[Bookslut]
I promise I’m not trying to evoke Chris Matthews. After all, his views on women are already common knowledge, while the fascinating history of women and baseball is not.
Jennifer Ring hopes to fix that with her new book Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball. As I explain over at Bookslut, though, Ring’s book doesn’t live up to her topic’s promise.
It’s just some sorry attempt to get his 15 minutes. He’s just trying to jump on the bandwagon of the whole book era right now, and it’s just a sad attempt. I never even seen the guy in my life. I couldn’t point him out in a room.
Let’s gloss this little gem. Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit (Jenks’s “it”) is a new book by Matt McCarthy (Jenks’s “he”), and, as the above reaction may suggest, it dishes some dirt on a slew of MLB stars. But the book also captures the broader culture of minor league baseball, which includes approximately nine fringe players for every future big leaguer.
Contra Bobby, I found McCarthy to be a decent (and decidedly tangible) guy, even though the intentions behind his book—he dedicates it to “My Teammates”?—feel a little weird. Read more in my feature-slash-interview with McCarthy in this week’s New Haven Advocate.
[Gelf]
Reporters make for some of the toughest interviews, precisely because they know what makes for a tough interview. They directly address questions, rarely ramble, talk in soundbites.
This might seem like a writer’s dream—they even remember to pause and let you catch up!—but the best material in an interview often comes when people ramble, non-sequiturize, or just fill dead air. When reporters worry about helping you out and giving you what you “need” for a story, they often render the conversation sterile and predictable.
This was not a problem with Ken Krayeske. Despite Deadspin’s snark, Krayeske has a pretty solid resume as a reporter, but it’s his recent question to UConn coach Jim Calhoun that’s getting him national attention. The ensuing dust-up has generated plenty of inane opinion, but little actual reporting. So, with Gelf’s blessing, I decided to talk with Krayeske about his question. The results may surprise you.
Inspired by an aside in Terry Teachout’s excellent biography, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken
While researching this project, I came across a longish New Yorker review from 2002 on Teachout’s book, by Joan Acocella. Like everyone else, I’ve read (or at least started) plenty of these essays, but this might be the first one I read immediately after finishing the book. Like perhaps no one else, I was shocked at how much of the New Yorker essay simply summarizes Teachout’s book. (Of course, Teachout gets his best details from Mencken’s Newspaper Days
Now, you can question the ultimate purpose of something that amounts to a 3,000-word precis for an already-published book—which is what I’ve been doing, off and on, for the last few days—but I’ll leave you with another intra-literary note. One reason Acocella’s essay is so disappointing is because she’s a really good and really inventive critic, as demonstrated by her Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, an expanded version of her delightfully nasty New Yorker essay from a few years back. That book’s Amazon.com page
I’ll hold off on any conspiracy theories, but sometimes it’s nice to find a concrete reminder of the book establishment’s small-world-ness. If only they used trackbacks and Technorati . . .
. . . is hearing “The Chipmunk Song” play over the opening credits and realizing that it’s a harbinger of Jason Lee’s unfortunate future.
Craig Fehrman 