icasso had his blue period.  Hugh Hefner, by his own admission, is currently in a "platinum blonde phase."  And during my college years, (when I wasn’t cruising up and down "O" street looking for trouble) I was in a China phase.  Red China Blues, Wild Swans, China Wakes, and Fox Butterfield’s lovely tome China: Alive in the Bitter Sea were my entree into a world of concubines, hard labor, gulags, emporers, tyrants, stealthy political activism, and destruction from the inside of one of the world’s most populated countries.    I would have made a terrible member of the Red Guard.  … Continue reading Take heart, little grasshopper!

cannot think of another American sport that lends itself so well to the printed word as baseball; every season presents itself as a challenging read, and getting to know all of the players and coaches, their strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies, is not unlike cracking a novel like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez’s masterpiece requires the reader (at least this reader) to frequently reference the family tree at the front of the book, or face the prospect of becoming hopelessly lost amid multiple characters scattered over what is essentially the history of the world. And so it … Continue reading Reading a Season

The Most Beautiful Man in the World by Janis and Richard Londraville “[Swan has] long since fallen off art’s historical map, his own work so completely forgotten that he’s best known, to those who have heard of him at all, as the star of Warhol’s Paul Swan and Camp. Now his obscurity is lifting. . . . More than just than the story of an artist and his dubious oeuvre, The Most Beautiful Man in the World is a depiction of a queer man trying to make it in the 20th century. . . . Whatever the quality of his … Continue reading

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris “[Bang the Drum Slowly] has one of the loveliest last lines in American literature, a regret from Wiggen for the way the players made fun of a slow-witted and now dead teammate: ‘From here on in, I rag nobody.’ We could all use that on our coat of arms.” —George Vecsey, The New York Times (4/2/06) Continue reading

The Southpaw by Mark Harris As the temperature warmed up in recent days, there was no better way to prepare for the season than to reread Mark Harris’s The Southpaw, one of the finest sports books I know. . . . Harris loves the game itself, and he never loses sight of its value to America. —George Vecsey, The New York Times (4/2/06) Continue reading

Wedded to the Game:The Real Lives of NFL Women  by Shannon O’Toole “Wedded to the Game [is] a book that comes as a real eye-opener. . . . [This] is not a book about John Morton and Shannon O’Toole. Where their experience is illustrative O’Toole mentions it, but there’s no breast-beating about unfair treatment or bad breaks or anything else. She’s really more interested in what’s happened to other players’ wives, and some of them prove interesting indeed. . . . There’s much more about it . . . in this intelligent, thoughtful book.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post (4/11/06) “This … Continue reading

Tin God  by Terese Svoboda “One of the pleasures of reading Terese Svoboda’s writing is that it makes you feel smart. . . . She has written nothing less than a meditation on the infinite. . . . Svoboda switches centuries the way other writers switch days. . . . The shifts do not disorient but function as appetizing scene changes. You think you’ll read just one more section before you put the book down, and you read three. ‘Most readers are in trouble about half the time,’ E.B. White opined in his revision of William Strunk Jr.’s Elements of … Continue reading

The Boys Who Were Left Behind by John Heidenry and Brett Topel “[An] entertaining tale. . . . The book is filled with fascinating wartime detail, a good deal of bathos, and the mighty presence of Stan Musial.” —Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe (4/2/06) “John Heidenry and Brett Topel sketch a brilliant portrait of the 1944 World Series in The Boys Who Were Left Behind. . . . The aspect of this book that will stay with readers is its evocation of baseball-during-wartime.”—David Shribman, The Wall Street Journal (4/1/06) “Heidenry and Topel do a remarkable job of mining original … Continue reading

White Spirit by Paule Constant “This straightforward yet surreal work is beautifully written. Almost every paragraph contains an original and elaborate word construction that never rings false. Wing, who has translated two previous novels by Constant, deserves recognition for her work.”—Library Journal (3/15/06) “Sad ironies illuminate this deftly mapped journey to the postcolonial heart of darkness. . . . With prose both dark and rollicking, Constant chronicles colonialism’s terrible absurdities and reverberating effects on both Africans and Europeans.”—Publishers Weekly (2/27/06) Continue reading