Alou is one of the best baseball autobiographies of recent years because it offers the story of race and baseball not from a non-American perspective, but from someone who got to know the United States very well as both a resident and a subject of its foreign policy, as both insider and outsider.
The most extraordinary thing about Amiable is that it was ever rescued from hiding. As the novel’s scrupulous and publicity-savvy editors suggest, “the discovery of an unpublished and previously unknown manuscript by a major modern writer is a rare occurrence.”
Most scholarly professionals, linguists and non-linguists alike, suffer from the occasional (or not so occasional) feeling that what they do is meaningless, having no direct, positive impact on their fellow man. The overall message of Baugh’s book will inspire them otherwise.
The basic facts are here, from Spahn’s upbringing in Buffalo to his last year in baseball with the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants, as well as some useful quotes but there are two problems with Freedman’s book.
Both of Zadie Smith’s essay collections—Changing My Mind and Feel Free—feature extraordinary writing, but Feel Free has a more constantly deeply considered point of view and a wider gathering of material.
Collins provides an uplifting narrative about how a same-sex romantic partnership is validated by the government and comes to hold a more respectful and comfortable place among friends, family, and the larger community. Setbacks are setbacks. Wins are wins. Hopes and fears are clear.
Hill’s comprehensive work reflects a diverse skillset, straddling the disciplines of history, journalism, and political science, that lends to a linguistically captivating and informative explanation of Yemen’s experience of regional intervention, tribal patronage, and strongman politics.
Slugfest is a fun book for anyone interested in comic books, in American popular culture generally, or in the obsessive and sometimes pathological nature of business competition. But it is not the incisive book about this industry that still awaits its author.
William J. Ryczek aptly documents baseball’s generation of conflict through 1968, the year “America’s pastime” confronted racial militancy, Vietnam, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and also the growing dominance of football.
Kyle Longley’s book on LBJ mixes two rich elements: one of the most remarkable, and remarkably flawed men, ever to be U.S. president, plus one of the most troubling, tragic, and turbulent years of the 20th century.