TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

Continuing through my Legend of Drizzt chronological quest, I finally got through the first two trilogies and into the individual books. Before Wizards of the Coast got hold of the rights and repackaged the same work into the Legacy of the Drow and the Legend of Drizzt sets, The Legacy was the first stand alone Drizzt Do’Urden book. The original release was in 1992 under TSR. I had to hunt this book down a little. It’s mine, but I’d lent it out so many times that I had no idea who had it. I tend to be far less crazy about getting books back than I do DVDs or CDs. My favorite part of this book is the original cover pictured to the left. They spent six books already teaching us about dark elves. They live beneath the ground and have ebony skin black as night. On the cover: white guy. God bless TSR.

The little bit I remembered about this book was that I didn’t like it. Even when I first read it back in high school, I remember seeing that it was a “best-seller” and assumed it would be a tremendously awesome book. I remember reading (after having read the two trilogies already reviewed on here) and being tremendously disappointed in it. I wanted to see if I remembered correctly or not so I tried to go into it with an open mind.

Turns out that it held up as one of my least favorite books of all time and I still don’t understand why it was received so well and why some people think it’s one of Salvatore’s best works. I question now whether or not any of the people who reviewed it or received it well even read the preceding six books before picking up this one.

I have the very same complaints with the book in the present day that I did fifteen years ago. Salvatore took one of the most important and interesting characters in the entire Dark Elf Trilogy, Drizzt’s sister Vierna, and completely flushed away everything interesting about her. The first child of Zaknafein (and thus Drizzt’s only full sibling), Vierna’s not-quite-evil attitude was given as one of the primary reasons that Drizzt winds up with strong moral character and the ability to think for himself. She didn’t treat him as awful as her other sisters did and didn’t indoctrinate him properly. Drizzt references this in his “writings” that open the book’s parts. He questions “how would I have turned out if wicked Briza had raised me. Would I have turned out just as evil as she?” At the beginning of The Legacy all of those very interesting questions are flushed away.

We pick up in Menzoberranzan some 30 years after Drizzt has left. We’re given no information on what has happened to Vierna in the interim, but she’s returned to us as just another bat-shit crazy priestess of Lloth. In thirty years she’s gone from kinda-not evil to “I’m going to turn one brother into a drider and hunt down and kill the other one for the glory of Lloth” evil. It made no sense to me how a character who never really exhibited many evil tendencies is suddenly as gloriously evil as her sister Briza.

Every bit of this plot, from the absurd set-up (Vierna is told if she kills Drizzt she will be given control of the first ruling house, House Baenre, even though she’s in no way related to the family) to the execution (Vierna turns her brother Dinin into a drider for questioning her mission… something Trilogy Vierna never would have considered) to the resolution (Drizzt unapologetically running his sword through her heart) is weak and senseless. Salvatore was probably going for something along the line of “constant religious fanaticism of an evil deity can drive anyone insane” but it fell totally flat. It was also completely out of Drizzt’s character to coldly kill her because she was reaching for a weapon that he absolutely could have disarmed. The Drizzt everyone has been introduced to through this book would have disarmed Vierna, knocked her out, showed her the non-Lloth world of the surface, and tried to save her. Instead he runs through the only member of his family he ever really cared about. I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now. I have always thought a better story would have been Drizzt trying to save Vierna’s and convert her to Shar or Eilistraee. Instead, she’s used as a weak catalyst (when any high priestess from any house could have been used more believably) to kill off major characters and get Drizzt to attack Menzoberranzan.

On top of that, I really hated Salvatore’s use of “a quick death is just too good for you” moment with Artemis Entreri. Entreri catches up with Drizzt, loses again, and thrown into a cavern by Drizzt. Regis goes out to find him — the same Regis that Entreri has just spent the entirety of three books either chasing, torturing, capturing, or killing — finds him completely helpless, and says “A quick death is just too good for you, I’m going to leave you for the vultures.” Really? When he was just a member of an entire force that attacked your home? No one’s going to come find him? Really? I understand that Salvatore was not finished with character, and that’s fine, just don’t use a stupid and cliche way to keep him alive.

