The Book Shopper

Book Shopping-Hoarding Justifications

We are living in an era when it is easier than ever to justify purchasing lots of books: a.) the need to support your favorite bookstores  b.) more time to read, and c.) more friends are talking about the books they are reading and making more suggestions. It is the perfect storm. Even the Book Shopper blog is experiencing an uptick in monthly traffic and believe me that is big (read: strange) news. Allow me to elaborate. You got the time, right?

A.) Supporting favorite bookstores

For me, I have a had long relationship with Carlos Museum Book Shop on campus of the Emory University here in Atlanta. They are closed temporarily but their store manager Mark Burell is curating lists of excellent books online. My partner Denise and I have been under Burell's influence for quite some time. It was browsing in this eclectic book shop in 2007, where I purchased Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in the Age of Abundance (2003) published by Paul Dry Books in Philadelphia. This eventually led to the publishing of this blog’s name sake The Book Shopper: A Life in Review in 2009. That’s quite a connection, eh?

Another bookstore relationship over the years has been with Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas. While on the “World Book Tour” of The Book Shopper, my longtime friend Bruce Woods introduced me to the passion of Eighth Day Books and its owner Warren Farha. Eighth Day carries classics in religion, philosophy, history and literature. They recently published a new catalog of their offerings, similar to the catalog I wrote about in the January 2012 posting “A Spiritual Education Made Easy”. I ordered a copy of E.F. Schumaker’s classic 1973, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, and The Portable Graham Greene (1994) edited by Philip Stratford (a suggestion from friend Jim Simpson) along with an extra copy of the catalog.

B.) More time to read

One of the better books I’ve read so far this year came via The Carlos Museum Bookshop online service is Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View (2017) by Sam Stephenson. Born in Wichita, Kansas in 1918, William Eugene Smith was a master photojournalist and became well known for his pictures of Pacific War and later the haunting image “Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath,” (1971) a shocking photo which appeared first appeared in Life Magazine and later in book that captured the effects of industrial mercury poisoning on the city of Minamata, Japan.

Sink is not a photography book and Smith’s photographs are tightly controlled but you can see many of them online at Magnum, where Smith worked with off and on until he died of a stroke in 1978.

What makes Gene Smith’s Sink a great read is that the author Stephenson concentrates on the fascinating people (ex-wives, jazz musicians, and assistants) who revolved around the Smith universe. Stephenson traveled all over the world including Japan on his quest to talk to those who had first-hand knowledge of Smith’s photojournalist essays. Another aspect of Smith's life, which Stephenson dives into is the loft in New York City where Smith lived. The place was jammed full with photographs, prints and audio recordings of jazz musicians that frequented his apartment including Mose Allison, Thelonious Monk, Hall Overton and Sonny Clarke. I will admit I knew next-to-nothing about these artists, but after reading Sink, I expanded my personal audio playlists.

You can find this book and another great ones (like Cultural Amnesia by Clives James) at the Carlos Museum Bookshop be sure to click on the GREAT BOOKS FOR ADULTS link.

C.) More friend time equals more books suggestions

Part of my down time has been spent connecting with old friends more frequently. I am more of an old school telephone guy than a Zoom personality. If I opt for screen time, I fear friends may be disappointed that I don’t have an impressive bookcase* like PBS New Hour's Judy Woodruff.  Or I may be revealing too much like PBS political commentator Amy Walters who had a Hamm's Beer Plaque on her bookshelf that she has since covered up. (See the posting Books in the Background.) 

On these calls, in between gulps of Hamm's,** we ask each other what we are reading. This is a little dangerous because you can easily become intrigued about what they are reading. During the pandemic,  the suggestions have been overwhelming. So much so that I added the page Suggested Readings as a link of the The Book Shopper flagship homepage to personally keep track of future books-to-read candidates.  

I realize that I am doing this at the risk of being bombarded for online ads for the books that have appeared on my Suggested Readings Page? More possibilities in this endless spiral of hoarding ahead, I suspect.

* For the record, the avalanche of books in the photograph aboves comes from bookstore in Berlin not my study.

** I am making a joke here since Hamm's is no longer being brewed. In my youth, it was known as a Pabst Blue Ribbon class of lowbrow beer before PBR became "retro-chic."  Also, it has a silly jingle that begins with "From the Land of Sky Blue Waters" and featuring a cartoon bear. This is what makes Hamm's beer sign stand out on the pundit Walters's book case. 

