Book Review - The Big Chair by Ned Colletti

I have a confession to make: I’m not much of a reader. While I enjoy reading, I often find myself too strapped for time to commit to a book, especially during the daily grind of the baseball season.

I have quite a backlog of books I’ve been meaning to get to, and hopefully will at some point. But I made a point to read former Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti’s new book, ‘The Big Chair,’ written with Joseph A. Reaves. and I’m glad I did.

Colletti has been in baseball for 35 years in a variety of roles, starting out in media relations and publications with the Cubs in the early 1980s. He also worked for the Giants before coming to Los Angeles, and has basically seen it all in baseball.

This book does a good job at telling many of those stories, with Colletti sharing several behind-the-scenes details of various points in his career. I read the book just before Thanksgiving and found myself loving the tales so much that I finished it in two days.

Without giving anything away, a few stories I particularly enjoyed included in the book are Colletti’s exhaustive interview with Frank McCourt for the Dodgers general manager position, how Colletti convinced Cubs general manager Dallas Green to hire him, and Colletti’s daughter’s reaction to the Angelsbeating the Giants in 2002 World Series.

There are details of a few colorful disagreements between Yasiel Puig and former Dodgers manager Don Mattingly, plus Odalis Perez and Brad Penny each leaving the Dodgers on not the best of terms. 

There was Colletti with the Cubs watching Greg Maddux leave as a free agent for the Braves, then nearly 14 years later bringing him to the Dodgers in trade.

Also included in the book is the time in 2011 a Dodgers intern posted a Fan Post on True Blue LA that laid out Colletti’s organizational report, including confidential information on several players, heading into the MLB Draft. That post was eventually deleted, and the author lost his internship.

I was surprised that the signing of Jason Schmidt wasn’t mentioned, but Colletti was otherwise pretty thorough discussing his tenure as Dodgers general manager, hitting nearly all the key points that have been discussed ad nauseum over the years.

Where this book shines is in the storytelling, and with 35 years in baseball Colletti has a lot of stories to tell. That makes ‘The Big Chair’ well worth your time.

Purchase this book, CLICK BELOW:

Original review on: www.truebluela.com

Book Review - Artemis by Andy Weir

Andy Weir, author of The Martian, takes readers to another desolate world, but instead of the Red Planet it's the moon, in his new novel, Artemis.

Weir takes readers on an exploration of the colonization of Earth's nearest neighbor in outer space, and it's not too far into the future. 

Most everything needed for the modules of the city of Artemis can be reasonably manufactured on the surface, along with the occasional supply and tourist runs from home. 

Each living habitat is named for a prominent member of the original Apollo programs, but each has distinct features associated with it, whether it is for the affluent or those barely able to scrape by and survive.

Living in the poorer end of Artemis is Jasmine Bashara, aka Jazz. She has talent and is quite intelligent but chooses to skate by. 

She works as a porter for the tourists and the citizens who sometimes want their packages from Earth handled discreetly. She blows a field test that would have gotten her a job taking tourists in EVA suits to explore the area around the original landing site of Apollo 11. 

Upset and not thinking clearly, Jazz receives an offer that promises more money than she can imagine if she can successfully pull off a dangerous assignment. She has the skills and the knowledge, but does she have the luck and equipment necessary to keep her in the clear when damage control begins?

Jazz is a compelling character, both clever and sharp. Weir has created a realistic and fascinating future society on the moon, and every detail feels authentic and scientifically sound.

Weir knows how to make cutting-edge science sexy and relevant without losing the story.

Want to Buy This Book, CLICK HERE:

Original review on: http://www.firstpost.com

Book Review - The Savage by Frank Bill

Frank Bill might be Indiana’s most prolific novelist, but he doesn’t live in Indy or one of our college towns. 

Instead, he resides in Corydon. He still works at a factory. And in his latest novel, The Savage, he has perfected his literary formula: a stylized and extraordinarily violent version of the Southern Indiana he knows.

Bill’s previous books—Crimes in Southern Indiana, a story collection that remains his best work, and Donnybrook, a novel—take place in the present-tense Midwest. He might focus on the worst parts, the suffering small towns and murderous men. 

But he’s trying to capture something true. You can tell the time is our own, although you can also tell that time has passed his places and characters by.

The Savage switches things up. It’s based in Harrison County, where he lives, but much of it occurs in a dystopian future, where the grid has been unplugged and society has been broken. Many Americans, angry at corporate evil and a collapsed economy, have enlisted in militias that specialize in killing and stealing. In this bleak future, a teenaged loner named Van Dorn tries to survive.

