The Books of Summer: Our Current Faves

BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about some recent books that have knocked our respective socks off.

TOP OF THE ORDER: 25 WRITERS PICK THEIR FAVORITE BASEBALL PLAYER OF ALL TIME
edited by Sean Manning
(Da Capo Press, 2010)

Baseball is a subject prone to sentimentality, but invite people to talk about their favorite baseball players and you are really asking for it. Surprisingly, few contributors to this anthology whiff. One is W.P. Kinsella, who, in the foreword, does little more than list the players, managers, or owners he has, over the years, favored (Curt Flood, Willie McGee, Bucky Walters, Johnny Vander Meer, Ewell Blackwell, Grady Hatton, Harry Brecheen, Enos Slaughter, Cito Gaston, Dick Williams, Ron Fairly, Charley Finely, Spike Owen, and so on). "I was never a fan of Ted Williams," Kinsella says at one point, "though he was a great player." You don't say? How fascinating.

Just as bad, Kinsella confesses that he "can't imagine being able to expound on one player's merits for a whole essay." Luckily, the other contributors were able to imagine such essays and the result is this book.

Craig Finn almost destroys his ode to Kirby Puckett with self-referencing ("I started another band: the Hold Steady. People really reacted to our second record, Separation Sunday, and by the fall of 2005 I was a very busy man. In February 2006, after a grueling few months, we did our first tour of Australia...."). He makes up for it by reminding us what helped make Kirby Puckett distinctive ("You almost had to laugh at the sight of him. He was short, and his butt stuck out like a bubble when he was at the plate. He looked a bit like a fire hydrant and a bit like a teddy bear—cute to match his name.").

Doug Glanville, who picks Garry Maddox, is an intelligent ex-ballplayer (and TV commentator) who speaks better than he writes. The following sentence is the kind of vapid hyperbole that a lot of us try to get away from in our reading: "He had tremendous charisma with fans and an uncanny ability to be accessible, and everyone walked away feeling as if Garry Maddox had known them for years." As is: "Loyalty is a big part of who he is, and not just because he is grateful and values relationships but because he understands that it can be good for any endeavor you can dream of pursuing."

The majority of entries, however, are illuminating. Steve Almond's sharp, warm, poetic defense of Rickey Henderson is marred only by two footnotes.

Footnote #1: "The scribe Jim Murray once joked that Rickey's strike zone was 'smaller than Hitler's heart.' With all due respect to Mr. Murray's enthusiasm, it would be difficult to conceive of a more offensive metaphor." Why even reference the metaphor if it is so historically offensive? Meanwhile, on page twenty-six, contributor Jonathan Eig actually contends for a "Most Offensive Metaphor" award: Barry Bonds "struck me as one of the lowest pieces of dung ever scraped from the bottom of a shoe."

Footnote #2: "No ballplayer ever wore his pants tighter than Rickey. I often wondered if, like a matador, he had to be lowered into them. And I also wondered if one of his many tics—the plucking of the fabric at the crease of his crotch—was a result of this snug fit. In the end, it struck me as more likely the result of a desire to call attention to his considerable genital bulge." I feel for the sap who had to fact-check that one.

A bonus in a collection of this sort is the unplanned way in which the views of authors converse or even debate one another. For example, a few TOP OF THE ORDER authors think that to be called great, a baseball player must also be a good person. Other writers argue that the matter of character is irrelevant. The heralded Buzz Bissinger not only takes the moral approach in his piece on Albert Pujols, but ends on that note: "What remains is the ineffability of character...[w]hich, ironically as it turns out, has not a thing to do with baseball."

Enter Christopher Sorrentino with his piece on Dave Kingman, a behemoth who is remembered for either striking out or hitting mammoth home runs (and who "looked and held himself a lot like Clint Eastwood, another magnificent and unknowable loner with simplistic solutions to complicated problems"). Kingman was deemed a "difficult personality," which Sorrentino translates as meaning "that the player in question isn't terribly keen to feed reporters the quotes they require to round out their stories." This jab caused me to turn back to the Pujols tribute where Bissinger writes, "During interviews, he [Pujols] talks about his life not in the familiar rote of I'm only talking to this writer because the club says I have to but with singular grace and humility." [Italics in the original.]

Bissinger's a great reporter. But he seems self-absorbed. In his essay, he claims, with apparent seriousness, that:

I am the one who made the single greatest public discovery in the cosmology of baseball: Albert. Albert Pujols. As I was writing the book THREE NIGHTS IN AUGUST, in which I spent much of the 2003 season with manager Tony La Russa and the St. Louis Cardinals, I made a conscious decision to refer to Pujols as the Great Pujols.... But after the book was published, the finicky mosquitoes came out with their low-drone whines that I had overreached. The familiar names of Rodriguez and Barry Bonds were invoked with straight and serious faces. Some had the psychosis to mention the Colorado Rockies' Todd Helton or Manny Ramirez....

