Review: Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan

Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan by Scott Simon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed parts of this, though not the parts I expected before I began reading. This book sat on my TBR pile of baseball books, as I had the impression that that was what this was about. But here, Simon interweaves personal stories of his family with stories of recent Chicago sports teams. And I found Simon’s family stories, and the sports stories where he is a character were more interesting than his perspectives on, for instance, Bull’s management during the winning seasons that were so long ago. I most enjoyed his descriptions of hanging out with some people who might be considered one step removed from athletic greatness – like family friend Jack Brickhouse, and Luc Longley, who Simon befriends and kind of becomes one of his posse members. Simon doesn’t appear to have the personality to be the kind to hang out with your Jordans or Pippens or Ditkas or Graces. It comes across as nerdy humblebragging. Overall, this was at its best when Simon talks about his family. The reportage on the Chicago pro sports teams of the 80s and 90s was a nice trip down memory lane for a Chicago sports fan, but was about what you’d expect from a reporter.

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Review: How You Learn Is How You Live: Using Nine Ways of Learning to Transform Your Life

How You Learn Is How You Live: Using Nine Ways of Learning to Transform Your Life by Kay Peterson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In reading this, it seems the author is offering up a rehash of Myers Briggs, but including the word learning in as many descriptions as possible. The author includes 9 “ways of learning”, some opposites of others, some overlapping others, with the thought that you prefer to act “to type” as a default but can modify your actions and thoughts to include the other ways in your decision-making process. The ways of learning, such as thinking, acting, and reflecting, (and which are illustrated on the book’s cover) seem to me to be the actions associated with a flowchart that a person might use while making decisions. I like an occasional reminder to think using a process, and this book worked as that, but I didn’t see the tie-in to learning. This is more a general guide to decision-making. It seems to fall in between books describing how people associated with a Myers Briggs type think and a decision-making guide. I could see where this kind of classification could be useful, but it seems one of many, while trying to be something else entirely. The classifications were not crisp, they felt mushy and over-simplified. Not my cup of tea.

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Review: Fat City

Fat City by Leonard Gardner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well written story of men in the boxing world based in agricultural California in the 50s or 60s. One boxer is a down on his luck veteran trying to get back into the game while sliding into despair, while the other boxer is young and shows initial promise, but is beaten down by the life. The other main character is the trainer who takes shortcuts while continuing to make his living working with these boxers with pedestrian dreams of victory. The story also follows some others, including a Mexican boxer with a long career and many bouts that shows the likely result of a “good” boxing career. It’s all depressing in the end, but the author teases the reader with hope, dangled just out of reach, then yanked away by the system. The author provides plenty of characters to measure against. A joy to read -- you can sense the quality of the writing and the skill of the author -- but ultimately depressing.

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Review: The Power of Cute

The Power of Cute by Simon May
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Academic riffing on the meaning of cuteness in culture. The book shows the difference in what cute means in American and European cultures compared to Japanese culture. There are definitions and conjectures about what it all means. Strangest point related to how cute is often one small step away from monstrous. Deeper than many a pop culture book nowadays, but more on theory and conjecture and less on the statistics and objective observations you’d expect in a pop science book. Once I got used to the intellectual level, I found it provided some interesting things to think about, though nothing notably prescriptive. The Princeton University Press audiobook was overwhelmingly British.

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Review: Al Capone's Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago During Prohibition

Al Capone's Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago During Prohibition by John J. Binder
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The sheer volume of research that went into this book is amazing. The author constantly pulls in new people – criminals, kingpins, government officials, law enforcement -- often giving a paragraph or two description of the person and their connection to the story, and often followed by the details of their killing. It is numbing in volume. And buildings – you get cross streets addresses for many of the scenes of action, be it a gangland killing, a warehouse for illegal beer, a distillery, a brothel, or a hideout. And there are statistics, with ratios showing the ebb and flow of crime in the city and near suburbs. There was truly too much content here to make this a wholly readable and enjoyable book, but the author attempted to organize these facts into a roughly chronological narrative. I found the narrative did bounce back and forth in time too often to keep track, but I appreciated the attempt.

