Reading the Final Four
After the weekend’s bloodletting I emerged groundhog-like from the pit of my office bracket contest just long enough to sniff 11th place in a 12-person pool. I do like to think I’m a little better at picking college basketball books than picking Final Four matchups.
A solid place to start is with John Feinstein’s Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four, which chronicles the 2005 NCAA tournament through a series of the author’s conversations with prominent coaches, players, and commentators. Feinstein observes a number of interesting characters along the way like former USC coach George Raveling, who once served as Martin Luther King’s bodyguard, and polarizingly passionate ESPN personality Dick Vitale.
In this excerpt from the introduction of Last Dance, Duke University’s legendary Coach Mike Krzyzewski describes his mixed feelings about attending the Final Four as an outside observer on the occasions when he has failed to lead his team there with a shot at winning the national championship.
Feinstein’s first book, A Season on the Brink, is one of the most riveting and revealing sports books ever written, profiling mercurial former Indiana and Texas Tech coach Bobby Knight. The author enjoyed almost unlimited access to the Indiana program for a full season in the mid-1980s as Knight tried to lead a particularly frustrating team to at least a winning record, seemingly bringing himself to the brink of madness in the process.
I lived on Tobacco Road in the heart of ACC basketball country for a couple of years and witnessed up close the amazingly bitter rivalries. Probably my favorite of Feinstein’s books examines the personalities and schools of this basketball-mad region: A March to Madness: The View from the Floor in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Feinstein focuses on insanely driven coaches like Duke’s Krzyzewski and North Carolina’s Dean Smith, whose personal rivalry was almost as dramatic as that of the teams they led. The book also considers coaches like Georgia Tech’s Bobby Cremins and Clemson (now Texas) coach Rick Barnes, whose failures to cope with the crucible of pressure nearly broke them as human beings.
For an even more focused look at the white-hot loathing between Duke and North Carolina, Will Blythe’s To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever lays out one insider’s wildly biased, admittedly obsessive personal history from the Carolina Blue point of view. The former Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Sports Illustrated writer eloquently explains the hatred these two institutions share for each other, and along the way he makes some fascinating observations about what it means to be a fan:
“The answers have a lot to do with class and culture in the South, particularly in my native state, where both universities are located. Issues of identity–whether you see yourself as a populist or an elitist, as a local or an outsider, as public-minded or individually striving–get played out through allegiances to North Carolina’s and Duke’s basketball teams. And just as war, in Carl von Clausewitz’s oft-quoted formulation, is a continuation of politics by other means, so basketball, in this case, is an act of war disguised as sport. The living and dying through one’s allegiance to either Duke or Carolina is no less real for being enacted through play and fandom. One’s psychic well-being hangs in the balance.”
Great Bad Reviews
The array of scathing criticism earned by Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones reminded me just how fun it is to read a negative review. When a talented critic gets ahold of a work upon which heaps of eloquent scorn can be piled, the results can be as darkly satisfying as a hearty, villainous laugh.
One of my favorite literary assassins is the eternally unimpressed Joe Queenan, who has vivisected any number of pop culture figures, politicians, and entire nations in his books and essays. In a New York Times piece called “Why Not the Worst?” Queenan explains “one of life’s unalloyed pleasures”: finding ”an uncompromisingly stupid novel in a world filled with stupid novels that do make compromises.”
In the essay Queenan explains his resistance to “the tyranny of the good” and confesses, “One of the reasons I became a book reviewer is because it gives me the opportunity to read a steady stream of hopelessly awful books under the pretense of work.” While the essay revels in Queenan’s effortless eviscerations of bad writing, he also points out the sheer entertainment value and priceless critical thinking practice gained by wallowing in the gutters of horrible literature.
A slightly different twist on the joys of nasty criticism is offered by Bill Henderson’s Rotten Reviews collections. The thin but priceless volumes catalog hundreds of witty dismissals of both long-forgotten works and canonized classics. Assorted victims of these poisonous pens are labeled, among other things, ”an explosion in a cesspool,” “a copy editors despair,” and “a third-rate work of art but a first-rate outrage to our sensibilities.”
Equally evilly enjoyable is Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without, a legendary 1968 collection of essays trashing everything from Beowulf to Hamlet to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This compilation of hatchet jobs by a triumverate of British writers tears down a series of classics that for centuries have “choked (readers) . . . with the implied obligation to like dull books.” A particularly tasty example comes from their battering of The Bride of Lammermore:
“What can be made of a writer who at the most poignant and harrowing climax of his novel describes events only with the desperate phrase that they ’surpass description’? It is immediately obvious that we are dealing not with an artist but with Sir Walter Scott.”
All of this reveling in negative reviews also reminded me of a quote usually (but not definitively) attributed to Winston Churchill, in a note responding to a bit of acid criticism directed toward him:
“I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. Your criticism is in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.”