The only good thing about this book was the exploration of Wulfgar trying to learn to deal with a strong-willed woman. In the entirety of the Icewind Dale Trilogy, barbarian women are never seen and it’s suggested they live as slaves to the men. At the end of the trilogy, it’s suggested that Catti-brie and Wulfgar are going to get together and by the beginning of this book there’s a wedding planned. Showing Wulfgar dealing with a wife who won’t kowtow to his wishes is a good character exploration. Unfortunately, most of it is thrown away by simple jealousy. With the use of the ruby pendant, Wulfgar is convinced Drizzt is trying to steal Catti-brie from him and it follows the predictable course from there. This was another crazy character turn that made no sense at all. For most of the preceding trilogy, we’re told that Bruenor raised Wulfgar as his son and imparted his values on him. By this book, Wulfgar is less complex and mostly an angry barbarian. Another pretty silly destruction of a character’s background in the need to give him a tragic flaw.

Just like then, I hated this book because Salvatore spent 1800 pages in the Dark Elf and Icewind Dale Trilogies establishing characters one way and completely derailed them in this book. I found myself just wishing this book was over by halfway through because I wanted to move on because I knew the ending was going to be just as unsatisfying as it was the first time.

Solid recommendation to avoid.

Chronologically written (and actually read by me) before The Dark Elf Trilogy, the The Icewind Dale Trilogy by R.A. Salvatore is the 2nd of the Drizzt trilogies or books 4, 5, and 6 of the Legend of Drizzt series. This trilogy was the series that introduced Drizzt and his compatriots Regis, Catti-brie, Wulfgar, and Bruenor to world.

Reading through this series now it’s not hard to figure out why Drizzt turned out to be the breakout character of this series. Everyone else is honestly kind of one-dimensional and boring. The idea that no one expected this character to be hugely and absurdly popular — and create a generation of fanboys who demanded to play dual-scimitar wielding rangers in their weekly game — is probably one of the reasons TSR is now a sub-subdivision of Hasbro. Take a look at the major characters who are introduced in this series:

Bruenor Battlehammer: The king of this dwarf tribe. He’s a surly, angry, drinking dwarf with a soft side who took in a human girl (Catti-brie) after a goblin raid killed her parents. He also takes in another human boy (Wulfgar) after the barbarian tribes failed attack on Ten Towns in The Crystal Shard (book one). Bruenor, other than his penchant for taking in humans, never does anything to break out of the surly dwarf archetype that exists everywhere from Lord of the Rings on down. In fact, when I mention Bruenor, picture Gimli.

Catti-Brie: The aforementioned human girl whose parents were killed in a goblin raid. How exactly she came to be in Bruenor’s care is never really addressed, just know that she’s 18 and Bruenor is the only father she knows. We’re first introduced to her at the end of the Dark Elf Trilogy and she’s only 13. She is the first human who doesn’t treat Drizzt with mistrust. Her trust and Drizzt’s subsequent rescue of her earns him Bruenor’s trust. Five years later she’s beautiful young woman and a potential love interest for Drizzt. She’s also one of my least favorite characters in any book ever. For whatever reason this character has always seemed a bit lame to me. She always seems like she’s floating around the exterior of the story and inserting herself into everything. Somewhere in the course of this trilogy she goes from “girl who barely carried a shortsword around and was terrorized by an assassin” to “girl who finds a magic longbow and all of the sudden morphs into the worlds most dangerous markswoman.” I’ve never really bought her.

Wulfgar: The first parts of book one involve the barbarian tribes attack on Ten Towns. Bruenor captures one of the younger boys instead of killing him and indentures him to five years of servitude. He raised Wulfgar as a son. Advance five years in The Crystal Shard and Wulfgar is a 6′10″, 300-lbs of muscle fighting machine. Jeez, are he and Catti-brie going to fall in love someday?

Regis: The halfling thief. He’s the hook for both book three, The Halfling’s Gem, and the conduit through which Drizzt will be introduced to his Moriarty. I’d like to think that Regis has points in these books other than to be a troublemaker that leads the friends’ adventures… but he really doesn’t. After this series, he’s rarely around at all. Regis’s most important role in any of these books to force Drizzt to meet his nemesis.

Artemis Entreri: Entreri is supposed to represent Drizzt’s dark half. A man who grew up on the tough streets of Calimshan, Entreri is every bit the fighter that Drizzt is. This is important because we’re supposed to understand that Drizzt is the most impressive fighter to wield two weapons that anyone has ever seen. Entreri is every bit as skilled as Drizzt, but sees himself as superior because he is not hindered by personal relationships. His judgment is never clouded by care for someone else. This character would be better if Salvatore didn’t spend pages and pages of text beating you about the head about how you’re supposed to understand that this guy is Drizzt without the soul and, later, what Drizzt would have become had he not been raised with values by Vierna and Zaknafein.