The author also included many, many interesting facts, thrown in to counter-balance the statistics that would otherwise overwhelm the narrative, sometimes with some personality. Talking about hoodlums visiting their Northern suburbs headquarters with their new machine guns: “They practice shooting targets there with a machine gun – and accidentally hit the occasional farmer.” I appreciated the depth of reporting, including organized crime before the beer wars of the twenties. There is also in-depth coverage of historic brothels throughout the city, as well as city politicians. Having lived in Chicagoland for 30 years, I found the details of the addresses interesting, not realizing the historic uses of some of the real estate that I have passed by every day. I listened to this on audio, and I could almost hear the voice of John “Bulldog” Drummond, local reporter who specialized in organized crime stories for decades. The narrator had a bit of his cadence.

Overall, likely a very good reference work, and a good narrative of Chicago organized crime from Capone’s 1920s and before.


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Review: Got 'Em, Got 'Em, Need 'Em: A Fan's Guide to Collecting the Top 100 Sports Cards of All Time

Got 'Em, Got 'Em, Need 'Em: A Fan's Guide to Collecting the Top 100 Sports Cards of All Time by Stephen Laroche
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of my favorite books is the “Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book”. It is a snarky walk down memory lane by the author, ruminating on things like whether Sal Maglee always had 5 o’clock shadow, and what makes a real baseball name. It illustrated these discussions with pictures of vintage baseball cards that so you could easily understand what they were talking about. It was very humorous. I was hoping that “Got Em Got Em Need Em” was more of the same, but it didn’t quite match the aplomb of the earlier book. “Got Em” etc. was a different story. It was to show the top 100 sports cards and to describe why they were on the list. It seemed to me on finishing the book that the authors really named the top 100 athletes that had been featured on sports cards, so it was a kind of subjective popularity ranking. This covered all sports that had trading cards, so baseball players accounted for half or so. As this was a Canadian book, hockey was represented (and I my American mind over-represented), but the authors provided a number of explanations behind their choices. It was quite a personal book for the authors. The bulk of the book is the listing of the 100 cards, with writeups on each and a photo. The writeups covered the athlete’s story as well as any unique story about the card. You learn a lot about the trading card industry and its history reading this. The authors included a few interludes describing some card bloopers as well as each author’s favorite cards. I learned a lot and was entertained. While I have collected some sports cards in my day, my collection is small and mostly from the seventies and early eighties. I was disappointed that the only card I had that made this list was Dr. J’s rookie card. And while I have OJ Simpson’s rookie card, that particular OJ card didn’t make the list, but another one did… I enjoyed this quite a bit. You will absolutely receive an education on hockey while reading this, but if you like to know more about trading cards in this kind of format, it works.

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Review: Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read a couple of Doctorow’s novels and liked them, so thought I would also be enlightened by his short story collection. As with most such collections, some stories were hits and some were misses. I judge these by the story, and since we’re talking sci fi, by the worlds conjectured. Some of the stories seemed too weird to represent a future state, but were written to make a statement. I’m specifically thinking about “I, Row-Boat”. Not my favorite. I did enjoy “After the Siege” for its gritty take on future techno-enabled city siege warfare. I enjoyed “Anda’s Game” for the cute “turning on the head” of online work, which I suspect is pretty close to reality. And I got a bit of a thrill about “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” because I recognize the personality-type and can not imagine a whole bunch in the same place (it's kinda scary). I also appreciated “The Man Who Sold the Moon” as being one of those examples of how an organization can change the future, and how that organization can be driven by a few people with a vision. Kind of a Horatio Alger story, but instead of “rags to riches” we get “interesting idea to world-changing enterprise”. I’ll be reading more. I listened to the audio version with different narrators for each story. I found this a little uneven, needing to slow the playback on one story to maintain my understanding. YMMV.

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