The Glory of Their Times

Ritter, Lawrence. S. The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It. New York: HarperPerennial 1984. Print

First Sentences:

This is a book about the early days of baseball.

It is a book about what it was like and how it felt to be a baseball player at the turn of the century and in the decades shortly thereafter. At least that was my intent when I began working on the book five years and 75,000 miles ago. But now that it has been completed, I am not so sure.

 

The narratives contained in this book are chronicles of men who chased a dream and =, at least for a time, caught up with it and lived it.


Description:

 

One of the many attractive features of Lawrence S. Ritter's The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It is reading the actual words of baseball players from the earliest days of professional ball at turn of the century. Each of these 26 narratives on individual players consists only of the words of the players. No analysis by the author, no footnotes, no embellishments. Just their conversational recollections of their entrance to baseball, their playing days, other opponents, and their later years.

 

Author Ritter traced down old-time players using team records, newspaper articles, families, and just plain doggedness to track down the men. Some are recognizable as Hall of Famers like Rube Marquard, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Smokey Joe Wood, Goose Goslin, and Hank Greenberg. Other seem vaguely familiar like Fred Snodgrass (who dropped a fly ball in the World Series that besmirched his name forever), and Babe Herman (whose son Don was my math teacher in high school). Then there are those I knew nothing about, such as Specs Toporcer (the first infielder to wear glasses) and Stanley Coveleski (who beat the New York Giants three times in one week in as a rookie to win the pennant for the Phillies).

 

Every interview is fascinating, bringing alive this sports-mad era, the colloquialisms of speech, and of course detailed stories from their playing days. The men generally downplay their own achievements, whether getting six hits in a row in a World Series (Goslin), throwing faster than Walter Johnson, according to Johnson (Wood), or having a fourth best all-time lifetime batting average of .349 (Lefty O'Doul).

 

They preferred to tell of their own childhood days on farms, in mines, and working at miscellaneous jobs before sneaking away to play on local teams. Contracts were low, conditions of fields, travel, and housing poor, but to a man they said they would pay to play the sport they loved, although they weren't above holding out for more money, especially if they could time their holdout to miss spring training.

 

They also talk about fellow players, usually with awed reverence for these players' achievements. Grover Cleveland Alexander coming in hung over to strike out a dangerous hitter in a key World Series situation. Jim Thorpe running faster than any man in baseball. Christie Mathewsonm, the kindly gentleman, throwing his unhittable screwball. and the hated/beloved manager John McGraw. It was interesting to hear stories regarding the same opponent or game from different interviewees.  

I just couldn't get enough of reading their memories. Ritter's style makes you feel you are sitting next to the player by a cosy fire, listening to him drift back in the years to his youth. His highlights, lowlights, lucky breaks, and longtime friendships all blend together to transport readers to an era of spit balls, 43-oz bats, and players who rarely struck out.

Highly recommended for anyone, especially those fascinated by oral histories and the bygone era of baseball.

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Tye, Larry. Satch: The Life and Times of an American Legend.   

Now hear the memories from Satchel Paige, one of baseball's Negro League's best pitchers and truly genuine characters. Painstakingly researched and wonderfully told, this is a real insider's look at the Negro Leagues stars and lifestyles on and off the field. One of the best sports books ever!

Teacher Man

McCourt, Frank. Teacher Man: A Memoir. New York: Scribner 2005. Print

First Sentences:

Here they come.

And I'm not ready.

How could I be?

I'm a new teacher and learning on the job.

On the first day of my teaching career, I was almost fired for eating the sandwich of a high school boy. On the second day I was almost fired for mentioning the possibility of friendship with a sheep. Otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about my thirty years in the high school classrooms of New York City.


