BOOKS THREAD

Recently finished the Grant bio by Chernow. Excellent.

 

I read Three Bags Full just because of this place.

 

Read Pearlman’s new book on the USFL, “Football for a Buck.”
Pros: in his style, there are funny stories about drugs, wild sex parties and general craziness. Some may not like that, but it makes for interesting stuff. I read a book about the usfl about a decade ago, and it focused more on the business end. Pearlman glosses over that, and focuses on the characters. He also turns up some strong gems such as a guy with no talent who managed to sneak onto the Blitz roster for a day or so the first season. Also that Villanova’s Jay Wright worked for the Philly Stars for a season. It’s obvious that pearlman did his homework.
Cons: since I had read a previous book about the league, I think he paints trump as too much of the heavy. Other book blamed trump for screwing up everything, but passes the blame around to others. Pearlman sets his sights on trump and just fires away. Not faulting because he comes with facts, but wonder how the book would have differed if trump hadn’t become trump. I also wish he had added a chapter on what happened to usfl players who didn’t become nfl legends. Just a few updates on the travels of chuck Fusina, Eric vermilion and Marcus Dupree would have been cool.

Other: from a literary merit standpoint, he does a nice personal story bookending the start and finish. Starts with his childhood fascination with the league and ends with how his son has picked that up.

 

What is the other book?

 

$1 league by Jim Byrne, which i enjoyed and why I was hesitant to get pearlman’s book. I figured I had read the definitive version of the league.

 

Just finished Eight Men Out (yes, I know, it’s been around forever). Great book, well researched.

 

Also just finished The Captain Class. Really well-researched book on leadership and sports. Easy read. Sam Walker looked at the 16 best teams ever (as rated by his methodology) and found commonalities among their captains, though some may not completely bear out. For example, he said the top captains habitually did defiant, dissenting, and potentially devisive things (like rip the team in the media or threaten to throw the coach out of an airplane), but that, from what I know about him, couldn’t be further from the truth in regard to Tim Duncan, one of the captains discussed. For every trait, did he go through each captain’s personality or just pick a couple who stood out and call that the trend?

 

I suspect it will be a long time - if ever - before we see a better, more in-depth bio of Bill Belichick than the new one by Ian O'Connor. Read it, no matter your feelings for the Hooded One, it's a great book.

 

The autobiography Eric Clapton released several years ago was a disappointment to this fan, endless pages detailing his rampant substance abuse and his failed relationships while dismissing albums like Layla, the absolute masterwork of his career, to a handful of paragraphs.

Thankfully, Philip Norman, whose bios of Lennon and McCartney are as good as any written about either artist, shows up with a terrific new book, Slowhand: the Life and Music of Eric Clapton. Norman certainly doesn't overlook Clapton's relationships with his mother and grandmother, the drug and alcohol abuse that nearly killed him or his many dalliances with women, with many pages devoted to his famously obsessive on and off again relationship with Pattie Boyd. Norman does a good job detailing Clapton's musical output, from his earliest days through the restless streak that caused him to bolt from the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and Cream, his lengthy solo career and the occasional live show disaster resulting from too many drugs or too much booze.

 

I finally have bookshelves covering an entire wall of a house for the first time in my life. I've made a book bucket list and a list of lifetime favorites and told everybody I know that they don't need to wonder what to get me for gifts for the next decade. I just want books. Hardcover books from the list for the next decade and I'll be happy.