Author Archive
It’s difficult to make a serial killer boring, but Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi managed to do just that in their new book, “The Monster of Florence.”
The book purports to be a nonfiction narrative detailing at least a dozen unsolved killings in Italy over the past few decades.
Note my use of the word purported, because it’s difficult to tell just how truthful this book is, particularly in our “lie-as-memoir” times.
For example, Preston constantly uses dialogue, in quote marks, from more than two decades ago. He wasn’t there. Spezi, an Italian journalist, was sometimes there, but it’s unlikely he has exact recreations of dialogue from back then. And when you read the overly dramatic quotes, it makes them even more suspect.
Back to the serial killer. It seems that such a Monster would dominate the book, yet the authors dispense with his crimes before the book is even half-finished. At that point, they concentrate more on their roles in the search for the Monster.
Pardon me for saying so, but I’d much rather know more about the crimes — their retelling reads more like a novel instead of a factual account — than whatever trouble the authors encountered during their investigation.
The book originally started as a magazine article, but was then expanded. At times, this makes some of it seem like filler. Preston, for example, uses an entire paragraph to describe the menu at a dinner.
Oh, and one more quibble: there are more than two dozen references to smoking in the book, as if Preston thinks describing such a scene builds a noirish ambience that his prose simply can’t create. Once noticed, those moments become especially annoying.
With the bestsellers “1776” and “John Adams,” David McCullough, in some ways, reinvented the history book.
No longer solely the providence of stuffy academics, the history book, in McCullough’s hands, wove an artful tale that enthralled like a work of fiction and educated like a work of history, all with an elegant and graceful prose.
For better or worse, that will be how most subsequent works of history that reach for a general audience will be measured.
With that in mind, it’s safe to say that “Almost A Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence,” John Ferling’s epic retelling of the American Revolution, won’t be confused with a McCullough work.
That shouldn’t condemn Ferling’s book, though. Few can tell history the way McCullough does, and that doesn’t mean we should discard anything that fails to reach those heights.
Ferling’s book does an admirable job of condensing the Revolution — from its beginnings at Lexington and Concord to its conclusion with the Treaty of Paris — into a largely readable account.
And for those of you who think you have a decent understanding of the Revolution, you might rethink that after reading this book. At nearly 600 pages, it’s a lengthy endeavor, but ultimately a satisfying one as Ferling recreates, in largely readable and accessible prose, just how unlikely a success the Revolution truly was.
Sure, the book has some faults. For one, it could’ve been an easier read if Ferling took the war on a year-by-year basis, instead of a more geographic one. At times, it’s difficult to make sense of what’s going on when the book dips backward in time.
A “Who’s Who” roster at the beginning would’ve been a nice touch, too, because there are so many generals and soldiers on both sides that it’s often difficult to remember 300 pages in who was doing what.
But those are minor quibbles. For a mostly easy-to-follow account of the remarkable founding of this country, and just how surprising it was that those patriots managed to pull it off, spend some time with Ferling’s book. It’ll serve as a nice bookend to the early stages of the Revolution as told in McCullough’s “1776.”
In his book “Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game,” George Vecsey offers a wonderfully readable account of baseball’s origins and milestones, from its first days in America through the continuing steroids controversy.
The book, recently released in paperback, is extremely well-written by a knowledgeable fan, full of intriguing stories and anecdotes that provide a peek into baseball’s history.
And while the book was engaging and fun, that might well be its biggest fault: it’s just a peek. If you’re looking for a chronological account that solidly outlines the history of baseball in America, a story full of times and dates with everything placed in context, you won’t find it here.
The book looks promising from the start: a photo of perhaps the greatest baseball fight ever on the cover, with Nolan Ryan mercilessly punching Robin Ventura in the face.
But then you start to wonder when you first dip into “The Code,” Ross Bernstein’s new book purporting to outline baseball’s unwritten rules.
One of the introductions is written by Rob Dibble, a notorious hothead of a former pitcher who once started a fistfight with manager Lou Piniella in the locker room. In his introduction, Dibble innocently dismisses the infamous incident where he drilled Chicago Cubs outfielder Doug Dascenzo in the back as he was running to first.
According to Dibble, Dascenzo violated “The Code” by bunting late in a lopsided game. Except that’s a lie anyone with a Web connection could disprove: the Cubs were only leading 6-4 in the eighth when Dascenzo bunted to move a runner over, hardly a game that was out of reach. Dibble hit him because he was one of the game’s biggest jerks, simple as that.
Read the rest of this entry »
deadspin.com, perhaps the premier sports blog out there, is funny.
“God Save the Fan,” the new book by deadspin founder Will Leitch, not so much.
It almost seems that someone told Leitch that, with the book deal, he has to stop with the fart jokes, stop torturing Carl Monday, stop making Chris Berman’s life a living hell.
So instead, we get a series of ponderous and oh-so-righteous sports essays that, frankly, leave the reader glassy-eyed and more than a little ready to ditch the book and click over to the website.
Here perhaps, is why: on deadspin, Leitch only needs to be funny in small doses: headlines, witty descriptions and the like. He does that very well.
But when trying to expand that to a full-length book, he falls flat. He isn’t very funny, but he is very preachy. Proof can be found in his one-paragraph descriptions of the fans of teams in the NBA, MLB and NFL. They’re funny. They’re also short.
For a much funnier, more enlightening and frankly more interesting read, check out “Now I Can Die in Peace,” the collection by ESPN’s Bill “The Sports Guy” Simmons.
He’s the real progenitor of the Internet-spawned “Sports fan as sports writer” craze, and he’s the best at it. Leitch might just know this, since he takes a couple of barely veiled shots at Simmons in his book.
Unlike Leitch, Simmons seems to be able to place sports in a context that reflects the rest of pop culture. And also unlike Leitch, he actually seems to like sports. That may sound strange, but after reading “GSTF,” it just doesn’t seem as if Leitch likes sports very much.
