thanks to my former teammate (college intramural basketball team) Tom Bowen for introducing me to this book.

Why I Blog

Next year will be the thirteenth year of The Book Shopper blog and if I keep at the current pace of approximately two offerings a month, the 500th posting should appear sometime late next year.

It’s not too early to start pondering how this milestone should it be celebrated.  Here are three possibilities that are currently percolating in my brain:

Possibility One. Host a party or gala. Rent out a small exercise room at the local rec center.  Invite some of the regular blog readers as an opportunity to meet one another, swap stories and anecdotes. Though I am always apprehensive of putting my friends—even virtual friends together— I have the sense that the typical discriminating Book Shopper reader will peacefully share their thoughts on quirky, demanding books or the oddities of book culture. They would all probably get along unless…

Negatives thoughts on Possibility One. Since the Number 1 visited page of all time is the Unabomber’s Library Part Two, I could end up with more of a fringe element in attendence. These well-read anarchists might get out of control after quaffing too much Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck.

Possibility Two. Invite the more well-known book celebrities to comment on their cameo appearances on the blog. They include writer David Shields, Books-as-Art Artist Brian Dettmer, photographer Emily Berl, avantgarde filmmaker James Benning and rapper Killer Mike (when he appeared at a book event of Thomas Chatterton Williams).

Negative thoughts on Possibility Two. These artists might ask that their names and work be removed from The Book Shopper, which would have a devastating effect on blog traffic.

Possibility Three. Just surf through all the previous 470+ postings and repurpose some of the more timeless entries and then take the year off.

Negative thoughts on Possibility Three: I am not sure that’s a good idea, because as the late Joan Didion wrote in her essay “Why I Write” that she writes to know what she is thinking. This is how I feel about blogging,

If I cease to blog, then I may not be thinking. And if I am not thinking, I am not percolating. 

 

A Review of Best Books Read in 2021

If best book lists were constrained to only books published during the year, The Book Shopper blog (est. 2009) would only have one offering (Connoisseurs of Worms) to share. Historically I have always expanded the selection pool to books that I have read in their entirety, which this year covers just over 30 books. (A complete list of books read is linked to the main homepage of the blog.)

As usual, some patterns emerge when revisiting what I have read this year. One is that I reread five books by some of my favorite authors—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Primo Levi, Larry McMurtry, Drew Gilpin Faust and David Shields, which seems abnormally high. Was I seeking the comfort of the familiar in the upheaval of pandemic? Is this an epiphany for me?

The major qualification to make the list below is that besides enjoyment, each book influenced me by either a) leading to other books which I eventually read, or b.) slightly changed my thoughts or actions in my little world.

There is no significance in the order and the links go to locations on the blog where I wrote about them in more detail:

The British Are Coming: The War for America (1775-1777) (published in 2018) by Rick Atkinson. In a year when I read books from historians Marc Bloch, and Barbara Tuchman about the practice of writing history, Atkinson always has been a role model. He is a master of storytelling who carefully selects the historical figure (not necessarily a major figure) and the situation that best illustrates what was going on. He relies on a mixture of sources and weaves them seamlessly. What made it especially timely is how The British Are Coming resonates with our own times – handling pandemics (theirs was smallpox) and the bitter and warring factions that founded our nation. (Uh-oh, sound familiar?) Remember before the war, the colonists were all subjects to King George the III.

For more see “A Brief History of Vaccinations in America.”

Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands (2009) by Judith Schalansky. My interest in her work began as a review of her series of essays An Inventory of Losses (2018) in the New York Times.  Schalansky’s book atlas is a treasure chest of a book as she mixes short essays and information graphics in her travelogue of "fifty islands I have not visited and never will."

For more see the posting “Airplane Reading.”

 

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches (2011) by S.C. Gwynne. Another fantastic history book relying on a blend of meticulous research and storytelling centering on the life and times of Quanah Parker. Parker was the last great Comanche chief who was the half-white son of a Comanche warrior and Cynthia Ann Parker who was abducted in a raid when she was thirteen. The bloody treachery embedded in the history of Texas and Oklahoma will dispel any notions you ever had about the glory of Manifest Destiny.  

For more see the posting, “Timelines.”

The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms (2004) by Amy Stewart. After I read this, I replaced my simple plastic tub with a tiered worm tower. The influence of Stewart’s book about these amazing eisenia fetida cannot be discounted. I am proud to be a member of the vermiculture community and to unabashedly say the word “vermiculture” though I cannot pronounce eisenia fetida.

More here at “Upping the Worm Game.”