Most of these characters, other than Drizzt, are kind of boring. In fact, the only reason I don’t doubt that Drizzt wasn’t supposed to be the central character in these books is the complete lack of mention of why the hell there was a drow on the surface. Once we get in to books after this, the roles of Regis, Bruenor, and Catti-brie are far diminished in lieu of the far more interesting conflicts among the drow.

The 2nd half of The Crystal Shard deals with an artifact of the same name and a wizard who gets his hand on said artifact and wants to use it to conquer Ten Towns. The artifact is a tremendously evil item of power that had drawn the balor Errtu to the surface. Unfortunately, a bumbling human wizard had found it first. The artifact uses the human as a vessel and Drizzt and crew vanquish everything.

The 2nd book, Streams of Silver deal with the friend’s adventure across the surface and the rampant racism that Drizzt has to deal with once he leaves his comfort zone in Icewind Dale. This is also the first real mention of Entreri as we find out that he has been tasked with capturing Regis. Regis has a fancy ruby pendant with hypnotic powers that he stole from the master of the Calimshan Thieves’ Guild. This book pretty much contains the entire sequence of events that makes me dislike Cattie-brie. She spends a good portion of this book as one with no skill with a weapon who is terrified of Entreri. By the end of the book, she’s found a bow and is shooting arrows through everything that comes near her. There’s no progression. She just goes from Princess Zelda to Bullseye. It seems like Salvatore had a character map for her, then decided he didn’t need a damsel in distress and just went in another direction without actually retconning what he’d already wrote. It never quite worked out… even though Catti-brie remains as the crazy archer of doom, it never quite rings true. You always have that image of her terrified of Entreri.

The 3rd book, The Halfling’s Gem, deals with what happens after Entreri catches up with the friends. He catches Regis and begins the long trek back to Calimshan. Wulfgar and Drizzt chase after them culminating with Drizzt meeting his dark half in battle.

If the theme of the last trilogy was theology’s effect on society, the theme of this trilogy is the effect of racism on the individual. Most of the good parts of the trilogy are written from Drizzt’s point of view and the fact that, no matter what he does, people will always judge him first on the reputation of his people. One of the biggest internal struggles he faces is when he is given a mask which allows him to appear as a surface elf. Not nearly enough time is spent on this. Drizzt is given the opportunity to literally change his skin but chooses to continue allow the ignorant to judge him how they will. The assumption being if they will judge me on my skin and not my actions that they are not people he would care to associate with.

It’s coming across that I don’t like this series… that isn’t true, although Salvatore’s writing style can also get grating after a while. I do like it but I also know I like the stuff that comes after it better.

If you want to read any of Salvatore’s future Dark Elf works, this trilogy is necessary to get the history and backstory of a lot of the relationships (the rest are addressed in the Dark Elf Trilogy). Other than that, they’re fun one-off fantasy books and nothing more.

I considered writing a review for each of these books individually but later decided it was pointless. The TSR trilogies are meant to be taken as one whole. Each book CAN be taken individually but it makes more sense to think about them as a whole rather than three parts. The Dark Elf Trilogy is the prequel to the Icewind Dale trilogy. I read it first as I wanted to do the chronological thing. The Dark Elf Trilogy deals with Drizzt’s birth in Menzoberranzan and how he manages to become a “good guy” while surrounded by nothing but evil.

In the Icewind Dale Trilogy, Drizzt was a supporting character… but it turned out that he a more interesting character than any of the book’s other characters. You can’t just drop a neutral good drow elf on people and expect them not to ask questions. As it happens, the character was popular enough to warrant an entire prequel trilogy. I’d give credit to TSR for realizing that except TSR was apparently one of the crappiest run companies ever.

As it turned out, it went pretty well and Salvatore knocked out three of my favorite books ever. Reading them through, they’ve not only held up but have actually become more relevant in the 20 years since it’s been written.