An Essay About the Blog

The essay below appeared earlier this month in Everything Typepad, the e-newsletter for users of the platform application Typepad.  It's kind of a brief blog history. The original posting appears at https://bit.ly/2VTCTu7.

Blog as Archive

 

As one who has been blogging for over a decade, musing about books and book culture to a handful of readers, several beneficial aspects have emerged over the years. No, it’s not riches or fame, but I’ve discovered that personal blogging has provided me with a diary of what I have been reading and thinking about since 2008.

The blog has evolved over the years. It began as a promotional tool for my book of essays, The Book Shopper: A Life in Review published by Paul Dry Books in 2009. For a while I even kept a calendar of book activities and did some reportage of author events here in the Atlanta area where I live. I saw some good authors over the years, but then my interests shifted. I broadened my scope to the current musings format, which gives me more leeway to come up with various topics to write for my biweekly postings.

Some of the postings fall into categories like book reviews or bookstores, or some of my favorite subjects like baseball and military history. I also prefer to read older books and lesser-known titles. (Who needs another spin on a bestseller?) Other noteworthy categories are Books-as-Art-as-Books and the MARTA Book Club – a series of 34 postings where on my daily commute I logged the titles of books that people were reading while on the trains of the city’s Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. (The book art at the right is called Book Chance by Andrew Huot. which appeared in "Book Art in Atlanta" on September 20, 2019)

Using the Typelist feature on Typead, I also keep a running list of what I have been reading throughout the year and display it on the sidebar. I have recently added a new page of “Suggested Readings” so I can keep track of what bookish friends have recommended. (If nothing else, the blog provides a handy jog to my memory, which I can access through my phone on a moment’s notice.)

Because the blog has more of personal take on subjects instead an authoritative one, I have been able to combine events – such as vacations and trips – into postings and travelogues. For example, over the years I have visited bookstores in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Oaxaca, Amsterdam, Nova Scotia, Prague, and the Greek isle of Santorini to name but a few. Accompanying on these excursions is my longtime partner Denise who is always willing to pose as a book browser or snap an “action” picture of me standing in front of a bookstore.

Blog subjects sometimes include other family members too. For example, I wrote about going with my younger daughter Bonnie to the Rickwood Baseball Classic in Birmingham, Alabama to honor the Willie Mays biography I was reading (Mays played for the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro Leagues in 1948). When the Kansas City Royals played in the World Series in 2014, I wrote about the Kansas native, baseball writer Bill James, reminiscing about the time I lived in the Sunflower State. It included a photograph of my mother pushing my older daughter Cynthia in a swing wearing a toddler-sized George Brett uniform (a future Hall of Famer). Thoughts about my father have been included in numerous postings as well, particularly as I reflected on his service in World War II. All this flooded back to me after I chatted briefly with historian Rick Atkinson, the author of The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 at a small reading at my local library.

While flipping through my 450+ musings, I noticed that I should be a little more diligent about assigning categories to these postings. This can go a long way to help me find specific things I wrote about. Moreover, it has made me more aware of how topics like certain writers or themes have reoccurred and how my thinking has evolved over the past decade. This digital “paper trail” is like a diary of sorts, but with the added challenge of making it interesting, since I know others are going to be reading it.

A final advantage of the blog archive is that once I’ve taken the time to record my thoughts and observations and add some photos and artwork, I will sometimes stumble upon new opportunities to send that link out to connect with others. An informal conversation or a serendipitous article I’ve come across online reminds me of something I’ve already thought and written about. A quick follow-up is a convenient cut-and -paste away.

While there are rarely riches and fame in blogging, connecting to friends, family members, subscribers, and even oneself can be reward enough.

 

Books in the Background

One of book-related ways I entertain myself in this stay-at-home era is to take quick pix of journalists and experts fulfilling their news responsibilities from their "home studios." First of all, isn't it interesting that we as television viewers now accept grainy videos, bad lighting, up-the-nose angles, audio drops and the digital pixel-repaints that can make someone look as if they just emerged from a Walking Dead makeup trailer? But it's cool. We all understand.

