Category: Books

“the whole book era,” brought to you by Bobby Jenks

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, Books, Sports

[New Haven Advocate]

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.

—Bobby Jenks

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.

Yet another reason to write congenial book reviews

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, The Media

[x-posted at Gelf]

Inspired by an aside in Terry Teachout’s excellent biography, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, I’m currently working on an essay about 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, but that’s a bit different.) Acocella offers maybe two paragraphs of original critique or analysis; even her Mencken quotations come straight from Teachout.

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 contains a wonderful blurb, originally published in the National Review in 2000, from none other than Terry Teachout. (“[Acocella] marches through the ranks of Cather scholars the way Sherman marched through Georgia.”)

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 . . .

Pop Orwell

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Features

[Splice Today]

On December 21, 1940, George Orwell reviewed Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for a London newspaper.

“Simply as a film,” Orwell writes, “it has very great faults.” Yet he goes on to predict the film’s future impact: “What is Chaplin’s peculiar gift? It is his power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man. . . . If our Government had a little more imagination, they would subsidize The Great Dictator heavily and would make every effort to get a few copies into Germany.”

What can we learn from such a review (besides the fact that Orwell had a barely latent crush on Paulette Goddard)? That Orwell consumed precarious amounts of pop culture, a point I try to make in my essay-slash-review of two new volumes of Orwell’s nonfiction (edited by George Packer) over at Splice.

“LeBron James and the Beat Book”

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Sports

[PopMatters]

As these things often go, my new essay on the surprising number of books about LeBron James sat in PopMatters’ que for a long time. This means my discussion of David Foster Wallace now feels sad, weird, and even a little callous (more on his suicide here). It means I wasn’t able to mention the new documentary about LeBron and his high school team.

That said, it also means my essay arrives just in time for the start of the 2008-2009 NBA Season. Read it here.