How? Well, drow society is a strict theocracy. The city’s ruling council is made up of the high priestesses of the top eight houses in the city. Each priestess is very careful to exactly follow the tenets of their goddess Lloth or risk losing her favor. The loss of her favor means the eradication of the house. As such, the followers of Lloth find themselves justified in anything they do. Any mercy is frowned upon. The drow believe that Lloth saved them after the surface elves drove them underground and gave them the gifts needed to survive in underground caves. We even get a taste of the propaganda delivered to young students in school that ensures the hatred of the surface world continues through generations. To Salvatore’s credit, it probably took some work to take creatures that are just handy bad guys and flesh out WHY they’re bad.

What he also gives you is a fictionalization of a theocracy based on hatred of all others who don’t believe like they do. It has everything: the scapegoating of the surface elves, the belief that they are right and everyone else is wrong, a ruler who is believed to be the very voice of their god, “surface raids” that are pretty much terrorist attacks, and the fanatical following of everything deemed proper by their goddess lest they fall out of favor and be sacrificed. 17 years later and this is more relevant now than it was then. Not necessarily because of terrorism abroad, but as a strong cautionary exaggeration of what happens when ANY society is raised with an “us vs. them” mentality.

The best part of this book is that it actually presents a believable chain of events that led to the rearing of a good guy in a world of bad guys. Two characters, his father Zaknafein Do’Urden and his sister Vierna are the two people who have the strongest hand in raising Drizzt. Vierna is described as the least evil of Drizzt’s three sisters and the only other child of Zaknafein and Malice Do’Urden. In drow society, there is no concept of marriage. The matron mother has a normal consort, but she can use whoever she desires in her house when the mood strikes her. The child is raised as she sees fit. Male children are frowned upon and the third living male is sacrificed at birth. Had Drizzt’s eldest brother not been killed by his 2nd eldest brother on the night of his birth, Drizzt would have been killed to appease Lloth. Vierna raises Drizzt for his first ten years and is not as cruel as his other sisters would be given the same job. In fact, she’s often described as the only female in the household who doesn’t exactly accept all of Lloth’s teachings. After the first ten years, Zaknafein takes over to teach Drizzt how to fight. Zaknafein is described as the best fighter in Menzoberranzan and of high moral character in a world where morals are seen as a weakness. Zaknafein instills this strong moral character in Drizzt before he goes into the drow schools. Drizzt, armed with morals from his first twenty years, does not fall for the propaganda machines and quickly learns he can’t live amongst these people. After finding himself unable to kill a surface elf child in a drow raid (and this ultimately brings down his entire family) he runs from Menzoberranzan and tries to find his own way.

Leaving the city he finds other people who help guide him on his path. He meets up with a svirfneblin (the gnome version of the drow) who he spared years before who gives him aid. When he gets to the surface he finds a blind ranger who teaches him the ways of the forest.

Altogether, this story is one of the more uplifting stories I’ve ever read. Drizzt rises above the evil teachings of his homeland to strike out on his own. Outside of Menzoberranzan, he faces nothing but racism because of the terrible reputation of his people but rises above it based on his morals and his actions. It leaves you with a tremendous feeling of hope.

If these books were about people instead of elves, they’d probably be considered a classic study in theology and racism in the modern world. As they are, they’re just tremendous reads.

Strong recommendation.

I am a an admitted Stephen King fan-boy going back to high school. I read IT back in seventh grade and, in retrospect, I’m kinda shocked my high school library had it. Not that I’m real up to what goes on in high school these days but it seems that a book with some of the coarsest language I’ve read in any King book along with the fact that the last few chapters contain a somewhat graphic description of a 12-year-old girl getting gangbanged by six 11- to 13-year-old guys does not seem like something good Godfearin’ folks would want in their middle or high school library.

Regardless, I read it and it remains one of my top 3 books of all time… so much so that I re-undertake the 1,100 pages every three or four years or so. When I saw a few years back that King was semi-unretiring after his self-imposed, post-Dark Tower retirement, I was excited. After reading Cell (which got an unfair rep for having a shitty ending… get an imagination people), I was more excited. It seemed like he was ready to ride in to the twilight writing the type of books that got him there in the first place.

Of course, the Lisey’s Story came out… which was a totally different direction than Cell. And now Duma Key kind of continues Lisey’s Story’s direction.

