“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.
From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.
Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.
Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.
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Interesting, although I don’t agree with some of the implications and I don’t love that it refuses to draw any conclusions. I think it’s generally agreed at this point that Hauptmann didn’t act alone, …
It’s very good — but the Plimpton oral history gives you a better sense of him, and you don’t need both. (7/1/06)
Listy in spots, but Lechner undertook his watch-twelve-TVs-for-a-week experiment the same week Mighty Big TV launched back in 1999, so that’s a nifty time capsule; the writing is not the deftest, but given the parameters, …
A Hitchcock short-story compilation (remember when he had his brand on everything — books, TV shows, everything?). I don’t usually read much detective/suspense fiction, but the old-school stuff is good; the diction is more …
Lovely, friendly, quick read. Not what you might expect from Roald Dahl and all the more winning for it. (8/10/05)
The apple chapter is brilliant, the tulip chapter is less brilliant but still entertaining, and the marijuana section — I have to doff my cap to Michael Pollan. He’s able to write ably about …
The cross-cutting is a little heavy-handed for me, but it works better and gets more fluid as the book goes on, and the portrayal of Jane is pitch-perfect. The woman is maddening. So …
Brooks is a really sharp writer; he’s exact, but he doesn’t get bogged down, and he pokes fun at the Bobos, but not meanly. His account of visiting the REI store in Seattle is …
Excellent book; I might have cut some of the historical stuff, like about Serpico, but every time Conlon went on a tangent and I was like, “Aw, get back to your experiences,” I ended up …
For a biography of one of the most enduringly controversial figures in the game, this is a real chore to get through, for two reasons: 1) too much background/historical context, that does not add to …