Description:

I think these introductory sentences to Frank McCourt's Teacher Man are the perfect words to pull readers into this delightful memoir. Immediately, you are presented with author McCourt's fear of the first day of school, his not-so-understated terror of being ill-prepared and unqualified, along with teasers about outrageous events that occurred on his first two days. With the statement that McCourt taught school for thirty years, any reader interested in schools and teachers must lick their lips in anticipation of reading many, many more stories about his unusual adventures in the classroom.

Teaching is the downstairs maid of professions. Teachers are told to use the service door or go around the back. They are congratulated on having ATTO (All That Time Off). They are spoken of patronizingly and patted, retroactively, on their silvery locks....Dream on, teacher. You will not be celebrated.

And what adventures he has. After a bit of background from his first 27 years of life as an Irish immigrant, McCourt starts his teaching career in inner-city schools due to his lack of experience. There they call him "Teacher Man." He finds the only way to get through each period and keep the kids' attention is to tell them stories of his youth in Ireland. Not exactly a topic on the curriculum for vocational schools, but he survives for awhile until he just gives up and tries to pursue an advanced degree in Ireland at a Protestant university (he's Catholic) with not too surprising of results.

Finally he lands a job in a prestigious school, one of the best in New York and maybe the country, where students are motivated and preparing for major tests towards their hoped-for acceptance into top Ivy League colleges. Needless to say, his Irish stories and tendency to be distracted into unconventional tangents again land him in hot water. His classes are extremely popular, but he wonders whether it is because he's such a great teacher or because he is such a pushover grader and wandering lecturer? And worst of all, he cannot fulfill the principal's expressed direction to show students how to diagram sentences (which McCourt had never come close to mastering). He soon finds there are other problems with teaching.

If you asked all the students in your five classes to write three hundred and fifty words each then you had 175 multiplied by 350 and that was 43,750 words you had to read, correct, evaluate and grade on evenings and weekends. That's if you were wise enough to give them only one assignment per week....If you gave each paper a bare five minutes you'd spend, on this one set of papers, fourteen hours and thirty-five minutes.

His lessons include a disastrous field trip to a questionable film where the students are boisterous and refuse to leave when the movie is over. Then there is "the art of the excuse note" where students get to create, read, and discuss excuse notes they write which are supposed to be from their parents. There is the lesson where everyone brings in a cookbook and reads or sings a recipe, often accompanied by another student and instrument. And, of course, there is his fallback lesson of his stories told in his wonderful Irish brogue.

Sprinkled into his reflective narrative are encounters with various personalities, from his wife to administrators, fellow teachers, parents, and some very challenging students. He needs to get the attention of each of these  people in different ways, but has only varying success,  blaming himself for not handling situations and encounters better. Like when he ate one student's sandwich in class. Or when he struck another in the face with a rolled up magazine. Or when he called a student's parents with a report of misbehavior and learned the father had severely beaten the student as punishment.

In all, he taught in five high schools and one college, including a vocational and technical high school and a high school of fashion industries.

My arithmetic tells me that about twelve thousand boys and girls, men and women, sat at desks and listened to me lecture, chant, encourage, rumble, sing, declaim, recite, preach, dry up. I think of the twelve thousand and wonder what I did for them. Then I think of what they did for me. 

Those of us who were at one time (brief for me) teachers can identify with many of the situations and students McCourt describes. But with his direct, honest writing style, McCourt relays this information about his world of education so clearly that probably anyone could feel his self-doubt and lack of expertise in handling the daily challenges that arise in Teacher Man. A strong, sensitive, and funny memoir.

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Cordell, Esme Raji. Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher's First Year.   

The daily memories of a creative, off-beat novice teacher in an inner city school. Delightfully, passionately written with plenty of observations about her students, administration, and wonderful projects she gives to her students, including building and using a time machine in her class and having her students shout, "Play ball!" after the national anthem is piped in daily over the school intercom. Wonderful.  (previously reviewed here)

The Good Times

Baker, Russell. The Good Times. New York: Penguin 1990. Print

First Sentences:

My mother, dead now to this world but still roaming free in my mind, wakes me some mornings before daybreak.