I find myself looking at what the interviewee has selected for their backdrop: potted plants, books, framed awards and statuettes and lots of pictures of family members, which I believe are inversely proportional to the time spent with one's family. (I've observed in the past that those who have dozens of family pictures in their offices are unknowingly indicating that they have not been at home so much, and need photos to jog their memory. But that problem is solved now.)  

As one would expect, I am more curious about the quantity and quality of books they have. A reflection on their souls. Did some of these pundits and reporters resort to being like those home decor designers who bring books in for "staging?" Were some of the men forced to hide their Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski collections? And don't try to pass some VCR tapes as library books. Sophisticated readers of The Book Shopper Blog know the difference between a 2004 video of Cold Mountain and its literary progenitor published in 1997. 

Who Are These People?  How Many Can You Name?

It's no mystery from this collage that I watch CNN and PBS, but I try to limit my news viewing to keep my sanity.  And as you can see, part of the coping mechanism is looking at their books and how they are organized and whether they have been dusted in the last year or two. Fortunately for them, the video quality hides most of the titles and their housekeeping standards. Nevertheless, here's a scorecard:

Top (left to right) William Brangham, PBS correspondent; David Brooks New York Times columnist; Amy Walter, political columnist who had Team of Rivals (2005) by Doris Kearns Goodwin on her shelf. 

Middle (l to r) Dr. William Shaffner, Infectious Diseases Professor at Vanderbilt and keeper of the ancient medical books; Dana Bash, CNN political correspondent; Dr. Carlos Del Rio, Emory School of Medicine.

Bottom (l to r) David Chalian, CNN political journalist; David Gregory, CNN political analyst and person whose hair color I most envy;  Unknown. Yes, I don't know who this woman is, but she made the collage because she had Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010) and two Saul Bellow books on her shelf.  Who does that?

Heather Cox Richardson

Also worth mentioning is political historian Heath Cox Richardson who has the history books to remove any doubt about the validity of her insights. She posts daily on Facebook @heathercoxricharson. (This screen shot is from her video lecture series.)

 

Viral Re-reading

Recent events have dictated my current reading choices, but I suppose on some level all reading choices are based directly or indirectly on the internal and external factors in one’s life. But my decision to re-read Albert Camus’s 1948 novel, The Plague has been a little more obvious than usual. I probably read the book 25 or 30 years ago. My Knopf hardback copy was printed in 1958 and there are markings and underlines throughout the book, which is a practice I have long discontinued, but thankful in this instance because it is easier to locate some of my favorite quotes, which I still remember in part. As this blog is my witness, I’ve been a Camus reader ever since*.

Born in Algeria in 1913, Camus was raised by a deaf mother and a grandmother**. His father died in 1914 in World War I at the Battle of the Marne and his childhood is described in detail in Camus’s autobiography The First Man which was published posthumously in 1995, thirty-five years after the author’s death in an automobile accident. The Nobel Prize winning Camus spent much of his adult life in France but traveled back to Algeria for extended periods of time.

Set in the Algerian port city of Oran in the 1940s, the plot of The Plague is simple. It begins with one of the main characters Dr. Rieux, a local physician stepping on a dead rat in his building stairwell. Within a matter of days, rats start to die by the thousands in the streets and alleyways from an infestation of bubonic plague that is transmitted by fleas. As the rats die, the fleas move to human hosts. The authorities are reluctant to refer to it as the plague at first (sound familiar), but soon all travel in and out of Oran is blocked and the 200,000 residents are on their own. Medical facilities and treatments are quickly overwhelmed. An exhausted Dr. Rieux carries on relying on indifference to survive. Camus enlists other characters who interact with Dr. Rieux to tell the story: Grand, a city clerk-statistician and an over-meticulous writer (“Evenings, whole weeks, spent on one word, just think! Sometimes on a mere conjunction.”), Rambert a journalist who is separated in Oran away from his wife in Paris, and the saintly Tarrou who arrives in Oran before the plague and becomes a dedicated relief worker doing whatever he can out of a sense of duty.

Is This the Kind of Book I Really Should Be Rereading Now?

Despite its despairing themes, the book has a few comforting aspects. Camus gives almost poetic accounts of the shifting mind sets of the city and its inhabitants. One example is one of the quotes I remember from decades ago comes from the opportunist Cottard, who early in the novel is prevented from killing himself but later finds temporary peace of mind in the chaos. “Well, let’s put it like this, “says Cottard, "I’ve been feeling much more at ease here since the plague settled in.”

