Biographies “Popular fiction eclipses ghost-written celebrity biographies in book ... - The Independent” plus 3 more |
- Popular fiction eclipses ghost-written celebrity biographies in book ... - The Independent
- Allen Barra on Yogi Berra: One of My Favorite Sports Biographies Ever - Huffingtonpost.com
- Book on monk Thomas Merton's love affair stirs debate - USA Today
- Just Published: PACCAR Inc. - SWOT Analysis - PR Inside
| Popular fiction eclipses ghost-written celebrity biographies in book ... - The Independent Posted: 22 Dec 2009 06:45 PM PST Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | ||||
| Allen Barra on Yogi Berra: One of My Favorite Sports Biographies Ever - Huffingtonpost.com Posted: 22 Dec 2009 12:23 AM PST There's no question that Allen Barra is one of the best long-form sports journalists working today. (One I'd put near him is L. Jon Wertheim, whose Running the Table, rating: 90, and Blood in the Cage, rating: 79, are among the best books ever written about billiards and mixed martial arts, respectively.) His 2005 book The Last Coach, a biography of Paul "Bear" Bryant, considered by many to be the greatest college football coach of all time, was simply masterful (rating: 90); I loved it even though I have no interest in college football. His new book, Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee, a biography of his near-namesake, is just as good. Yogi's one of the most famous living athletes, author of numerous World Series highlights, a number of memoirs, and scores of half-remembered quotes, and Barra's book is the first comprehensive biography of the man; it's also one of the quintessential baseball biographies. Any Yankee fan, any baseball fan, will enjoy it. Long-form baseball writing is harder than ever these days because of the widening rift in the baseball writing community over the merits and proper use of advanced statistics. It's a generational thing: old-school sportswriters are still attached to newspapers, and are dwindling as newspapers shed staff, and they're an aging bunch. They're getting more and more outnumbered by internet professionals and bloggers like me who pontificate about sports in other media. This also frequently leads to disdain for advanced baseball research performed by fans and laymen. Barra gracefully tiptoes through this minefield. In deference to the sportswriting of the time, he characterizes Yogi's year-to-year performances with standard stats like home runs, RBI, and batting average. But in an absorbing, thoughtful appendix, he quotes the work of well-known baseball researchers and sabermetricians like Bill James, Pete Palmer, Eddie Epstein, Rob Neyer, and more, to put Yogi's career in proper context. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Barra is an old-school writer comfortable with the new world of baseball statistics. The author starts the book with the audacious claim that his subject, one of the most famous men in America, is vastly underrated as a player -- that his reputation as a quotable clown obscures his career as arguably the greatest catcher in baseball history. But he also gives a sense of Yogi the man. He was a shy, humble, devout Catholic who still carried photos of his late parents in his wallet well into his '60s, who has been married to his wife for 60 years, and who is far happier to talk about his grandchildren than himself. But he was a fierce competitor supremely confident in his own abilities and self-worth. He threatened holdouts for a higher salary from the Yankees' famously skinflint general manager, George Weiss, until he got the amount of money that he wanted. And, in 1985, after George Steinbrenner fired him as manager of the Yankees without telling him personally, he swore he'd never again set foot in Yankee Stadium as long as Steinbrenner was manager, an oath he kept for 14 years until Joe Dimaggio convinced Steinbrenner to personally apologize. Of course, Berra's era is the golden age of the Yankees -- he won ten World Series from the late '40s to the early '60s, and was the undeniable leader of ten different World Champion teams. (That's a record. By a lot.) It's also the tentative, rocky, hesitant period of integration in baseball. Of course, the 1950s are perhaps the most-written about decade in baseball, so while Barra on Berra yields new, interesting details, the atmospherics of the era are a bit more warmed-over -- so he often tends to fast-forward through the seasons to get to the parts that really matter, the World Series. And that's fine. Barra's obviously fond of his protagonist, so if you have a real problem with the Yankees winning every year, you're not going to find much of a sympathetic voice on the page. Berra runs into a little more trouble after he retires, as political upheaval in the Yankee front office