"If there's one think I can't stand, it's a quitter."

I have heard her say that all my life. Now, lying in bed, coming awake in the dark, I feel the fury of her energy fighting the good-for-nothing idler within me who wants to go back to sleep instead of tackling the brave new day. 


Description:

I cannot imagine a better book that portrays the newspaper world -- from writing to newsroom to drinking to bosses -- than Russell Baker's The Good Times. Covering his years as a delivery boy for the Baltimore News-Post to police reporter and later newsman for the Baltimore Sun to Chief of the Sun's London Bureau, Baker cheerfully recalls his youthful impressions, preconceived notions, hero-worship, and reality behind his various roles in creating a newspaper piece.

In his youth, Baker's family often presented him with the exemplary image of his Cousin Edwin who once had been managing editor for The New York Times. This unseen figure, to the young Baker, was a man to be admired for his wit, accomplishments, and writing skills for a highly-respected media outlet. Baker felt a strong compulsion to follow in his footsteps.

As a result, he spent seven years at the Baltimore Sun, where he started as a novice police reporter and learned to "rewrite, write features, edit copy, do makeup, crop pictures, write captions, and compose headlines that fit." Later, he moved up to become the Sun's  London correspondent. 

I arrived in Fleet Street with the police reporter's weakness for overwrought language and passion for cliches, and indulged both for the first few months. Some of my early stories read like parodies written for a burlesque on journalism.

Eventually he does land a job at Cousin Edwin's newspaper, serving as The Times'  White House correspondent. This is thankless job with boring days of re-writing press releases, sitting in on ambiguous briefings, drinking, and endless waiting for something big to happen. Then President Eisenhower has a heart attack in 1955. It would be an opportunity for Baker to show The Times what a great reporter he was and thereby land a more exciting job.

It slowly dawned on me that this was not just a big, big story, but the biggest story in the world, and likely to remain so for several days to come. The biggest story in the world, and it was all mine.

But this White House job soon becomes less of a challenge for him.

[at age 36] I have built nothing worth leaving and don't even know how. Instead, I spend my life sitting on marble floors, waiting for somebody to come out and lie to me...From that moment on, I was emotionally ready to end my reporting days.

After haggling with editors, publishers, and owners, he was finally offered a column on The Times Editorial page, "one of the gaudiest prizes in American journalism." It is here that Baker achieves his biggest spotlight and freedom to write about what he wants, and fame follows.

I admit to knowing nothing about the newspaper publishing business beyond my junior high school writing for our student paper, the Eleanor Joy Toll Tollagram. But The Good Times cleverly walks Baker (and us readers) through the various stages of becoming a reporter, from chasing sirens to writing of foreign events in London, political writing, eventually a personal column.

Baker is a clever, humorous, and highly entertaining writer who is capable of both self-deprecating and biting commentary about others. The Good Times is a quality read for anyone interested in newspapers, reporting, and great writing. I thoroughly enjoyed learning about all of this.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Gill, Brendan. Here at the New Yorker.   

It just doesn't get any better than to read a captivating writer (Brendan Gill) plying his craft describing a fascinating place (the New Yorker offices) and recounting the escapades of cleverly funny people (James Thurber, E.B. White, Peter Arno, and editor William Shawn). Hugely funny.

Kayaks Down the Nile

Goddard, Robert. Kayaks Down the Nile. New York: Holt 2019. Print

First Sentences:

For those wondering why three men with sound minds and healthy bodies would want to risk their comfort and security -- even their lives -- in exploring the largely untamed Nile River, I offer the reasons why the river intrigues me. 

The 4,145-mile Nile is the longest river on earth, and one of the greatest of all natural wonders. For 6,000 years it has been the world's most important watercourse, with a vital role in the development of the human race. And the Nile Basin's million square miles contain the world in miniature: a fantastic variety of races, animals, terrain, agriculture, and weather.