Perhaps an odd thing to admit, but even today outside on my busy street, traffic has slowed considerably. It’s rather pleasant. My partner Denise and I are practicing social distancing – we wisely postponed a trip to Arizona and the West Coast earlier this month. She is working on some new sewing creations and I have been catching up on my gardening and writing lengthy blog posts. This slower than usual pace is a change – even for us retirees, but re-reading Camus gives me some direction. “Thus, each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky,” he writes.

Baseball Bedtime Stories

One of things I miss is baseball. Each winter, I read a lengthy baseball book and this off season I finished Volume 1 of Norman Macht’s biography of Connie Mack. Mack was the owner and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics for a half a century – holding records for both the most games won and most games lost. Macht uses the prism of Mack’s life in baseball as an entry to the sport between the time periods of just before the turn of the century path through 1914. Macht gives accounts of key games and a host of Athletics players with fantastic names and the personalities to match:

Ralph Orlando “Socks” Seybold

John Phalen “Stuffy” McInnis (that’s the stuff kid)

Charles Allen “Chief” Bender (Hall of Famer)

George Edward “Rube” Waddell (Hall of Famer)

Osee Schrecongost (Waddell's personal catcher and fellow hellion) - nicknamed Schreck

In order to sleep and not get too overworked about current events and while quenching my longing for baseball, I have turned to re-reading stories from Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of the Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (1984), which is on most lists of best baseball books of all time. Here’s a humorous anecdote from Babe Herman who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1920s. Herman tells the story about his manager William Robinson who affectionally known as Uncle Robbie takes us out on a lighter note:

Oh before I forget, there's one more story I've got to tell you about Uncle Robbie. It's about the time he agreed to catch a baseball dropped from an airplane as a publicity stunt. See, Gabby Street had just caught a baseball dropped from the top of the Washington Monument. So they were going to try to top that in Florida, in spring training, by having someone catch a baseball dropped from an airplane flying over the ball park. With some reluctance, Robbie agreed to put on a mask and chest protector and be the hero of the hour. Heck, anything Gabby Street could do Robbie figured the catcher of the old Baltimore Orioles could do even better.

The first two times the plane flew over the ball park, Dan Comerford the clubhouse man, dropped a baseball and both times he completely missed the field. The ball didn't come with half a mile of the ball park. Unfortunately, Dan had taken only two baseballs up with him, so he either had to come back down and get more or forget the whole thing. However, while he was trying to decide what to do, he noticed a sack of Florida grapefruit in the plane. In the early days of Florida, everybody had a sack of grapefruit. So the pilot circled around and made another approach, only this time Dan dropped a grapefruit instead of a baseball!

Well, down in the ball park, out near second base, Robbie is also circling around, getting a bead on this thing as it falls. As far as he knows--as far as anybody besides Dan knows--it's a baseball that's falling, not a grapefruit, and Robbie is determined to catch it.

"Get away, get away," Robbie yells "I got it, I got it." And then squash, it smacks right into Robbie's mitt and literally explodes, juice and pulp splashing into Robbie's face and all over him. The force of the thing was so great that it knocked Robbie down, and all he knew was that he had all this liquid and stuff all over him.

"Help, help," he shouted, "I'm bleeding to death. Help me!"

Some players called him "Grapefruit" forever after. It was a nickname he never lost.

---

Footnotes

* Last year I wrote a long essay about Alastair Horne’s A Savage War for Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 for the Tropics of Meta which includes Albert Camus vain attempt the reconcile the warring factions in bloody war of Algerian independence.

A short shout for a paperback copy of Camus The Stranger in 2018.

A mention of the Henri Cartier-Bresson photography exhibit at the High Museum featuring photos of Camus in 2011.

As you can see Camus is no stranger to the blog.

** In Camus’s autobiography, The First Man (1995) he describes his childhood of poverty in which he was raised primarily by his grandmother. In one account Camus admits that he stole a nickel from his grandmother so he could attend a soccer match and when his grandmother confronted him about it, he lied that the nickel dropped into the family latrine. The family was so poor that his grandmother pulled up her sleeve and reached into toilet to search for the coin. I also recall how a schoolteacher of Camus’s, recognizing the boy’s talent, persuaded his grandmother that young Albert should continue his education instead of going to work – as was expected considering their dire economic condition. This teacher, this moment, changed the trajectory of Camus’s life.