Soundtracks to Reading
I practice a strange and controversial reading technique that has its share of detractors, Mrs. Bookmarking prominent among them. There are certain books, almost always fiction, which I can enhance the hell out of by listening to a soundtrack of carefully chosen music while reading.
As someone who usually has a difficult time trying to do two things at once in life, it seems pretty counter-intuitive to attempt to deal with multiple media intakes, both of which can demand full attention. While I’m rarely able to pull this off with any success while reading non-fiction, creating a playlist to accompany certain novels can bring out the best qualities of both music and books.
I’ve recently been deep into the novels of Dennis Lehane, starting with Shutter Island and moving straight through the fantastic five-book “Kenzie & Gennaro” series of Boston detective stories. Patrick Kenzie, the private eye/narrator, has a well-defined musical sensibility that occasionally clashes with that of his partner, and the blue-collar, ethnic, northeastern setting suggests more than a few soundtrack possibilities.
Kenzie loves the Rolling Stones and Nirvana, while his partner is way more into “mopey 80s alternative bands” like The Smiths and Depeche Mode. In one scene, a character almost gets capped in a bar by Kenzie’s loveable psychopath pal Bubba for mistakenly playing The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” on the jukebox. While I was reading the series I also saw an interview with Lehane where he mentioned his love for Bruce Springsteen, whose sensibilities are often a close match with the themes and settings of the novels.
With all of this in mind, my great enjoyment of Lehane’s books has been increased by strapping on a pair of headphones and blasting a series of Stones, Nirvana, Springsteen, and U2 CDs while reading. Maybe novels like these have a built in cinematic quality (or maybe I’ve just seen too many Scorsese movies), but the addition of a tune like “Gimme Shelter” to any of Lehane’s tense, riveting passages just cranks the drama up to 11.
Nick Hornby’s books are also steeped in knowing pop culture nods and opinionated musical references. My reading of his great first novel High Fidelity several years ago was constantly interrupted while I hopped over to the CD player to change out a disc in order to keep up with his web of musical allusions. I eventually settled into a rotation of obscure Motown and Stax tunes leavened with English post-punk discs by The Jam and Elvis Costello that seemed to perfectly suit the novel’s tone.
Hornby’s next novel, About a Boy, centered on references to Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, whose music lends a reading of the book an extra layer of intensity and sadness. In How to Be Good, two of Hornby’s misanthropic characters even compile a list of people they consider “talentless, overrated, or simply wankers” that includes James Taylor, Paul McCartney, and Jim Morrison (along with Homer, Shakespeare, and the Pope). Among the only figures they consider properly rated, along with Graham Greene and Quentin Tarantino, is Bob Dylan, whose music makes a great soundtrack to Hornby’s novel.
One of the only successful pairings of non-fiction reading with music came while I read Shelby Foote’s massive Civil War trilogy. By the time I reached the final volume, the weight of sadness and national near-self-destruction made every page seem like a ten-pound sheet of lead. During the final chapters I was already hearing in my head one of the saddest classical pieces I know, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which I repeated on a continuous loop in my CD player as Foote’s elegy described the final battles and surrenders and the assassination of President Lincoln.
Historic Photos of Oklahoma
In this NewsOK.com video segment called Reading Minds, I interview Oklahoma historian and author Larry Johnson about his new book, Historic Photos of Oklahoma.
Johnson’s book is a fascinating collection that covers the time period roughly from 1870 to 1970, and it reveals parts of Oklahoma’s past that are likely unfamiliar to many modern eyes.
In the interview Johnson talks about some of his favorite photos in the book, including images that show massive virgin forests in the state, cinematic outlaws and bank robbers, and dramatic dust storms on the plains.
Johnson’s previous work, 2007’s Historic Photos of Oklahoma City, is an equally interesting collection that showcases some of the earliest known photos of the city in the 1880s through to images of Civil Rights marches in the 1960s.
Some of my favorite images in both books show amazing Oklahoma buildings that have since been lost to fires or the wrecking ball, like the Criterion Theatre at 118 W. Main in Oklahoma City with its glowing glass facade and the Romanesque 1906 Oklahoma County Courthouse.
Johnson maintains the historic Oklahoma Collection in a beautiful room on the second floor of the Metropolitan Library System’s Downtown Library, and the walls of the library are also filled with historic photographs of the city and state. Johnson also curates the Oklahoma Images project, which is an extensive online collection of historic photos and essays.
Johnson’s books are available at local bookstores like Full Circle and Edmond’s Best of Books, as well as Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon.com.
Two Friends and Lion
A recent publishing trend has seen the release of numerous books inspired by websites like PostSecret and Passive Aggressive Notes. I thought I had spotted an even newer genre–books based on wildly popular YouTube videos–when I ran across A Lion Called Christian: The True Story of the Remarkable Bond between Two Friends and Lion.
