Reading the Fights

The Best Writing About the Most Controversial of Sports
Edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Daniel Halpern - 1990 Prentice Hall Trade

 Review Upcoming!

Hate Mail from Cheerleaders

And Other Adventures from the Life of Reilley
Rick Reilley - 2007 Time Warner, Inc

One good turn deserves another!

The pieces in this book cover the early 2000s.  The biggest irony I'm wrapping my head around is that Lance Armstrong wrote the foreword for this book.  I'm curious who would have been chosen had this been published just a few years later.

The Life of Reilley

The Best of Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilley
2008 - Sports Illustrated

A number of years ago, my cousin forced a Sports Illustrated magazine into my hands and told me to read Rick Reilley's column on the back page.  Needless to say, the column was great but I never followed up. 

By the time I became a regular subscriber to the magazine, Reilley had already moved on from the back pages of SI.  Which is why I was so excited to read this book, to finally get the chance to catch up on some of those columns that I missed.

Pieces in this book span the late 80s to early 2000 and it's incredible to see how some things have hardly changed at all, whereas others have progressed tremendously.   In addition to Reilley's excellent writing, this book is worth reading for its wide scope and perspective on sports.

The 34-Ton Bat

The Story of Baseball as Told Through Bobbleheads, Cracker Jacks, Jockstraps, Eye Black, and 375 Other Strange and Unforgettable Objects

Steve Rushin - 2013 Little, Brown & Company

Steve Rushin makes reading fun again. 

And it's not just because he has a unique writing style that heavily leans on puns and word play.  It's because he had the great idea to tell the story of baseball not through the lens of another winning season, GOAT player or season that changed the lives of every small town citizen, but through the everyday parts of the game that we take for granted.  Bats. Baseballs. Uniforms. Bobble Heads. Cracker Jacks. Souvenirs.

The book's just the right length, easy to read and packed with interesting information.  I'd call this a must read for anyone who loves the national pastime. 

October 1964

David Halberstam - 1995 Random House Publishing Group

Although this book has been around for a while, it was nice to read it in context of more recent books that have been published about some of the players from that time; namely Mantle and Maris among others.

Halberstam has a great gift for making a nonfiction work about a statistically-crazed sport read like a novel.  Considering some of the elements involved in that summer of 1964, this is a novel with profound racial themes and a clear dichotomy between an old way of thinking, represented by the Yankees, and a new way of life, represented by the Cardinals.  Halberstam doesn't either stop at the players, also describing how these changes affected all aspects of baseball from the front office to scouts to the press corp.

October 1964 is an easy, enjoyable book and one recommend for someone just looking for a nice baseball read.

Joe DiMaggio

The Hero's Life
Richard Ben Cramer - 2001 Simon & Schuster

This book was given to me by a friend over a year ago and I finally got around to reading it.  I'm sorry it took me so long.  "Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life" is very enjoyable, well written, and pretty thoroughly researched.  Think of it as the When Pride Still Mattered or The Last Boy for Joe DiMaggio.

However, this book comes with a caveat.  After reading When Pride Still Mattered, I not only still liked Vince Lombardi but also became a little bit of a Green Bay fan.  After reading this book, I didn't like Joe DiMaggio as much. 

Because Cramer does an excellent job of building a full picture of the man we raised to hero status, realize that also sets us up for disappointment when we see how fame and greed, two recurring themes in the book, made DiMaggio behave.   There's a reason we allow myth to shroud our heroes for so long, and often it's because we just like them better that way. 

If you don't want to know the truth, don't read this book.  For everyone else, it's a highly recommended read.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Ben Fountain - 2012 HarperCollins Publishers

This book is probably considered a political or military story, but it talks about football, so it counts as a sports book for me.

Whatever it's considered, Billy Lynn is worth reading because of its unique writing style and descriptive phrases.  Besides, it's good for us sports freaks to prove we can read something besides for box scores every once in a while.

Still, serious sport nuts will not enjoy this for its football, because it's only used as a backdrop in tandem with the Dallas Cowboys to narrow in on America's opulence and obsession with entertainment.  So the book talks about sports, just not positively.   We could get mad at Ben Fountain for that but this book is too good for such trivialities.

Billy Lynn is a worthy literary experience and enjoyable to boot.