My Destination: Professional Book Shopping

For the last few weeks I have been shifting from book shopper to book seller and Saturday, March 7th and Saturday, April 4th I will be setting up Destination: Books, a popup book stall at the Freedom Farmer’s Market at the Carter Center here in Atlanta. Destination: Books will be carrying about a dozen titles on organic farming and sustainability from Chelsea Green Publishing in Vermont, which I have selected for the booth, which I guess still makes me a book shopper. Here’s a sampler of some of those titles:

The Worm Farmer’s Handbook: Mid-to Large-Scale Vermicomposting (2018) for Farms, Businesses, Municipalities, Schools and Institutions by Rhonda Sherman.   I have been doing vermicomposting for about 5 years and you don’t have to have much more than a tub, selected food scraps and some worms to set something up. This book is written for vermi-culturists who are thinking of a bigger operation, but it has plenty of useful information for the “gentleman” worm rancher as well.

Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical to Liberation on the Land (2018) by Leah Penniman. I can trace an interview with Leah Penniman in July, 2019 issue of Sun Magazine to this idea of Destination: Books at the Freedom Farmer’s Market. First, I read the interview. Then I checked out the library’s copy and thought Farming While Black was a rare blend of black history, activism, practical advice for those interested in community gardening and tips on just growing better fruits and vegetables. It inspired me to contact Chelsea Green to carry some of their books and here I am.

Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist (2013) by Michael Judd. This full-color illustrated book is almost like a wish-idea catalog of projects that can replace your lawn with something edible or practical. Why not build an earthen oven for your backyard pizza parties? Why not give up some of your lawn mowing?

Used Books Too

I will have some related titles on the environment and transportation books at the booth too,  including Edward Humes’s Door to Door: The Magnificent Maddening World of Transportation (2016), David Owen’s Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability (2009) and Peter Gorman’s Barely Maps (2019).  Anyone who has read Hume’s book knows how interconnected the United States is to factories in China, so when container ship traffic at Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles harbor terminals begins to decrease dramatically, due to COVID-19 you know that there will be changes afoot. China exports everything from clothes to furniture to auto parts to electronics including the iPhone.*

The Humes book makes a case on why it is important to keep things local, and ideas from Destination: Books can help you do it.

* In the opening chapter of his book, Howe traces a laundry list of components in the iPhone that must travel from all over the world Germany, Kentucky, California, Massachusetts, the Netherlands, Taiwan and Korea to China to be assembled and then shipped back to markets all over the world. When you factor in all the mileage to get the components to China it comes out to approximately 165,000 miles. If you factor in the raw materials being mined and shipped to these component manufacturers the distance traveled is close to 237,000 miles which is close to the distance to the Moon.

Book Cleanup

"Many fates befall books other than being read and treasured" - Richard Ford, Independence Day

This quote came to mind when I saw several books soaking in the creek at the park near my house. The creek bank was steep and I wished I had an older version of my mud-loving grandson around (seen below, equipped with his wellies) who might fetch them out in my behalf. But I was only one around on that gray, soggy day. I had to go home first to retrieve a walking stick and a garbage bag because I didn't think the waterlogged copies of Who Let the Gods Out by Max Evans, The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The Line Tender by Kate Allen and a John Sandford detective thriller would be salvageable.

This was no small task without a proper net and carrying the heavy, wet books up a muddy slope was a challenge too. As I hauled them out to the nearby trash can, I muttered to myself, "If someone wants to get rid of their books, why don't they just burn them."  

My final takeaway: Never underestimate what a blogger will do for something to write about.

 

Bookmark Findings

Are you one of those people can’t seem to get rid of a bookmark – as if it were some significant memento of a reading or bookstore experience? Maybe the only time you get rid of a bookmark is when you lose it. For those who may have lost their bookmark during a visit to the Decatur Library, do not despair. Your bookmark has been repurposed as art by Joanna Young of Decatur who made this installation (with help from the Decatur Library Staff) from bookmarks found in the stacks. Closer examination of the tree reveals that people are a loosey-goosey when it comes to what qualifies as a bookmark. It can be simply, anything capable of marking your place in a book – whether that be a playing card, a bookstore advertisement or a bookmark promoting reading. Anything is better than dog-earring a page to mark your reading spot.