The water of the Nile is the source of life for an immense population of humans representing dozens of races ...

Description:

When I was in high school in Southern California, there were two days that every student and teacher looked forward to with complete abandon. Those were the days that John Goddard, a former graduate of my high school, came to visit and give an assembly on his latest adventure. You see, Goddard was a world-famous explorer and documentarian for National Geographic of the world's natural beauties: from mountain tops (by foot) to jungles (by elephant), to underwater (by scuba and also by holding his breath for 2.5 minutes) and to the air (by flying a fighter jet). He was Indiana Jones before there was an Indiana Jones, but without the treasure-hunting.

Goddard, at age 15, heard an adult say he regretted not pursuing his goals when he was Goddard's age. Fired up, Godddard created a list of 127 things he wanted to accomplish in his lifetime. Included were relatively simple tasks like "Type 50 words a minute," "Become an Eagle Scout," and "Make a parachute jump." Others were more challenging, such as, "Ride an elephant, camel, ostrich and bronco," "Retrace travels of Marco Polo and Alexander the Great," and "Milk a poisonous snake." Some were just plain daunting: "Visit every country in the world," "Land on and take off from an aircraft carrier," and "Visit the Moon."

I still remember Goddard's assembly when he came back from exploring the Nile River from source to mouth by kayak. The trip proved the basis for his book, Kayaks Down the Nile
(#97 on his Life List: "Write a book"). 

Just walking up to their starting point of that adventure proved ominous:

Occasionally, as I plunged through the spongy mat of humus, my foot sank into cold slime, after extricating my leg, I had the distasteful chore of prying off the slimy black leeches that had immediately fastened themselves onto my bare legs.

Goddard was attacked by a Nile hippo on one of his very first days:

My private opinion that an unmolested hippo was not dangerous to man was refuted when this great barrel-shaped hulk plunged after me in a vicious charge that left no doubt as to his intentions. He was nearly as long as my kayak and must have weighed well over three tons, yet his rage drove him through the water at an incredible speed. His nostrils blasted spray with every snort, and his yellow tusks were to say the least, awesome.

When he and his fellow explorer Jean came across some fifteen foot tall termite nests near Lake Victoria (#68: "Swim in Lake Victoria" - done) and sliced into one to see what it was like inside, Goddard got a surprise:

Suddenly an aggressive soldier termite bit Jean on the forearm with such ferocity that Its pincers pierced the skin and overlapped. To free Jean, I had to split the head and pull out each mandible separately.

That's just a taste of the adventures and energetic writing style of Goddard. You can see how he could hold audiences of every age and country breathless with his casual descriptions of dangerous events encountered in his travels.

I highly recommend Kayaks Down the Nile for its fearlessness and variety of experiences, and then marvel that this tremendous Nile adventure, so challenging, so threatening, so inspirational, was just one of many such expeditions undertaken by Goddard. I still am in awe of him and his accomplishments 50 years after first listening to him tell his tales. This book shows you why.

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Kane, Joe. Running the Amazon.   

Joe Kane documents the nine-member expedition to explore, for the first time, the entire length of the Amazon River from its source high in the Andes to its mouth in the Atlantic. (previously reviewed here) 

My Life With Bob

Paul, Pamela. My Life With Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues. New York: Holt 2017. Print

First Sentences:

When you're a child, reading is full of rules.

Books that are appropriate and books that are not, books that grown-ups will smile at you approvingly for cradling in your arms and those that will cause grimaces when they spy you tearing through their pages.

Description:

I'm attracted to books about books. You know, those books chock full of lists of great reads. The type of book that offers new (to me) titles with interesting plots by hopefully prolific authors who will stock my "To Be Read" list for months. 

Such were my hopes for Pamela Paul's My Life With Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues. What could be better than spending time with the lifetime reading diary of the current editor of The New York Times Book Review? But in My Life With Bob, there is actually not much about the books themselves beyond their titles, authors, and possibly a very brief plot reference. 