I'm also a finicky mosquito, but my psychosis isn't in calling Pujols great, it's with Buzz claiming that it took his tooting in 2004 for the rest of us to recognize that Pujols's first three years in the game suggested a special player. To use just one gaudy set of numbers, Pujols batted in 130 runs in his first year, then 127, then 124.

But this is what baseball fans do: pick fights with one another.

Many of the stellar writers in this book are new to me, including King Kaufman (not to be confused with Dave Kingman), who, in writing about a journeyman player named Neifi Pérez, messes with the way we think about "lousy" players: "We fans buy our tickets and sit in the stands and boo lustily when our team's current Neifi grounds into a double play or gets caught stealing or serves up a three-run homer in a tie game. But really, who are we to judge? We're the tone-deaf knocking the choir, illiterates mocking poetry."

His insight: "The worst player in the major leagues is a hell of a ballplayer."

A number of these essays look at players who, at first glance, seem easy to mock: not just lumbering Kingman and cocksure Rickey (who referred to himself in the third person), but players like Tony Horton (remembered, if at all, for failing to live up to his promise), the ultra-conservative Jeff Kent (like Kingman, Kent was disliked by teammates and the press), and Michael Jordan (yes, that MJ, who batted .202 for the 1994 Birmingham Barons). What's fascinating in these treatments is how often the writers discover it was they, as fans, who had the most failings, not the players. "We were acting like the idiots we were," says one.

It's easy to mock baseball players when they "fail." After all, we get to do so from the safety of the bleachers or the blogosphere. If the athletes we rail against were in the same room with us, we'd be too scared to give them any sass. Instead, tough hombres that we are, we'd ask for an autograph.

What I got from this book was how unfair our feelings of both love and hate can be—there can be poor reasoning behind both. I also got from this book the quiet and self-reflection that wise writing can lead to, no matter how mawkish the subject.

LINES WE LIKED: "What attracts a fan to a player? Talent, position, statistics, appearance—the quantity x itself, to quote Salinger. But the most powerful connection is forged in the imagination." Stefan Fatsis (on Bobby Murcer)

"When you're a kid, your idols are aspirational figures, and when you're old, they're objects of nostalgia. But when you're in your prime, you choose your heroes as proxy." Neal Pollack (on Greg Maddux)

—MAS

OTHER PEOPLE'S REJECTION LETTERS
edited by Bill Shapiro
(Clarkson Potter, 2010)

Rejection cuts deep. This sly collection embraces that deepness—and why not? We can no more escape rejection than we can death, advertising, or Sean Hannity. In his trenchant intro, editor Shapiro says "that one thing that has always interested me about rejection: whom you blame for it. Whom do you hold responsible when you don't get the cute girl with cinnamon hair or the good job or the platinum card?" An oddly liberating aspect to the book is that it almost entirely consists just of the rejectors' voices; our own puny responses are silent.

In addition to the sometimes heart-wrenching content, OTHER PEOPLE'S, as a sort of found-art collection, also delivers the goods visually. This is because the book's pages mostly consist of photographs of actual rejection letters—be those rejections corporate or personal, coldly typed or desperately penned, coffee-stained or electronic, empathetic or crushing.

The majority of the rejectees are people like you or me:

"Amy, OK Ill stop saying things about your butt. What did you think i like you as a grilfriend. Well I dont ok By Mike"

"Dear Mama, I'm sorry. I've tried to change my aditude but I can't help it. P.S. Also I know you hate me."

"Dear Candidate: Thank you for submitting your pictures to PLAYBOY. The editors have viewed them and carefully considered...."

"Following a personal interview, a review of your records, and deliberation, your release to parole supervision at this time is denied...."

Mixed in are rejections either to or from the famous. F. Scott Fitzgerald berates his daughter in an exceedingly long missive; the Museum of Modern Art rejects a free piece of art from pre-famous Andy Warhol; Jackie Robinson berates President Eisenhower (on Chock Full o'Nuts letterhead).

Here is Gertrude Stein declining to read a manuscript that was sent to her, apparently, from someone she didn't know:

"Dear Madam, I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being...."

Who knew rejection could be beautiful?

—MAS

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
by Tom Franklin
(William Morrow, Oct. 2010)

Boys with guns, hard-drinking brutes, missing girls, scary uneducated people, kudzu-choked landscapes...yes, this is another dark and tangled Southern tale by Tom Franklin, and quite possibly his best. There are evil misdeeds here, crimes to be solved, and racial complications, but on a deeper, more profound level, this is a story about friendship—its murky dynamic of trust and betrayal. The book throbs with suspense and forensic clues as Franklin whips the narrative into a taut web. But beyond the compelling plot, this novel masterfully exposes the commonplace varieties of human cruelty, the kind that transforms decent citizens into a small-minded mob whose meanness goes unpunished.