I too, have trouble tossing a nice bookmark though I am at a loss to try to come up with something creative  (a bookmark wreath?) like Ms. Young. Check out these rarities from my collection of bookmarks that clutter my desk. *

Over the past few years, I have changed my bookmark habits by enlisting postcards to use as bookmarks. I like using the back of postcards to make notes or pulling quotes as I read instead of making pen marks or worse, using  yellow highlighter. I usually add the page number too.  After I finish the book, I stick the postcard inside the book and leave it as a short index for future reference. Later, if I am listing the book for sale at my Destination: Books Alibris Site or donating it to the Decatur Friends of the Library (Next book sale at the Library is February 8th) I remove the postcard at put it in index card sized box.

Besides as a good excuse to buy an additional postcard or two while traveling or putting one of those postcards from a trendy restaurants to good use, the postcard makes a good bookmark because it is made from more durable card stock that holds your reading progress firmly between the pages. If I am really on my game, I will select a postcard that thematically fits with the book that is has been paired with.

Postcards for Viet Thanh Nguyen

A recent example is the large sized postcard (a gift from younger daughter Bonnie when she visited Southeast Asia) I use with the works of Viet Thanh Nguyen. I recently finished The Refugees (2017), a collection of eight short stories. The stories are linked because the main characters have some connection to Vietnam – most of whom came by boat to the United States after the Fall of Saigon in 1975 (as did Nguyen and his parents). Whether it’s a former military commander who insists taking charge of his son’s marital life, a Vietnam war vet visiting his daughter who teaches in the Vietnamese countryside, or a woman dealing with the dementia of her older husband of an arranged marriage, Nguyen’s refugees not only struggle with daily problems but their lives are further complicated with their conflicted feelings about their homeland. The poignancy and matter-of-fact clarity in which Nguyen tells these tales adds my admiration of his work.

To capture these notes, I enlisted the aid of a large postcard just as I had done when I read Nguyen’s excellent novel The Sympathizer (2016). The Sympathizer has many of the same themes of The Refugees except the narrator has a sense of satirical humor (including a takedown of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now) deftly mixed with intense graphic passages that will terrify you. I can’t remember who I gave my copy of The Sympathizer to, but at least I still have my notes or should I say a bookmark to remember it by.

* Bookmarks Annotated. The Borges quote comes from the American Book Center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (circa 2014), The Watermark Bookstore in Wichita, Kansas (circa early 1980s), which included quotes like "You know how it is in the kid's book world. It's just bunny eat bunny. " and Raven Used Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts (circa early 21st century).

Hot Stove League Intensifies

Usually Major League Baseball’s hot stove league is reserved for a few stories about free agents signings and time to catch up on baseball books to pass the time until Opening Day. This year there is no winter snoozing with the Houston Astros and Boston Red Sox scandals about using technology to steal signs pushing baseball to the front page headlines. Three managers have been terminated, and one general manager Houston's  Jeff Luhnow was also fired.  It makes off my season anxiety concerning the fate of my adopted baseball son, Chicago Cub third baseman Kris Bryant seem trite. (I will always remember Kris' smile just before the final out of the 2016 World Series.)

Coincidently, this scandal mushroomed while I was catching up on my backlog of magazine reading which included baseball. In the July, 2019 issue of Atlantic magazine, Jack Hamilton wrote a review and thought piece on Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik’s book The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformist’s Are Using Data to Build Better Players (2019). The entire piece is available here, but two paragraphs really resonated. One concerns the general atmosphere on the Houston ball club.

I certainly don’t want to be in the position defending millionaire ballplayers, but perhaps the underlying core motivation of stealing signs via technology ( similar to using Performance Enhancing Drugs) is self-preservation --- keeping your job. The sentence about how Luhnow fostered a toxic atmosphere of winning at all costs makes me wonder whether pressure from management factored in the complicity of Houston players using technology to steal signs. In the following paragraph Hamilton suggests that one of the trends in professional baseball is that top players can be created from cheaper average players. That notion doesn’t bode well for the star players.