However, have faith! Bob is a solidly entertaining, funny, insightful memoir where books do play a pivotal role: they provided the foundation behind key life decisions and events for author Pamela Paul. You see, Paul had decided early in her life to keep track of every booksshe read, regardless of whether she liked them, hated them, or was profoundly moved by them. She recorded just the title, author, and approximate date for every book read into her notebook she nicknamed The Book of Books, aka Bob. 

My Book of Books is still a private place. It's not a traditional diary, to be sure. It's about me, and yet it isn't about me. It's impersonal and yet deeply personal....Diaries contained all kinds of things I wanted to forget - unrequited crushes and falling-outs with friends and angsting over college admissions. Bob contains things I wanted to remember what I was reading when all that happened.

Bob relates chronologically the events and corresponding books that she read which influenced her during important periods in Paul's life. Chapters/situations include "You Shouldn't Be Reading That" (Brave New World), "Never Enough" (Catch-22), "Reading with Children" (A Wrinkle in Time), and "On Self-Help" (Autobiography of a Face - yay, a new title for me!). There are also chapters with their related books on topics of "Why Read?" (Les Miserables), No Time to Read" (The Hunger Games), and "Solitary Reading" (The Secret History).

Paul is a wonderful writer. I had so many slips of paper marking clever expressions (do other readers do that?) that describe her and her life that it is difficult to decide which ones to share: Here are some samples:

• Listening to Holden Caulfield moan and groan, I couldn't help but think, What a jerk. What did he have to complain about, with his privileged life and his private school and his afternoons wandering unsupervised around Manhattan?

• If you're going to be a bookish child, you had damn well beter be good at it, and I feared the prospect of being sniffed out for my lapses. Someone always has to be the person who has never read Trollope, but it damn sure wasn't going to be me.

• Sometimes you fall so much in love with a book that you simply have to tell everyone, to spread the love, and to explain the state you're in. You read pasages aloud to anyone who will listen. You wait with bated breath, watching for signs of appreciation, wanting that smile, that laugh, that nod of recognition. Please love this book too, you silently -- and sometimes not so silently -- urge. You become insistent, even messianic in your enthusiasm.

So we readers follow her life episodes and corresponding books, from her job as a "scoopeuse" counter worker for a Haagen-Dazs shop in Paris; marriage, divorce, and motherhood; living in London and Paris; and finally to her position as editor with The New York Times Book Review. She has lead a fascinating life and, of course, recorded the related titles in Bob.

It's hard not to wish that everyone ...would keep a Book of Books. What better way to get to know them? You could find out so much if you could get a read on where other people's curiosities lie and where their knowledge is found....[Otherwise] you miss a vital part of a person, the real story, the other stories -- not the ones in their books, but the stories that lie between book and reader, the connections that bind the two together.

I was completely entranced in her life and the influence books had on her. She is a self-deprecating, funny, serious, and endearing writer who treats readers as friends, privvy to her innermost thoughts, fears, hopes, and stumbles. Highly recommended for all you solitary readers and lovers of the power of books.

If [my] house was on fire. Everything bursting into flames. Only moment to decide what to save... I'd leave behind the laptop and the photo albums and even, forgive me, my children's artwork, because there is one object I'd need to rescue above all else -- my true precious, Bob.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Queenan, Joe. One for the Books  

Joe Queenan, a well-published author of articles and books, reads "between 30-40 books at a time. Because he estimates at this rate, he can only read around 2,000 books before he dies. One for the Books describes the books he loves and hates in a wide variety of fields, as well as topics of e-books, the distasteful use of the word "astonishing" in a book review, and selecting books with his eyes closed. Eccentric, passionate, and outrageously intelligent and funny.  Highly recommended (previously reviewed here)

Half Broke

Gaffney, Ginger. Half Broke. New York: Norton. 2020. Print

First Sentences:

At first it seemed like just another ranch asking me to help. Training horses and educating their owners has been my job for the last twenty years ...