The Good

• Getting a story completely out of New England was a nice change of pace. The New England stories are getting almost TOO self-referential. I mean, at some point, wouldn’t the rest of the world kinda notice all the f*cked up, supernatural stuff going on in that part of the country? There are entire shows dedicated to finding out if supernatural stuff exists. Someone’s eventually going to notice the occassional armageddon that happens in Maine, right?
• This seems to be one of the occassional personal books that King writes. I’m not sure if I can explain it to someone who’s not a King reader, but every few years he puts out a book where the central character is very obviously an exaggeration of himself. Bag of Bones was one of these… I think IT was, too in some ways. This is one of these. I always like these books a little more than the random cast-off horror stories.
• Strangely, I didn’t hate this book by any means but I’m having a terrible time coming up with bullets for this section.

The Bad

• Since Cell, this is the 2nd book in King’s post-accident/Dark Tower career. It is now the second in a row where his themes have become very depressing. Maybe it’s just a natural progression for a guy who’s crested into the 2nd half of his life and who probably has death on his mind more often; but death has become a very prevalent theme in his books… People used to die in his books, but the death usually served a purpose of some sort - and very rarely were the deaths as depressing as they were now. Lisey’s Story is an entire book written about a widowed wife left behind by a husband who died too soon. This book has characters die with the main character having left issues with them unresolved. I know that’s how real death works sometimes, but it doesn’t make it any less depressing to read about.
• As King gets richer and richer and becomes farther removed from being an everyday dude, his characters become harder and harder to relate to. The main character in this book is a multi-millionaire who built a successful company and just has enough money such that he never has anything left to worry about and can just cruise down to Florida and rent a house on the Gulf for a year. He also has started to drop his political beliefs into his books more and more often. Yes, I get it. You went from young, idealistic liberal, skipped the step where you had to struggle and work for a soulless company and pay taxes to people who are too lazy to work, went right to uber-rich and now you think we should all pay as much in tax as you and everyone who thinks otherwise is a soulless ass. You hate Bush. We get it. (Aside: Can we stop with the Bush thing? It’s been almost eight years now. There’s nothing left to say that hasn’t already been said by everyone a billion times. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have both made careers on it. Enough already). Much like in music, I respect the guy’s opinion but I really don’t need it in my horror fiction, thanks. Reading and sports are distinctly my escape from the politics nonsense.
• I wasn’t sure if this was good or bad… but I went with bad. This might be the first book I’ve ever read where I found myself completely indifferent to the main character in every possible way. The book was written from the first person with his time on Duma Key being four years removed from when he was writing the memoir. I just found Edgar Freemantle completely uninteresting in any way. I felt bad for him as a guy whose life fell apart because he was unfortunate enough to be the victim of a horrible accident… but it also makes me wonder about his decisions in the first place. I mean, he married a woman who leaves him when he’s recovering from this horrible accident that scrambles his brain for a year. Almost every instance where this woman appears defines her as a complete shrew who was obviously cheating on him while he was laid up in the accident. In the divorce, he just gives her 60% of the contracting company that he built from scratch. I understand the desire to just put stuff behind you, but he just seems like a pushover to the point he’s almost pathetic.

The Rest

King’s books are taking on a consistent feel since his Post Dark Tower books. If I’m being honest, the theme probably started in the final three Dark Tower books. They are heavilly laden with death, sadness, loss, and how people deal with them with a bit of random sci-fi filtered in. While I’m sure critics love this, it leaves me feeling like I’m not reading a King book. I don’t know that I need to read 600 page epics to tell me that getting old sucks. I’m pretty sure I already knew that.

I would probably be looking forward to the Dark Tower comics if I actually read comics anymore. I can’t even get myself to go get the Season 8 Buffy comics.

Mild recommendation.

BEWARE SPOILERS!!

I tentatively planned to write a review for each of the Harry Potter books as I finished them, save them in the queue until I finished all seven, and then post them individually so I could see how my opinions changed as I went through the series. After I had gotten through the 2nd book, I made the mistake of reading the review I’d written for the first one and realized it wasn’t going to work. A lot of the dangling plot threads and unanswered questions I complained about in the first book’s review had already been answered by the time I finished the second. I realized then that the books are more meant to be taken as a single, massive 5,000 page volume instead of seven individual pieces. I was right to wait until all seven were out before bothering with any of them. It would have been annoying reading them one at a time and waiting for the next one to come out. It’s the same reason I eventually gave up on The Dark Tower series by Stephen King until all seven came out.