The remarkable video has been passed around the Inter-web-nets a few hundred million times by now, and it has inevitably spawned a legion of occasionally disturbing parodies. Even for someone like me who disdains just about anything to which the term “feel-good” can be applied, Christian the Lion’s story definitely has the power to make the room seem unusually dusty.
The book was originally published in 1971, and it tells the tale of two friends who bought a lion cub from Harrod’s and raised him themselves for a year in Austin Powers-ish “Swinging London.” When the lion grew to an imposing 185 pounds and could no longer fit in the back of a jaunty convertible, the friends brought him to renowned conservationist George Adamson in Kenya, where he was released into the wild.
An updated version of the book published this year features 50 photographs and re-tells the (OK, I’ll say it) feel-good story of the friends’ unlikely reunion with the grown lion. A children’s version of the book is also available, and this Today show story from last year catches up with the two friends forty years later.
For research purposes I decided to re-watch the YouTube video after checking out the book, and . . . dang it . . . can’t quite see the keyboard . . . too dusty in here to type . . . .
*Sniffle*
When March Went Mad
In honor of March Madness my one-man selection committee began creating a 64-entry, single-elimination tournament bracket to break down my Final Four Favorite Books of All Time.
Luckily for all involved, I was quickly distracted by Seth Davis’s new book, When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball. The Sports Illustrated writer’s book describes the paths that brought Magic Johnson and Larry Bird together as opponents in the 1979 NCAA championship game. Davis shows how this marquee event catapulted both players to international stardom, transformed the NCAA basketball tournament into an annual national obsession, and jump-started the resurgence of the NBA through the next decade.
In this New York Times interview , the author discusses some of the interesting background material he learned about the two iconic hoops superstars. One of the book’s most intruiging subplots involves Bird’s coach at Indiana State, Bill Hodges, who convinced Larry Legend to give college basketball another try after washing out at Indiana and finding work as a garbageman.
This lengthy excerpt from SportsIllustrated.com describes Bird’s troubled family background and more of Hodges’s recruting efforts to lure the “Hick from French Lick” to Indiana State.
In this interview, the author discusses some of the racial undertones of the Magic vs. Bird rivalry and its role in breaking down stereotypes on and off the basketball court.
Over at Salon.com, King Kaufman points out a trend in sports book publishing that focuses on “a single game and claim(s) that the rush of history pivoted upon it.” Kaufman notes that recent studies of the 1978 Red Sox-Yankees playoff, the 1960 World Series’ Game 7, and the 1958 NFL Championship Game tend to over-reach and over-simplify decades of complex events in order to magnify the importance of a single game.
Even so, Davis’s book is an entertaining narrative that captures the fleeting moment before two midwestern college kids became global icons and dragged their sport into the modern media age with them.
Literary Voices: Ann Patchett
The Library Endowment Trust, a non-profit organization whose work benefits the Metropolitan Library System, hosts a popular annual fundraising dinner each April. Previous featured guests at the Literary Voices dinner have included Sue Grafton, Juan Williams, and Dave Barry, and this year’s speaker is PEN/Faulker Award-winning author Ann Patchett.
On Tuesday, April 14, at 7:00 p.m., Ms. Patchett will speak following the dinner at the Oklahoma City Golf & Country Club. After her talk there will be a question-and-answer session and a book signing. Proceeds from the event will fund library programs and equipment for all of Oklahoma County’s 17 Metropolitan Libraries. More information can be found at the Literary Voices website or by calling 405-606-3760.
Patchett’s award-winning 2001 novel Bel Canto is a mesmerizing account of a hostage situation in the Vice Presidential mansion of an unnamed South American country. An unlikely web of human connections is formed between hostages, guerrilla soldiers, and the world-famous opera singer at the center of the story. Patchett’s most recent novel, Run, is another compelling tale set over a 24-hour period in the lives of a politically prominent Boston family whose bonds are tested in the wake of a seemingly random accident.
Patchett has also written acclaimed non-fiction books, including Truth and Beauty, a memoir of her friendship with fellow writer Lucy Grealy, and What Now?, an adaptation of her 2006 commencement speech at her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College.
In last fall’s Atlantic Monthly special fiction issue, Patchett’s terrific essay “My Life in Sales” detailed the unexpected challenges and rewards of author book tours. Her recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The Triumph of the Readers,” describes the inspiring power of reading and the value of public libraries.
Each year the Library Endowment Trust also presents the Lee B. Brawner Lifetime Achievement Award at the Literary Voices dinner to honor an individual’s extraordinary contributions to Oklahoma County’s libraries. This year’s recipient, Penny McCaleb, is a longtime member and former Chair of the Metropolitan Library Commission and a dedicated supporter of our community’s libraries.