This particular ranch is a prison. Most of the residents living here are multiple offenders, felons.

Description:

Sometimes you come across a book that is so honest and open in its writing style that the people and actions portrayed just seem more real and compelling than usual. Ginger Gafney is a writer with this kind of voice. She is a real-life horse trainer who shares her thoughts and fears with us in a simple, quiet voice. 

Her memoir, Half Broke, is a wonderfully full of raw, down-to-the-bone descriptions and observations of her voluteer work with prisoners serving time on a ranch-style facility in New Mexico. These felons are mostly drug abusers and dealers, men and women who have served countless years in correctional facilities, foster care, and abusive relationships. 

Gafney works with a small group of these damaged individuals to teach them how to train difficult horses to accept human contact and be gentled into ridability for their owners. The horses themselves have been donated or loaned to the ranch because the animals have also suffered some trauma in their lives and have become wildly afraid of or aggressive towards humans. Two of these horses ran free within the facility's walls because after being hastily dropped off, they never could be caught, much less harnessed. For two years they charged, bit, and kicked any prisoner who came near them, despite the painful and gaping wound one of them had received during the off-loading from their trailer. 

Gafney slowly introduces her group of prisoners to the necessity of understanding horses and their needs. She explains how the horses are ultra sensitive to presence and posture, so first teaches the men and women how to walk with non-threatening confidence, to quietly approach the animal when it allows them, and to touch and groom it gently. Eventually, the prison group softens themselves, become less aggressive, and stand straighter and more calmly when they deal with other prisoners on the ranch.

Gafney herself reveals her own troubled childhood. She refused to speak until she was six years old, preferring the quiet of hidden places where she could be alone in silence. A gift horse changed her life as she cared for it, learning how it was aware of her every action and word, and both girl and horse responded accordingly. Gafney learned everything she could about training horses and chose that for her profession.

It's not exactly a feel good story as there are plenty of setbacks with horses and people alike. But the overall picture shown by Gafney is an honest portrayal of her real-life situation full of damaged people and animals, as well as the triumphs each experiences. Her writing pulls you deeply into this environment as it teaches you about people and horses learning to exist among the challenges of their own trauma. As Gafney says about herself (and maybe speaks for others at the ranch):

I  know I belong. All our troubles, all our inadequacies, we wear them on the outside. There are no perfect, pretty people at the ranch. We are the ugly, the difficult, the invisible, the broken. Nothing is hidden. It is why horses have always been easy for me. They're honest. They show me exactly how they feel.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

 de Clermont-Tonnerre, Laura. The Mustang.   

Here's a first for me: recommending a movie rather than a book. The Mustang is a fictionalized portrayal of the real-life prison program where wild mustangs are rounded up to be tamed and trained by prisoners. Portrays a similar environment, people, and challenges presented in Half Broke.

The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Vowell, Sarah. The Partly Cloudy Patriot. New York: Simon & Schuster 2002. Print

First Sentences:

There are children playing soccer on a field at Gettysburg where the Union Army lost the first day's fight. 

Description:

First things first. If you're wondering, as I was, about what the title meant in Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot, just think Thomas Paine. Remember the lines, "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country."

Author Sarah Vowell is a self-proclaimed history buff with a taste for the quirky. Take her book Assassination Vacation for example where she researched and then visited scenes significant to assassinated US presidents. She is certainly not a "sunshine patriot," but instead digs deep into the behind-the-scenes stories to uncover all sides of historical events. But she can also take a skepical view of government, thus branding herself a "partially cloudy patriot." Got it?

