Biographies “St. Vitalicus - Catholic Online” plus 3 more |
- St. Vitalicus - Catholic Online
- Two new biographies of Ayn Rand shine light on libertarian lioness - Austin American-Statesman
- Allen Barra on Yogi Berra: One of My Favorite Sports Biographies Ever - Huffingtonpost.com
- Three biographies offer a fresh look at a few legends of rock ’n ... - Buffalo News
| St. Vitalicus - Catholic Online Posted: 08 Jan 2010 11:54 PM PST Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Two new biographies of Ayn Rand shine light on libertarian lioness - Austin American-Statesman Posted: 31 Dec 2009 03:57 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. |
| Three biographies offer a fresh look at a few legends of rock ’n ... - Buffalo News Posted: 03 Jan 2010 04:12 AM PST Share this story: What could possibly be left to write about Paul McCartney, David Bowie and Led Zeppelin? Isn't enough, enough already? As it turns out, no. Every rock writer worth his or her salt wants to tackle the big subjects. And if big subjects are your interest, well, let's face it –McCartney, Bowie, and Plant&Page are more likely to whet your journalistic appetite than, say, Fall Out Boy or Lady Gaga. So the final weeks of 2009 and the first days of the new decade find major critical/biographical works on these rock critic war horses hitting the shelves. The bad news is, consistent fascination with the past suggests slim pickings in the present. The good news is, all three of these biographical theses have something new to offer to the mountains of similar pages already published and still available. Time, ideally, provides the opportunity for broader contextualization. McCartney, Bowie and Zeppelin all emerged in the 1960s, and though all of them continue to make new, meaningful, and in some cases, cutting edge music in the present tense, enough calendar pages have been ripped off and discarded to provide the rock scribe a chance to discern forest from trees. Apparently, that opportunity doesn't need to be offered twice. The breadth of detailed accounting, new sources and apparent enthusiasm for the subjects themselves represented by these three new books is impressive. Yes, these stories have been told before. But, like the art of songwriting itself, the best rock biographies enrich a tale in the retelling, and bring their own artistry to bear on tradition. If you're a fan of McCartney, Bowie or Led Zeppelin, these new books are most welcome additions to the existing scholarship. If you aren't, they offer an open window into still exciting and invigorating artistic worlds. Paul McCartney:A Life, By Peter Ames Carlin, Touchstone, 384 pages ($26) Telling Paul McCartney's story is, by this point, a tough gig. Even people who never cared about the Beatles, and skipped everything Macca has done since, are likely aware of the broad details of the man's life. Making all of this fresh is the biographer's cross to bear, and happily, Peter Ames Carlin –author of the excellent Brian Wilson/ Beach Boys study "Catch a Wave" –is up to the task. Carlin writes with a sure hand, and favors a crisp prose that moves lithely across several decades of subject matter. Clearly, he cares about McCartney's music deeply, but just as clearly, "A Life" is not a piece of drooling fandom. Though the Beatle years have been covered more than sufficiently in the past, McCartney's solo work has never really been given a fair critical shake. Carlin wisely seeks to fill in the gaps, and his new sources and insights on the body of post-Fabs McCartney work –which spans 40 years, compared with the Beatles' barely 10 –suggest an authoritative critique. The book's real gift to McCartney scholarship, though, is its subtle attempt to counter the ingrained and rarely challenged notion that Paul was the cute, shallow Beatle in contrast to John Lennon's tortured-artist-with-rapier-wit street cred. Carlin paints McCartney as an intelligent, ambitious, driven and ceaselessly creative artist, and gently suggests that –as with Lennon, who also lost his mother at a tender age –music became for Mc- Cartney a means of channeling grief and despair and overcoming issues of loss and abandonment. Carlin is the first author of a serious McCartney critique to suggest that making music is Mc- Cartney's only consistent joy –family aside –in a life that has had its share of tragedy. He's also the New books explore the creative contributions of rock legends Paul McCartney, left, David Bowie and Led Zeppelin, represented here by Jimmy Page. first to place all of McCartney's work in a continuum. When viewed through Carlin's lens, it's easy to place later-period masterpieces like "Memory Al-most Full" and "Electric Arguments" in their proper context –as further developments of themes begun "way back when they were Fab." Bowie:A Biography, By Marc Spitz, Crown, 448 pages ($26.99) Two constellations beam brightly in the David Bowie biography cosmos –David Buckley's "Strange Fascination" and Dave Thompson's "Hallo Spaceboy: The Rebirth of David Bowie" are both beautifully written and authoritatively detailed. This can't have made author and journalist Marc Spitz's life any easier, though "Bowie:A Biography" was not his first rodeo –Spitz has strong books on Green Day and Los Angeles punk to his credit, and a resume that includes scribblings for the likes of the New York Times, Spin, Blender and Uncut. At heart, though, Spitz is a "Bowie kid" grown up. Being a lifelong fan of one's subject can be the kiss of death for the rock biographer, since objectivity is routinely kicked to the curb in such scenarios. For Spitz, though, being a Bowie freak gives him startling insight. Bowie has changed rock music as often as Miles Davis changed jazz, and it must be said that only those who've paid close attention to every phase of the man's storied career can claim the authority to interpret all the work. Spitz is a wonderful writer –sharp, focused, fair and witty. "Bowie" collects all the facts, boasts fresh, current interviews with everyone but the Thin White Duke himself –since his 2004 surgery to correct a blocked artery, the man is not talking much to anyone, save via his periodic posts on Bowie.net –and intersperses first-person remembrances that place the reader directly inside Spitz-the- Bowie-kid's mind. All of the albums are dealt with evenly, which is nice when it comes to the period in the Bowie canon beginning in the early '90s and continuing straight through his most recent effort, "Reality" –records which Spitz rightly posits as among Bowie's best work. Remarkably, by cutting through the abundant rumor and conjecture surrounding Bowie-the-myth, Spitz has added keen perspective to Bowie scholarship. When Giants Walked the Earth:A Biography of Led Zeppelin, By Mick Wall; Orion, 512 pages($27.99) The story of Led Zeppelin is already written – what one needs to do is simply get it down, straight and accurately, and one has assembled a compelling book. The British quartet is the most important rock band of the '70s, and represents several things at once –the way the American blues could be transformed into a new, arena-filling thunder; the manner in which Middle Eastern influences could be married to Celtic folk to serve a sound at once powerful and subtle; and the full-on debauched, decadent "rock god" glory that surrounded the band, when its members wanted as much (most of the time) and even when they didn't. British journalist Mick Wall has his Zeppelin affairs in order, and seems intent on offering a fair perspective on the band's history and eventual undoing. He takes liberties with stream-of-consciousness passages, wherein an omniscient narrator speaks directly to Messrs. Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham, but when accepted as intended, these bits add to the rich fabric of the tome. Until Page and/or Plant tell the Zeppelin story themselves, "When Giants Walked the Earth" is likely to stand as the authoritative text on the band. Jeff Miers is The News' pop music critic.  Log into MyBuffalo to post a comment Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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