When I started reading it, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to like it. I chalked it up to reading a book written for people 15 - 20 years younger than me. The story was very simple and Rowling has an annoying habit of using alliterative character names for EVERY CHARACTER. Colin Creevey, Godric Griffindor, Dudley Dursley, Salazar Slytherin, Severus Snape, Cho Chang. You wouldn’t think such a little thing would grate on you but it does and it eventually made me wonder if every child in Britain was named that way.

When it started out, it was a good, simple story. It was about a boy who discovered he was something extraordinary and was taken out of an abusive home (inexplicably normal considering the way he was raised) and discovers he’s famous in this unknown world. The story was about this other world that exists right under all our noses. And in the first four books that’s all it was. A fun story.

For the first four books, the smack-you-over-the-head parallels to real world problems are mostly kept to a minimum. It begins with veiled references to where the entire series is going. Wizards see themselves as a superior race to non-magic using Muggles. Pureblood wizards see themselves as superior to half-blood wizards (the offspring of a Wizard and a Muggle) and both see themselves as superior to Mudbloods (magic users whose parents are both Muggles). Later on, we’re introduced to the Ministry of Magic - a quite powerful version of a wizarding goverment that’s seemingly unelected. There are registries for people who can turn into animals or werewolves. It is illegal for people to own dragons. The government runs werewolf support groups. It is illegal for a young wizard to use magic outside of school and they can somehow track this use. A wizard must have a license to teleport. Any of these rules are subject to a fine, expulsion from school (because that somehow makes sense), or imprisonment in Azkaban, the wizard’s prison.

In the first four books, the Ministry mostly appears as a deus ex machina “hey there’s a ruling authority overlooking everything”. The author needs some way to explain why wizards have not just taken over the world and why they live in secret. I found the explanation a bit unsatisfying; there’s really no given reason why wizards aren’t in control of the world other than they’re all really nice people. While she was writing Goblet of Fire, though, it appears Rowling realized that she could really turn the books into a pulpit to preach about anything and everything she wanted. In Order of the Phoenix the Ministry of Magic makes a conscious shift from deus ex machina to primary character. The Ministry denies Harry’s claim that Voldemort is still alive and uses the press to undermine his credibility. In this book, the government takes over everything. The government takes over the school to ensure that the students aren’t being trained as an army to overthrow the Ministry. The press becomes a magic-user version of Al-Jazeera, reporting what the government wants. Order of the Phoenix is where the books go from being a fun, creative story to a heavy-handed allegory on an oppressive government racially divided by bloodline.

Fortunately, Order of the Phoenix is primarily the only book where this silly sub-plot is front and center. Half-Blood Prince returns us to the decent story: a young wizard learning his craft and figuring out what he wants to be when he grows up. The sixth book pretty much exists to alley-oop into the seventh. There are about 100 pages of plot progression in 800 pages of book culminating with the famous spoiler that I heard on Opie & Anthony a day before the book’s release (and that I still haven’t really forgiven them for). When Deathly Hallows starts, the government has taken over the school. Voldemort is using the ministry to round up Mudbloods and put them in prison and has Harry and his friends declared as enemies of the state.

Sound familiar?

Fortunately, it splits this time with Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s quest to kill Voldemort while avoiding the Ministry backed death squads. The final resolution to the book is well done. I think it was wrapped up as satisfyingly as any long series I’ve ever read. Annoyingly, Rowling has seen fit to make attention-whorey comments regarding Dumbledore* before the books and what happened to the characters in the interim between the end of the book and the epilogue. I hate when authors do this. Readers should fill in their own gaps with what happens to their favorite characters after the book.

I am torn on my final thoughts of this series. On one hand, I enjoyed most of the (bloated) story. On the other hand, it is loathsome for the series to get the critical acclaim it does. Save Quidditch, there is not one original thing in ANY of the seven books. The witches and wizards supplied in the book are stereotypical magic-users, down to their clothes, hats, and choice of transportation. Horcruxes exist in Dungeons & Dragons as phylacteries. Veelas are Sirines. The Prophesized Child Who Will Save The World has been done in every video game since… well… ever.

