I wish WNYC.org had some sort of code that let me skip the pledge-period haranguing now that I’ve already donated. Every time I have to restart the audio stream, Brian What’shisnuts is giving me guilt …

Lance Mannion, in the midst of discussing David Halberstam:

One of baseball’s great beauties is that it is played at the speed of a human voice’s ability to keep up. It’s the only team sport that …

Herzog is off-puttingly self-congratulatory, and I wish he hadn’t bothered mentioning all the players he could tell had drug problems if he’s not going to name some damn names, and I know it’s the fashion …

Hated it.   Stomped on it when I finished reading it.   Condescending, priggish, hypocritical, poorly written pap.   Loathsome book.

The writing can be kind of pro forma at times, but Rathbone does paint a vivid picture most of the time.   My only real complaint is that I’d have liked more follow-up on some …

A fun, fast read if, like me, you’ve seen Goodfellas about a bazillion times.

It is — to the surprise of nobody, I’m sure — an excellent book.   It’s funny, it’s touching, and it’s so smoothly written that you just can’t stop reading it; I finished it in …

While it’s hardly even-handed (and also REALLY hard to read because, in the original, he typeset it himself and his caps alignment is fucked, so it’s like reading a really small-fonted term paper), it’s really …

Eh.   Not nearly enough dirt, the interstitial bits with Jerry are forced — if you read the excerpt in Vanity Fair, you don’t need to read the whole thing.

The problem here is that it’s pretty clear early in the book what had actually happened (sorry for the vagueness, I don’t want to ruin it for anyone), which is a shame; Jackson’s first-person narration …