resulted in his being fired as Yankee manager on two different occasions, despite relative success with the team. He went through further drama, which Barra touches only lightly, when his son Dale Berra, also a major leaguer, was implicated in the 1980's cocaine scandal. Yogi's a man who's lived a full life and lived it well. The book doesn't exactly read like a hagiography, but Barra clearly doesn't have much bad to say about the man -- nor does anyone else. I couldn't help smiling while reading it. And I'm already hungry for Barra's next. Rating: 93Crossposted on Remingtonstein. Follow Alex Remington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alexremington Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | ||||
| Book on monk Thomas Merton's love affair stirs debate - USA Today Posted: 23 Dec 2009 04:25 AM PST She was a petite student nurse; he was stocky and bald, with a wandering intellect and a boisterous laugh. He was also the most celebrated Catholic monk in America. Margie Smith had read at least one of the books that made Thomas Merton famous when she walked into his hospital room in Louisville in 1966. Over the next several months, the nurse and the monk wrote letters, drank wine and fell in love, sneaking in and out of the Abbey of Gethsemani like teenagers. "There is no question I am in deep," Merton wrote in his journal just a month after meeting M., as he coded her name. Though some Merton biographers have been reluctant to reveal Smith's full name and still gasp at its disclosure, it has been published in biographies and national newspapers. The cloistered Merton burst into public view in 1948 with the publication of his memoir The Seven Storey Mountain, which detailed his journey from a young rogue who wallowed in "beer, bewilderment, and sorrow," according to a friend, to a penitent novitiate in the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, the formal name of the Trappist order. Merton went on to write a steady stream of spiritual books, essays and poems and became one of the best known and loved Catholic writers of the 20th century. He died at age 53 in 1968 in a freak electrocution in Thailand. Scholars and even casual fans have long known of his affair with Smith, especially since his seven-volume personal journals were published in the 1990s. But some disagree about whether the affair was a lapse or an emotional breakthrough for a man who struggled with his feelings toward women. A new Merton biography, Beneath the Mask of Holiness, falls firmly in the latter camp. Author Mark Shaw paints a portrait of the monk as a tormented "imposter of sorts" who reluctantly played the part of the happy, contemplative guru. In reality, Shaw argues, Merton was haunted by his youthful indiscretions with women and the chasm between his past and image. Merton's mother died when he was 6 and he entered the monastery without ever having a loving relationship with a woman, Shaw says. The affair with M., which Shaw calls a "magical, inspiring love story," changed his life. "Having proved to himself that he could truly love, and be loved, Thomas Merton shed his mask, since no unfinished business was present to restrict any freedom to be with God alone," Shaw said in an interview. But after several months Merton realized the relationship was untenable; he broke it off and reaffirmed his vows. Compelling as his theory may be, a number of Merton scholars strongly disagree with Shaw's reading of the monk's life, calling it prurient and ill-informed. The book has caused a stir in the International Thomas Merton Society. Jim Forest, an acclaimed biographer of Merton, wrote a scathing review of it in a journal for Merton scholars. "Shaw seems to have no understanding of or sympathy with Merton's basic choices: to become a Christian, to be baptized in the Catholic Church, and then to embrace monastic life," Forest writes. A number of other Merton scholars refused to comment on the book, saying they have not read it and won't. If Merton was truly unhappy with being a "poster boy" for Catholic contemplative life, as Shaw asserts, he could have left Gethsemani at any time, says James Martin, a priest and editor at the Jesuit weekly magazine America, who has written essays on Merton. "Clearly, if he was so miserable, he would have left the monastery and taken up with Margie," Martin says. For sure, Merton was not the typical monk. He butted heads with superiors, had a steady stream of visitors, made a deep study of Zen Buddhism and occasionally downed a few bourbons. Still, Merton's evident humanity does not make him any less holy, Martin says. "Especially with Merton, one sees both the sins and the sanctity," Martin says. "And I wonder if this isn't something like the way God sees us."
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