Another coincidence cropped up while I was reading my annual hot stove baseball book, Volume 1 of  Norman Macht’s biography, Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball. As the owner and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics for a half a century, Mack (real name Cornelius McGillicuddy) the man with the most victories (and the most defeats) in baseball history also had visions of developing perfect ball players. In 1901, while Mack was forming the new American League, he had the hopes of prying a young promising pitcher from the National League – future Hall of Famer Christy Matthewson. Macht writes, “Mack saw this new beginning as an opportunity to fulfill his dream of taking young, intelligent athletes and teaching them, molding them into a perfect baseball machine.”

Mack's Exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame

 

Barely Maps: A Cyclist's Sojourn

On my companion blog Down & Outbound, I posted a note last fall about my contribution to a Kickstarter project entitled Barely Maps. The project is a personal account of cyclist and graphic designer Peter Gorman's 11,000 mile bike trip across the United States and southern Canada. A signed copy of Barely Maps 100 Minimalist Maps arrived at my door after Christmas including a personal thank you note for being an investor.

The book is gorgeously printed like an artbook with dozens of illustrations including a set of Intersections, where Gorman outlines the quirky, weird intersections of select U.S. cities.  Even though Intersections is a popular aspect of Gorman's work (single city posters are available at barelymaps.com) the book is much more. Writes Gorman, "It seemed important to make sense of the trip and what it was all about. I thought it would help to create something, so I opened a blank white page on my computer and started drawing." The result is a series of illustrated memoir-vignettes about his travels and his life before and after the trip.

All images courtesy of Peter Gorman

Gorman's transcontinental  bike trip dominates the first section of the book (Maps numbering #1 to #25) . Gorman writes only briefly about the places he visits, preferring to  rely on "maps" or more illustrative representations of places (The Great Lakes, Savannah, the Pacific Coast Highway). Some of  his efforts work better for me than others. but I will admit, I was hoping  something similar to Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983).  My misguided expectation that everything should match Charles Joseph Minard's "Napoleon's March to Moscow" falls on me. Once I put that aside, I could appreciate Gorman's creativity much more.

Part 2 is Intersections which covers 25 maps of intersections of major cities (Maps #26 to #50 although you have to figure that out for yourself). But based on his depiction of Atlanta I appreciate that all metropolises have street oddities that we view with both pride and loathing. One possible shortcoming is whether the reader will care about the petroglyph-like intersections from other cities.

The final two sections of the book Part 3 After (maps #51 to #75)  and Part 4 Before (maps #76 to #100) Gorman concentrates on the aftermath of his trip where he spent considerable time in Seattle (#51 to #64). About 80% of the maps in the Before section are dedicated to Gorman's childhood in upstate New York ---  his early memories of spinning globes in the classroom and riding his bike on his paper route in Syracuse. Included with these illustrations are short paragraphs explaining the significance of how maps have always been an integral part of his life. 

Because the last two sections are heavily Seattle and Syracuse centric, they don't work as well as the first section (unless you hail from those two cities). Nonetheless as one who designed and wrote his own book out of an obsession (Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire ) I understand Gorman's need to create and illustrate the book his way.

I will enjoy showing this interesting, quirky book to people at my next Destination: Books popup and I know Gorman is planning another creative endeavor in March of 2020 called Blue Atlas.  Long may he ride.

 

Best Books Read 2019

Instead of focusing on the best books published in 2019, my tradition has been to revisit the books I read in 2019 and ruminate about them to see if any theme emerges, no matter if it’s a stretch. A complete list of what has been read is on the sidebar of the homepage. I know its not that many books numbers wise, (barely over 20), but in my defense a couple of them were challenging reads such as A Savage of Peace: The Algerian War 1954-1962 (1977, 1996) by Alastair Horne which I wrote a longer essay about.

W.G. Sebald (1944-2001)

An interesting phenomenon about reading is how some authors must reach a critical mass in your mind before you pick up one of his or her books. My older daughter Cynthia mentioned Sebald in a paper of hers, and then he was mentioned in Jose Carrión’s Bookhops (from last year’s best books list) before I picked up a copy of Austerlitz (2001) at  Powell’s City of Books in Portland.

Born in Germany, Sebald spent much of his life in England teaching German literature. He has a most unusual writing style described as “elliptical a combination of “memoir, fiction, travelogue, history and biography.” I read two of what Sebald himself described as documentary fictions .  The first was Austerlitz, which tells the tale of man who tries to reconstruct his childhood when he discovers that he was sent by his Jewish parents from Czechoslovakia to England on the eve of the Nazi invasion of the country. In his other book The Rings of Saturn, (1995) the narrator roams throughout the Norwich area of England discovering the connections between his walks and the world at large. Each book is characterized by long passages with very few paragraphs but interspersed with grainy black and white photographs to illustrate his descriptions (kind of like a blog on paper).

