Baseball

“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.

Culture and Criticism

From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.

Donors Choose and Contests

Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.

Stories, True and Otherwise

Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.

The Vine

The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!

Capote: A Biography
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

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)

Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You: One Man, Seven Days, Twelve Televisions
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

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, …

Boys and Ghouls Together
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

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 …

Boy: Tales of Childhood
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

Lovely, friendly, quick read.   Not what you might expect from Roald Dahl and all the more winning for it.   (8/10/05)

The Botany of Desire
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

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 …

Borderlines
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

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 …

Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

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 …

Blue Blood
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

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 …

The Black Prince of Baseball: Hal Chase and the Mythology of the Game
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

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 …

Black Dahlia Avenger
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

Usually it’s the case with true-crime books that the story is compelling, but the writing is crap.   This one’s the other way around — a well-written book that is nonetheless some of the least …