Given this plot of populism gone sour, Bill understands readers may find echoes of our current age. “I started writing it around 2012,” he says, “and it’s weird. It’s not that what happened lately influenced the book. It’s that what happened back then has come to a boiling point now.”

The novel also features flashbacks to Van Dorn’s father, along with a few familiar, beat-up faces from Donnybrook. It adds up to Bill’s longest and most ambitious book yet. 

The Savage should appeal to anyone looking for fiction that’s aggressive and bloody, where every sentence swaggers.

Based on the success of Bill’s first two books, it seems like a lot of people are seeking precisely that. He has traveled to Europe, where French and Norwegian readers adore his fiction and its dark, working-class themes. 

In America, he has done events on both coasts. At one book festival in California, a woman seemed concerned. Were his books what Indiana was really like? Had he been mistreated as a child? Bill had to smile. “It’s not a nonfiction book, ma’am,” he replied.

Get A Copy of This Book Today, Click Now:

Original review on: www.indianapolismonthly.com

Book Review - The Desperado & A Noose for the Desperado by Clifton Adams

In two masterfully written, fast-paced Westerns reprinted from the 1950s, a hot-headed teenager on the run from the law becomes a bandit... and the fastest gunman ever to come out of Texas.

The Desperado and the follow-up, A Noose for the Desperado, penned the following year, are two thrilling tales by Clifton Adams, a two-time winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award.

A short story writer for pulp magazines in the late 1940s, Adams began his literary career as a novelist in 1950 with the first of two adventures featuring Talbert ‘Tall’ Cameron,
the young tearaway turned hard-bitten gunslinger.

Published by Gold Medal Books, The Desperado became a popular novel on its release and legendary crime writer Donald E. Westlake would later cite it as having an influence on his writing. It was also made into a hit B-movie by Allied Artists.

Bud Elmer, in his entertaining introduction to this fine Stark House reprint which comprises both novels, dryly remarks of the movie version: “For an act or two the plot streamlines the book pretty well. 

Then things go to heck in a hand-basket and any similarities with the book ride out of town.”

The novel is set in the early 1870s, with Texas under the rule of a carpetbag government led by northerner E.J. Davis whose despotic state police organisation administer rough justice to all who challenge their authority.

When Ray Novak, the former marshal’s son, loses his head and hits a Yankee cavalryman who happens to be one of the governor’s kinfolk, all hell breaks loose in John’s City. Before Novak flees town, he stops at Talbert ‘Tall’ Cameron’s home to warn him that the police will want to punish all local troublemakers.

Tall was guilty of a similar offence months earlier, clubbing a carpetbagger with his rifle butt, and so it seems likely that in Novak’s absence the police will make an example out of Tall.

Heeding the advice of his parents, he leaves town, intending to stay with his uncle on the Brazos for a while and then come back when the carpetbaggers are gone from Texas, but his love for local girl 

Laurin Bannerman stops him straying far from John’s City.

While evading the posse hot on his trail, he meets the legendary gunman Pappy Garret, a man who will change his life forever.

Pappy, an old-timer who proudly admits to having ‘never stolen a dime in his life,’ is a cold-hearted killer who carries ‘a beautiful piece of killing equipment,’ the sort that would make a man ‘glad to get shot by a gun like that, if he cared anything for firearms.’

Get A Copy of This Book Today, Click Now:

Original review on: www.wigantoday.net

REVOLUTION SONG A Story of American Freedom By Russell Shorto - Book Review

“There is properly no history, only biography,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Russell Shorto, in his new book “Revolution Song,” seems to be of similar mind. He writes about six people, all of whom lived in the Revolutionary era, but he does not roll them up into a single narrative or use their lives to bolster an overarching thesis.

Instead, he artfully weaves their stories together and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions. “I have tried not to preach or even teach,” Shorto writes in the preface — and it proves a decidedly refreshing approach.

Shorto has an eye for intriguing subjects (his previous books include “Amsterdam,” “Descartes’ Bones” and “The Island at the Center of the World”), and this book is no exception.

The Seneca chief Cornplanter (or Kayethwahkeh in Seneca) was a fine looking, philosophically minded man who was also, in Shorto’s words, “something of a killing machine.”

Allied with England during the Revolution, Cornplanter and his warriors slaughtered patriot soldiers and civilians, even children. In retaliation, George Washington sent an invasion force that destroyed crops and leveled village upon village, killing and scalping along the way.

The war devastated the Senecas, and afterward Cornplanter counseled accommodation, urging his people to learn English and know something of white ways. But as the Senecas lost more territory, they grew increasingly hostile to white culture.

A message came to Cornplanter from the Creator, telling him to “remove from his house and sight every article of the workmanship or invention of the white man.” He destroyed mementos, including a sword that had been a gift from Washington, and gradually withdrew from the wider world.