 

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is the only fiction offering on the list and it surprises me that I read only six works of fiction in 2020. (But doesn’t reading William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! [1936] count as 3 books?)  Set in the near future, Robinson’s book is considered speculative fiction at that. Robinson follows the lives of several characters who are dedicated to saving the planet for future generations but are often at odds with themselves and with corporate and government powers. What makes to the book so important is that it also includes interludes on possible new technologies and strategies that are intertwined in the plot.  Ultimately it gives one hope that we may survive by the skin of our teeth. The Guardian recently published a lengthy critique of Robinson’s ideas.  

More about the book itself in “Speculating on the Future.”

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All these books and other Book Shopper blog favorites are available our companion site (destinationbooks.net). When you purchase a new book through the site, we earn an affiliate commission and additional money also goes to support independent bookstores.

Permanence

In the Preface of Judith Schalansky’s book of essays, An Inventory of Losses (2018) she writes about the future of permanence in media and books:

"Sometimes I imagine the future thus: generations to come standing baffled in front of today’s data storage media, strange aluminum boxes whose contents, owing to rapid advances in platforms have become not but meaningless codes, and moreover ones that, as an object in themselves, exude less of an aura than the knots of an Inca quipu string, as eloquent as they are mute, or those mystifying ancient Egyptian obelisks that may commemorate triumph or tragedy, one knows."

But later in the Preface as a writer and a book designer (see the previous posting about her Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands), Schalansky offers a defense of the book.

“The book may be inferior in many ways to the new, seemingly incorporeal media that lay claim to its legacy and overwhelm us with information, and may be a conservative medium in the original sense of the word, but it is the only one which, by the very self-sufficiency of its body, in which text, image and design dovetail perfectly with one another, promises to lend order to the world or sometimes even to take its place.”

Schalansky's Pocket Atlas

Airplane Reading

This month I have made roundtrip plane trips from Atlanta to Berlin and then Atlanta to Los Angeles. Proper reading material is always a critical decision because it can make the difference between a tolerable flight or a miserable flight. 

I never trust the entertainment consoles. They may not work (as mine didn't) or they are populated with content that you didn't bother to watch at home. Even if you are interested in one of the inflight movies you will need your magnifying eyewear and a better set of earphones than the airline has provided. (I guess I am supposed to bring my own computer and content...)

The reason I bring this up is that I had the good fortune to hit pay dirt when I brought German author and graphic artist Judith Schalansky's Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Island I Have Not Visited and Never Will (2009) with me on the  four hour+ flight from LA to Atlanta.

The book practically fits in your back pocket and can share space your gin and tonic on the wobbly tray table. But the book also takes you to other places far away from the crowded cabin.  Schalansky credits the idea when she surveyed a giant globe in the Berlin National Library and began studying the tiny islands names that dot the blue expanses of the ocean.  First she collected the facts including their longitude and latitude coordinates, their current population (if any), a timeline of major events and their distance to nearby continents or other remote islands. Some you may have heard of such places as Easter Island, Iwo Jima, or Christmas Island but she gives equal billing to some uninhabited ones like Deception Island (near Antarctica), Bouvet Island (in the South Atlantic) or the cold and barren Lonely Island (near the Arctic Circle). 

She dedicates four pages to each entry/chapter. The first two pages provides the facts and the timeline and a detailed map including points of interest such as elevation, bays and any villages. Pages 3 and 4 are very short essays about the history or geological/biological makeup of the place such as the Pacific isle of Banaba, which is made up entirely of phosphate from centuries of bird guano buildup. Schalansky's writing style has been aptly  described in The Paris Review " as a prose poem of sorts. Facts sit side-by-side with a kind of highly personal fiction; we are given latitudes and detailed maps, but also lore and speculation."

What makes it special for airline travelers is that when reading about hardships like near starvation, or freezing to death while discovering these often hostile piles of volcanic rock, you don't feel so angry when the flight attendant ignores your request to reset your entertainment console. How can you complain? What also makes the book ideal in a plane setting is that my attention span often wanes during the flight, (I'm always checking other passengers viewing habits.) With just four pages per chapter if  you start to drift you can easily refocus and return to these compelling stories. 

Once you've reached your final destination, and you are greeted with a "How was your trip?" Instead of ranting about the hideous coffee, the sloppy mask wearing of the traveler across the aisle, or the sticky bathroom floors, you can quote Schalansky instead:

"There is no untouched garden of Eden lying at this never-ending globe. Instead, human beings traveling far and wide have turned into the very monsters they chased off the maps." 

Something to discuss while you wait for your luggage.

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When you purchase a book through our companion site (destinationbooks.net) we earn an affiliate commission.

Reactions

 

A short list of thoughts about this advertisement:

1.) It is dangerous to climb a ladder in a gown with a long train.

2.) What is she doing tearing pages out of books?

3.) Why does it matter if you tear pages out of books, if you have that many books?