Totalitarianism, Democracy

There seems to be a common theme in this year’s Best Books and that has been trying to understand 2019 better through the lens of 20th century history. It began with reading Eric Villiard’s The Order of the Day (2017) a short nonfiction book which looks how Nazi Germany annexed Austria months ahead of World War II and how Adolf Hitler was aided and supported by the German industrial giants of  Bayer, IG Farben, and Thyssen-Krupp (and others) who profited and whose fortunes were relatively unscathed by the war. 

Memorial to the Victim of Communism - Prague

Going to the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany this fall, I did do some “reading ahead” of the history of these countries. Two books by Czech expat Josef Skvorecky captures the dismal society under Soviet control in then Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s. Another book Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945, (2002) which I had written about previously introduces to the ghastly bloody end of World War II and how it set in motion the Cold War. My takeaway: Don’t take the threats from the Soviets/Russians lightly, they are tough, long suffering people who historically know how inflict major suffering on others.

As some sort of counterbalance to totalitarianism fanfare, I read the new edition of Charles Black Jr. and Philip Bobbitt’s The Impeachment Handbook (2018) which without mentioning Donald Trump discusses the history of impeachment, entails impeachable crimes and a discussion of the seven fallacies surrounding impeachment.

It’s a tidy short book and on a lark, I sent one via Amazon to our Georgia U.S. Senator David Perdue. I hope someone will take the lead and send a copy to the newly appointed Kelly Loeffler who is temporarily replacing our other senator. But perhaps she should consider buying her own since she’s contributing $20 million of her personal forture to her  campaign in 2020. 

I’ve also been reading Astra Taylor, Democracy Doesn’t Exist, But We’re Going to Miss it When It’s Gone (2018) just to put an historical perspective on what democracy really means and how it is distinguished from equality and freedom. You can see how obsessive I’ve become in 2019 even though I have been trying to limit watching the news on television.

One final note to ponder about democracy, in the aforementioned A Savage War of Peace one of the tipping points in that lead to the outbreak of eight years of terrorism and bloodshed was the French denying voting rights to the Algerian Muslim population through intimidation. Something to ponder in the age of gerrymandering and making it more challenging for people to vote whether it’s making it more difficult for college students to vote in New Hampshire or purging voting registrations in Georgia.

Luke Skywalker Can’t Read

I feel I must finish on somewhat a lighter note. I thoroughly enjoyed the cleverness of Ryan Britt's Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths (2015). Britt’ is  a great fan of science fiction – looks at some of the oddities of this world: Sherlock Holmes as a sci-fi institution, “looking at Star Trek as a half assed religion” and the of course thinking about Luke Skywalker’s favorite books. Britt writes:

Sadly, Luke Skywalker doesn’t have a favorite book. And even though he’s the ultimate dreamer, a craver of adventure, a wide-eyed Joseph Campbell archetype hero, he’s initially presented to us as a kind of philistine. This supposed pop descendent of Odysseus and Perseus lives in the zip code of a galaxy far, far away, meaning he’s got not no Shakespeare, Homer, Robert Louis Stevenson, J.M. Barrie, or even J.K. Rowling to get him excited about packing up and seeking adventure…As depicted in the first “real” Star Wars film, in 1977, Luke Skywalker—when you consider a substantial amount of evidence—is a functionally illiterate person and his fellow citizens might not be much better off. Not once in any of the existing Star Wars movies does a person, droid, or creature pick up a book or newspaper, magazine, literary journal, or a chapbook of Wookie poetry.

Fear not, blog visitor, because just being here you prove you are a discriminating reader (Our marketing team reports that functional illiterates avoid the blog.) Thanks for visiting and I hope you newcomers will become subscribers in 2020. I will take an oath not to bore you in 2020 and unlike many, I take oaths very seriously.

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If you’d like to purchase online any of the books that you’ve read about here, please begin your shopping at the Destination Books Alibris store at destination.alibrisstore.com. Any Alibris purchase that originates from Destination Books link benefits the blog as a small percentage of the price goes back into  supporting this “obsession.”