Shorto concludes with the optimistic side of the Creator’s message, describing ancestral lands and ancient ways that Cornplanter, having thrown off white culture, could dream of once more. But the conclusion to Cornplanter’s story is actually very sad.

Although the United States government guaranteed in 1794 that the Seneca grant where Cornplanter was buried would never be taken, in 1964 it was. The Army Corps of Engineers moved his remains and those of hundreds of Senecas buried near him in order to construct a dam on the Allegheny River.

Another of Shorto’s subjects is Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, a dark-haired beauty who wrote a delightfully scandalous memoir. Some scholars have thought it a forgery, but Shorto argues that it is not, and without doubt it is a good read.

Coghlan’s father, a British officer assigned to the United States during the Revolution, forced her at age 14 to marry the British lieutenant John Coghlan, probably to put an end to her dalliance with Aaron Burr. She detested her husband, ran away and availed herself of an English lord, whereupon her father sent her to a nunnery. After she escaped, he disowned her.

Read the original book review on: www.nytimes.com

An American Tragedy By Ta-Nehisi Coates

There have always been black presidents of the United States. That’s true whether we’re talking about the work of the historian J. A. Rogers, who in 1965 published “The Five Negro Presidents: According to What White People Said They Were”;

or whether we mean the work of our finest comedians like Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle, whose sketches imagining a black president satirized not so much the man himself as the racism that had prevented the dream of one.

Then there’s the actor Morgan Freeman, who has portrayed not just the president but God with that lush voice of his. He maketh all things possible.

But even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as “black” could not prepare us for the election of America’s first undeniably black president, Barack Obama. As Ta-Nehisi Coates charts over and over again in the essays found in “We Were Eight Years in Power,” the price of that ticket has been a steady and at times surprising backlash, resulting in what Coates ultimately and provocatively calls “America’s first white president” in Donald Trump.

If “the improbability of a black president had once been so strong that its most vivid representations were comedic,” now Coates means to give us what he calls “an American tragedy.” His account presides over not just a change in the nation but changing notions of citizenry, legitimacy and even hope. With some quarters seeing the 2008 election less as a promise than as a threat, Obama’s achievement proves to be both a milestone and a millstone.

The same might be said of Coates’s ascension as an important critic, if not the important critic, of our time. To his credit, Coates has sidestepped the old “one-at-a-time” trap used to pit black geniuses against one another, as well as the ever-present pressure to be the go-to expert on blackness after the runaway success of his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me.”

His reach has proved impressive: Coates, the son of a former Black Panther, went on to reinvent the comic book Black Panther, making him the envy of “blerds” everywhere.

But it is James Baldwin more than anyone who appears as a lodestone here. Coates even moved for a time to France, as Baldwin did, and Coates’s expatriate distance only sharpened his view of the goings-on at home. 

Of Baldwin, Coates writes powerfully: “Baldwin’s beauty — like all real beauty — is not style apart from substance but indivisible from it. It is not the icing on the cake but the eggs within it, giving it texture, color and shape.”

“Eight Years” could have settled for being the obligatory miscellany that too often follows a writer’s masterpiece; instead, the book provides a master class on the essay form. 

Structured as a call and response between eight of his most significant articles and briefer, more personal essays arranged by year, Coates gives us something between a mixtape and a Künstlerroman, demonstrating how he came to dominate the nonfiction genre.

Even without the framing of the lively if clipped “this is what I was doing that year” portions, we can see Coates’s growing power and prowess from the progression of the pieces themselves. 

Picking up steam with “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” from February 2012, Coates is in full command by the time we reach “Fear of a Black President,” an essay that captures the Obama that many are nostalgic for and others continue to rage against.

Read the original book review on: www.nytimes.com

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World - Book Review

Understanding our world through the stories of Joseph Conrad

Us versus them; you are with us or against us; black or white — as communication across lines break down, is the inability to understand each other pushing us to the brink?

Amid an existential crisis, comes this remarkable retelling of Joseph Conrad’s life and work and its resonance with the present dysfunctional world by Harvard University historian Maya Jasanoff.

In 1975, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe gave a public lecture, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The novella, he said, “projected the image of Africa as the ‘other world’, the antithesis of Europe, and therefore of civilisation...” Calling Conrad, a “bloody racist,” Achebe found the book “rife with degrading stereotypes of Africa and Africans.”

Jasanoff mentions Achebe, as also Barack Obama’s retort when asked by a friend why he was reading “this racist tract.” It’s because, he said, “the book teaches me things... About White people... A particular way of looking at the world.”

Read the original book review on: The Hindu