LINES WE LIKED: "Vines and kudzu had nearly overtaken the place, it seemed the heart of some struggle, as if the vegetation were trying to claim the structure back into itself, pull it down, the earth suddenly an organic breathing mass underneath Silas, he could almost feel the friction, hear the viscous grumble of digestion." AND:  "The land had a way of covering the wrongs of people."

—CAF

THE PASSION OF MONTGOMERY CLIFT
by Amy Lawrence
(University of California Press, 2010)

Analyzing the oeuvre of the equally troubled-and-talented silver-screen legend Montgomery Clift is not for anyone less than a devoted cinephile. Lawrence discusses each Clift film chronologically, highlighting the nuances of his uncanny performances while acknowledging the impact of his alcoholism, closeted sexuality, and mid-career facial disfigurement. This is not a biography. This is a hagiography—but told through works, not just facts. It's a dissection of celebrity approached intellectually, but executed as exaltingly as a fan struggling to ascertain the secrets of a Hollywood enigma—secrets that may be revealed through his affecting and puzzling art.

LINES WE LIKED: "Regardless of whether the actor recoiled from the possibility of fame, such speculation is bolstered by the fact that Clift's drinking did intensify with his move from stage to screen. The myth of stardom as both a goal and a curse holds with either motive: as soon as Clift became a star, he couldn't throw it away fast enough."

—NE

LAY THE FAVORITE: A MEMOIR OF GAMBLING
by Beth Raymer
(Spiegel & Grau, 2010)

Before relocating to Las Vegas, Beth Raymer paid bills as an "in-home stripper" in Tallahassee. Then, not long after arriving in Nevada, Raymer became personal assistant to one of the most notorious professional sports gamblers in town, "Dinky," of Dink, Inc.—a good-natured, doughnut-ingesting mathematician whose passion for hockey, money, and betting founded a gambling empire. Raymer's droll and zesty account proves that criminals, sex-addicts, liars, boxers, and gamblers are as capable of mirth and humanity as anyone. Raymer travels to Vegas with Dinky, and to New York and the Caribbean with the "harmless maniac" Bernard Rose, until she finds herself atop her own shaky pyramid and realizes adventure, too, can be an addiction.

LINES WE LIKED: "It wasn't what you did; it was how you did it. Bookmaking was illegal, but there weren't any victims. The fine was three hundred bucks and a night in the pokey." 

—CM

UPTOWN/DOWNTOWN IN OLD CHARLESTON
by Louis Rubin
(University of South Carolina Press, 2010)

The stories of UPTOWN/DOWNTOWN IN OLD CHARLESTON span Louis Rubin's early childhood to his mid-twenties in the 1930s and 1940s in one of the most grandiose cities of the South. As a young man, Rubin's imagination was transfixed by the world before him: pick-up baseball games, single-engine train cars, and the tugboats and oyster trawlers that worked Charleston's historic harbors. Only a city like Charleston could satiate the author's burgeoning literary mind and his appetite for experience. Without romanticizing, Rubin's clear, steadfast storytelling recalls a time long forgotten.

LINES WE LIKED: "One reason I was so drawn to the Charleston waterfront—its ships and cargo launches and tugboats and trawlers—was that it seemed to fuse two otherwise discrete realms of my experience. It was the stuff of literature and the imagination and yet was not self-consciously picturesque or quaint but immediate and real and important to me."

—JP

COMPRESSION SCARS
by Kellie Wells
(University of Georgia Press, 2002)

The stories in COMPRESSION SCARS operate as effortlessly as dreams—you're not sure what to make of them afterwards, but they make perfect, if strange, sense at the time. There are twins and conjoined prose. A boy with a pet swan. The evangelical demigod—or demagogue—whose "healing began accidentally as, I suppose, most genuinely divine things do, or so it would seem to us." Wells captures a swarm of blinking, ephemeral moments—the species that flit at the corners of the mind until someone pins them down for better viewing. Humorous, transcendent, COMPRESSION SCARS is magnetic, each narrative like a fun house doorway drawing you in.

LINES WE LIKED: "Alison is reading the part of Tituba, which she also considers a very nice name. Alison watches her hands shake in her lap. Her heart palpitates. She feels it miss a beat and double up on the next. She imagines a bullet of blood bouncing against her aorta. She tries to see calm pulses of blood, smooth as peeled almonds, pushing their way through her veins. She sees nothing but feels her body lifting as if she were being inhaled."  From "A. Wonderland"

—AC

Click here to read Editors' Picks from July 2010.