The Partly Cloudy Patriot is  a series of nineteen random essays about observations from her life. Her highly interesting musings range from the Gettysburg Address to ancient maps depicting California as an island, and the glories of Pop-A-Shot basketball (which Vowell is very good at). There's an essay about presidential libraries, people who compare themselves to Rosa Parks, a Salem witch trials souvenir shot glass, Canadian Mounties, and Tom Cruise (who makes her nervous). In other words, a completely delightful potpourri of topics all cleverly and wryly written.

Here's just a few samples:

• I was enjoying a chocolaty caffe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history on the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much.

• [on voting] I love it in there. I drag it out, leisurely punching the names I want as if sipping whiskey in front of a fire. I mean, how many times in a life does an average person get to make history?

• [on Tom Cruise] Cruise's face is too angular to be sensual....His face reminds me more of a math problem than a love poem, the nose and chin right out of high school geometry, hard vectors of flesh. Picasso might have liked to paint him, though it would have been too easy.

• [on Canadians] All these nice people, seemingly normal but for the hockey obsession, had a likable knack for loving their country in public without resorting to swagger or hate

So now you are either intrigued and laughing (as I was) by Vowell's insights into our world or ready to move on to another book. For me, Vowell is an author I plan to read a lot more. She's clever, insightful, humorous, self-deprecating, and finds interesting tidbits in everything she encounters - and  is more than willing to share her thoughts with us, much to our benefit.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Vowell, Sarah. Assassination Vacation.   

Vowell researches and then visits the important sites relating to the assassinations of three presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) and offers insightful and humorous comments on the event itself and people behind these histories. As delightfully witty as it is informative.

Bleaker House

Stevens, Nell. Bleaker House. New York: Doubleday, 2017. Print

First Sentences:

This is a landscape an art-therapy patient might paint to represent depression: grey sky and a sweep of featureless peat rising out of the sea.

The water is the same colour as the clouds; it is flecked by white-capped waves, spikes of black rock, and, intermittently, the silvery spines of dolphins 

Description:

In Nell Stevens' Bleaker House, she recounts her early efforts to write a novel on a remote, wind-swept island in the Falklands. She had earned a fellowship to spend time anywhere of her choosing to write a novel and, yes, she chose Bleaker Island, "eight square miles of rock and mud," to assure she would have no distractions. Being the only person on the bitter cold, tree-less, penguin-ridden island she certainly achieved that desire.

The ground is flat and beige and unchanging, a rolling scene of mud and grass and gorse. There is nothing I can see that distinguishes one mile from the next....It feels as though we are at sea, surrounded by water with no sight of land, and might sink at any moment without a trace....This is the bottom of the world.

But could she actually come up with an idea and then write a novel in all that quiet? Time would tell.

Bleaker House describes her daily routines, efforts at writing, and struggles with understanding her choices and goals, both current and in her past. Stevens is a clever writer who allows readers access to her stream-of-consciousness thoughts on writing and life on Bleaker Island as she faces writing challenges, boredom, and self-realization. Stevens envisions writing a crime novel since no crimes have ever been committed on Bleaker Island. We readers are permitted to follow her research efforts, plot outlines, and character development. But will it work itself into a novel? That is the question Stevens struggles with during her walks through the roadless, countryside among the sea lions and penguins.

She figures she must write 2,500 words a day to complete and revise a novel during her forty-one days on the island. Schedules and food rationing become a daily priority, but she begins to doubt her plot and even writing skills as the days go on.

A very personal, absorbing memoir about a distant environment and one woman who tries to create something new. Her struggles and triumphs, along with her daily routines to keep her sanity, put readers directly into the Bleaker Island world, something most people will never experience first-hand. For that feeling along with the musing of the deeply introspective author Stevens make Bleaker House a solid, engrossing read.

Surrounded by people, it is very easy to feel alone. Surrounded by penguins, less so.

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Beston, Henry. Outermost House.   

Classic memoir of the author's year of solitude on an isolated beach in Cape Cod as he tries to capture the natural beauty of that environment, its animals and plants.

Just Kids

Smith, Patti. Just Kids. New York: HarperCollins 2010. Print

First Sentences:

I was asleep when he died.