The Literary Voices dinner has become a very special Oklahoma City book event, and it is a great way for citizens to support their library system while rubbing elbows with interesting and internationally acclaimed authors.
The Kindly Ones — 983 pages of controversy
There’s a serious kerfuffle (if there can be such a thing) brewing in the book world over Jonathan Littell’s new novel, The Kindly Ones.
This 983 page doorstop is the fictional memoir of an unrepentant Nazi SS officer who dabbles in genocide, incest, and highbrow intellectual studies. The novel was originally published in 2006 in France where it won the country’s highest literary honor, the Prix Goncourt, for its American-born author. Now that it has finally been translated back into the author’s first language and published in the U.S., the novel is garnering such wildly polarized reviews that it almost seems critics are reading entirely different books.
The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani describes it as “willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent” and “a pointless compilation of atrocities . . . pointlessly combined with a gross collection of sexual fantasies.”
The Washington Post’s review condemns the book as “expansive and repulsive . . . narratively empty and intellectually incoherent” in its dismissal of the novel as “death porn.”
Meanwhile, an interesting piece in the Globe and Mail defends the book against “over the top” American criticism and describes it as “a microscopic examination of the mind and soul of a German perpetrator of the Holocaust who has never heard the term ‘the Holocaust.’” Reviewer Peter Scowan praises the author for forcing readers to confront a character acting in his own historical point in time with his own particular, horrific human reasoning.
The Austin American-Statesman’s reviewer notes biographical details about the author that may explain some of the novel’s difficult and controversial themes. While Littell spent a decade as a humanitarian relief worker in Bosnia and Chechnya, he currently subscribes “to a point of view that says our existence is completely meaningless and completely absurd.”
If nothing else, perhaps this explains the novel’s rapturous, award-winning reception in France.
“The Imaginative Space”: Books vs. Movies
One of my favorite bloggers, Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, recently took up a discussion that’s been obsessing me lately–the relationship between books and the movies adapted from them:
“(T)he more comic book movies I see, the more I value the imaginative space created by books. . . . . More and more, I’m feeling like I’d like to keep my memories, and preserve my imagination.”
Some of the comments on Coates’s thread about Watchmen discuss how the technical sophistication of modern movies can basically fill in every detail, leaving nothing for the individual imagination to personalize.
I’m currently reading Dennis Lehane’s riveting “Kenzie and Gennaro” series of novels about the lives and cases of two young Boston private investigators. Since I’ve already seen the movie Gone Baby Gone, based on the series’ fourth novel, I’m really enjoying reading the first-person narration in the voice of actor Casey Affleck who did such a solid job in the role of Patrick Kenzie.
His beatiful partner, Angie Gennaro, was played in the film by the equally lovely Michelle Monaghan. Equally lovely, sure–but now that I’ve read the books, it’s driving me crazy how wrong she is for the role of Angie. There’s just no way the angelic Ms. Monaghan can possibly inhabit the emotionally scarred but tough as hell character that lives in the imaginative space in my head.
Sometimes the casting directors and my own imagination do pull off a coup of synchronicity, though. The whole time I was reading No Country for Old Men, before the movie was even made, I just automatically heard Tommy Lee Jones’s voice in my head as the weary Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.
It’s often way too distracting to play the role of casting director while reading a novel, but there are times when a character and actor just seem to fit together. I’m not going to fight anybody to the death over Viggo Mortenson playing the father in The Road (coming soon to a theater near you), but I’m really going to struggle to keep my mental image of Steve McQueen, circa 1968, in that role.
Six Word Memoirs
Another notable website-slash-book project is the ongoing Six Word Memoirs series created by Smith Magazine. While the questionably non-fictional exploits of writers like James Frey and Augustin Burroughs may have taken some of the shine off the memoir publishing boom, Six Word Memoirs is a hell of a way to revitalize this tired genre.
The concept couldn’t be simpler or more clearly explained by its title. Writers both famous and obscure have contributed to the series with works like the one immortalized by the first collection’s title: Not Quite What I Was Planning. Inspiration for the series came from a legendary tale of Ernest Hemingway’s response to the challenge to write a six word story:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
These Twitter-length bios range from the trivial to the sublime, and the concept creates a mortal challenge for those writers who struggle like I do with the timeless dictum of the Strunk and White style manual: “Omit needless words.” I was once instructed by a deeply respected English professor that I write as if “you’re getting paid a nickel for every extra word you can use. You should write as if you’re getting paid a nickel for every word you can take out.”
So, so, so, so, so true.
An LA Times book blogger picks out his favorites here from among the Six Word Memoirs of Love and Heartbreak (which should be a perennial Valentine’s Day best-seller), and this NPR piece highlights some other excellent selections.