4.)  Books I have plenty of, but that Gregory XL sectional sofa would be ideal for my post lunch/reading naps.

For more about this Flexform Ad social media campaign visit here.

Timelines

Reading Notes

This detailed book on the role of the Comanches in American History works on several levels. First, I read a lot of history and lately books about writing history (Barbara Tuchman's  Practicing History and Marc Bloch's The Craft of History*) so I have been primed to appreciate how the author of Empire Moon S.C. Gwynne managed to weave the details of his scholarly research into a riveting saga.

Secondly, you cannot underestimate the blood, slaughter and greed that is an integral part of our nation's history. ( Oh, Texas, you have such a checkered past.)  Because the Comanches were so fierce, brutal and had created their own tactics for fighting on the wide expanses of the Plains in 1830s, they drastically curtailed Mexico's efforts to expand north of the Rio Grande river. 

 

And finally, as harsh and "uncivilized" as the Comanches were, their culture was partially dictated by their Plains environment (the Buffalo).  Moreover Gwynne draws a parallel that they were no more brutal than the white Scotch-Irish settler's ancestors— if you compared cultural timeline of the Celtics of the 5th century BC who fought against the civilized Greeks and Romans. (Herodotus described them as "fierce warriors who fought with seemingly disregard for their own lives." ) Like the Celts, the Comanches were superb horseman and did terrible things to their enemies and captives.

When reading about the decline of  Comanche nation in the 1880s,  you couldn't help but feel some sadness because their demise was similar to what eventually happened to other indigenous cultures. Gwynne uses the life of their last great chief Quanah as a way to describe the Comanche's final integration. 

* Notes on the Tuchman and Bloch book are buried in some reading notes,  elsewhere in the blog here.

Book Art V.9 Exhibit

Unlike last year when Book Art V.8 was limited to virtual showings because of the pandemic, this year's Book Art V.9 is open for public viewing by reservation. Book Art is part of the Decatur Book Festival, which is limited in scope this year with the the main event being held on Saturday, October 2, 2021. For all the details on the exhibit including interviews with the artists visit the Decatur Arts Alliance page, which is a sponsor along with the Georgia Center for the Book.

I went to Book Art last month and below are just a few of the pieces that caught my eye, but to do the exhibit justice it's better to see in person rather than rely on my Canva skills.

 

 

 

 

Speculating on the Future

In the ten+ years that I have writing the blog, this may be the first posting ever featuring the work of a science fiction writer, so I am confessing to a lot of ignorance about a genre that is also referred to as speculative fiction. However, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) has crossover appeal, because its plot directly addresses the problem of “Can somebody give us hope for averting the oncoming climate catastrophe?” Talk about moving out of your comfort zone.

Set in the near future after a brutal heat wave has killed ten million people in a matter of weeks, an international organization affiliated with the Paris accord known as the Ministry for the Future, is partially empowered to advocate for future generations. A team of international experts, led by the novel’s protagonist Mary Murphy begins to untie the Gordian knot. This includes addressing income inequality, eliminating fossil fuels, (which includes sequestration of carbon), developing technologies to slow the melting of the polar ice caps and getting the global financial powers-that-be on board. 

Robinson intersperses small chapters in the main story explaining how these different technologies and strategies would need to work. 

There is even a secret militant arm of this movement, that—let’s put it this way—make the Monkey Wrench gang from the Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel look like lightweights. There is a moral dilemma of whether EVERYTHING should be done to speed the process along. Toward the end of the novel Robinson offers a glimpse of what that changed world would be like.

What makes the book “worthy” of breaking through blog’s speculative fiction myopia is not only has Robinson encapsulated what it will take to save civilization and the planet, but he has folded it into a solid work of fiction. Decent characters, interesting settings (Zurich, India, Antarctica) and an old-fashioned plot driven by the ever-present sword of Damocles question of “will the planet survive?”

Links of Interest

A review entitled "Catastrophe and Utopia" by Eric Morales-Franceschini was what put this book on my radar. Thank you, Eric and Tropics of Meta who published it.

Rolling Stone magazine also reviewed the book and includes an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.

 

From the Books-as-Art-as-Books Archives

The recent article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about Jerushia Graham’s exhibit at the Callanwolde Gallery reminded me of the often overlooked Books-as-Art-as-Books section of the blog. Graham has appeared a couple of times in this section dating back to May of 2012 (oh yes, we have been at this blogging for over a long time) when she was a curator for the Art Institute of Atlanta-Decatur Wallbound exhibit, which was a precursor to the Decatur Book Festival’s Book Art Series.

If you scroll through the 32 entries that make up the Books-as-Art-as-Books section, you should come away with the sense that we have a somewhat loose interpretation of what that exactly means.  Enjoy the gallery.