I had called the hospital to say one more good night, but he had gone under, beneath layers of morphine. I held the receiver and listened to his labored breathing through the phone, knowing I would never hear him again.

Description:

I was completely unfamiliar with Patti Smith and her art, not to mention her life with fellow artist, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, during the turbulent 1960s. But fortunately for me and other interested readers, Smith carefully documented that fascinating world in her beautifully written memoir, Just Kids. 

In 1967, Smith moved to New York City to find work that would provide enough money to live, explore art, and mingle with the artistic energy and people of the city. Armed only with the new white waitress uniform and shoes given to her by her mother, Smith lived on the street, unable to afford a room, getting by eating old food donated by sympathetic restaurant chefs. One of her biggest joys was finding two quarters in Central Park.

I would spend that day much as I spent the next few weeks, looking for kindred souls, shelter, and most urgently, a job. 

She finally landed a cashier job at a Brentano's bookstore where one day Mapplethorpe came in and bought her favorite, secretly-coveted coveted necklace from the display case. She impulsively told this complete stranger, "Don't give it to any girl but me" and he promised he wouldn't. Sure enough, later after they had established a relationship, he actually did give it to her. 

[Robert] wasn't certain whether he was a good or bad person. Whether he was altruistic. Whether he was demonic. But he was certain of one thing. He was an artist. And for that he would never apologize.

Together, they lived in various tiny lodgings including the Chelsea Hotel, that famous refuge for struggling artists. Smith spent free hours writing poetry, songs, and sketching while Robert made and occasionally sold necklaces and collage art pieces constructed from objects scrounged from the trash. For a splurge they took a train to Coney Island, split one hot dog and a Coke, and people-watched all day. To settle problems, they went to the "bad doughnut shop...the Edward Hopper version of Dunkin' Donuts. The coffee was burnt, the doughnuts were stale, but you could count on it being open all night."

During the late Sixties, they met, discussed art and politics with, and attended performances of emerging stars like Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and many, many more. It was these people and the City itself that gave them energy and inspiration.

The city was a real city, shifty and sexual....The skyscrapers were beautiful. They did not seem like mere corporate shells. They were monuments to the arrogant yet philanthropic spirit of America. The character of each quadrant was invigorating and one felt the flux of its history. The old world and the emerging one served up in the brick and mortar of the artisan and the architects.

Patti Smith quietly began to perform some of her poetry and songs at local dive bars, fighting off drunks and hecklers. Meanwhile, Robert was given an old Polaroid instant camera and instantly he began to create his now-famous, often controversial, photographs. Both Smith and Mapplethorpe begin to achieve larger and larger measures of acceptance in the artistic world and some financial security. 

Just Kids portrays the hopes, frustrations, and lifestyles of a wide variety of artists  who eventually gained fame that lasts to this day. Her style reminded me of individual soap bubbles, where each paragraph was full and complete, then floated away as she moved on in the next paragraph to another episode, person, art piece, or contemplation. While that may sound disjointed, it came across as a peek into an artistic mind that feels deeply about incidents and people and is willing to share them with readers.

Smith recounted how some of her acquaintances did not make it out of the Sixties, including Jimi Hendrix who once helped Smith when she was on the street; Joplin, Morrison, her poetic idol; Tinkerbell (Warhol's model); and Mapplethorpe himself as foreshadowed in the opening sentences. The end of the book was some of Smith's strongest writing and passion for both Mapplethorpe and her own future.

I feel no sense of vindication as one of the handfuls of survivors. I would rather have seen them all succeed, catch the brass ring. As it turned out, it was I who got one of the best horses. 

A thoroughly absorbing and informative look into that era and its artistic inhabitants from one who lived it each day.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

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Great autobiography of Neil Young in his own rambling, opinionated, lyrical words. Introduces his experiences and changes with music and the artists of the Sixties and later years.