I realize that these characters are written for people who are certainly younger than I am but the characters are horribly one-dimensional. The Dursleys, for instance, appear in the first few pages of each volume only to outline how cruel and terrible they are. It’s never rightly explained how they never get in trouble for LOCKING A CHILD IN A CUPBOARD AND FEEDING HIM TABLE SCRAPS. Severus Snape hates Harry Potter with all his soul until DUSTY FINISH~! he was in love with Harry’s mother and has been defending him all along. If he loves Harry’s mother and wanted to protect Harry, why not treat him like a human being? Why continually try to get him expelled? Draco Malfoy encompasses every one-dimensional stereotype of every kid you’ve ever hated.

And, speaking of random plot-holes to question, I could fill a book with questions about Rowling’s imagining of the world of wizardry. In the Potter universe, people are either born with magical powers or they aren’t. All children born with these abilities are whisked off to their local wizarding school where they learn to cast spells and make potions. If a normal person put on Harry’s cloak, would it work? How has no normal person in hundreds of years discovered a wand? Or a magic item? Would either of them work? Can normal people make potions? I mean, it’s just mixing ingredients, right? Why do wizards need a wand? How are wizards so far removed from normal society that some of them don’t even know how to dress like regular people? And how have they managed to hide their existence for all these hundreds of years? Obviously some normal people know about the wizard’s world. Harry’s adoptive family knew of it before he came along. Hermione’s parents certainly do. The Prime Minister of Britain is in on it… and it’s never come up? No one realizes what’s going on? That is one enormous version of the Sunnydale Syndrome (normal people ignoring the inexplicable or rationalizing it to fit their world).

In the sum total, I did enjoy the books but I really, really, really hate when they are called wonderfully original or something of the sort. There is not one single thing in any of the Harry Potter books that hasn’t been done elsewhere… either in a book, video game, or RPG. This is what makes it tremendously frustrating to see Rowling suddenly begin wielding the court system to stop people from deriving from her work. HER ENTIRE WORK IS DERIVATIVE OF OTHER THINGS. As someone who spent years and years reading different types of fantasy/wizardry/sci-fi books, there is nothing here original. The fact that she would sue someone for making a book about her books when her entire storyline is something out of a 1985 NES video game is asinine. Could you see a video game with the following plot: “A young boy discovers he has fantastic powers. It turns out he is the chosen one who must save the world from the Great Evil.” He could be Link.

I’m glad I read them. But, as someone who has lived, breathed, played, and read a ton of fantasy/sci-fi over the last 20 years… you can do better. There are a ton of other, better, fantasy authors out there who don’t need to cause controversy to sell books in their niche.

* - I say this was attention-whorey because there was no reason for it. Characters in books SHOULD designed so the reader can make their own interpretation of them. Dumbledore, in 4,000 pages never made one single sexual reference. There was not one sexual reference in the entirety of the seven books. Now, two years after the final book’s release, the author needs to meddle in the archetypes that fans have made for this character in their own minds. It’s selfish and fully designed to be another heavy-handed tactic to get her name back in the paper. “I’ve always thought of him as gay.” No, you f*cking didn’t. You thought of Dumbledore as every other stereotypical “wise old wizard” - right down to the long white hair, cloak, hat, and beard. Dumbledore is no different than Merlin, Elminster from the Forgotten Realms, Mordekainen, Gandalf, Sarumon, or Fizban from Dragonlance. Do you know what all those wizards have in common? They are bearded, wise, gentle, and single. She is making absurd, press-gathering statements like this because she will never write another book. She caught lightning in a bottle by re-imagining the work of a lot of other people and collecting in to one series. The young readers she created are now young-adult readers who’ve read other things. If they’ve read ANY other fantasy books, they’ve discovered their favorite characters in other places. She knows this. “JK Rowling’s next book” will be the Chinese Democracy of the literary world.

One of the contentions of the stat-crowd is that the manager of a baseball team has a negligible effect on the outcome of a game. Their contention is that the manager in baseball has the smallest in-game effect of any major sport. I found myself disagreeing but, ironically, due to the lack of statistical analysis on exactly WHAT a manager can do to a game there’s really no way to prove it either way. To make up for it, I decided to read some books about managers or by managers. I started with Three Nights In August back in September. A good read. Three Nights was written by an independent observer of Tony La Russa. I wanted to go a step further and read a book actually by a manager, which led me to Kevin Kennedy (with Bill Gutman)’s Twice Around The Bases: The Thinking Fan’s Look Inside Baseball.

Oops.

This book was about 260-pages. Reading past page 50 was a chore… reading past page 200 was impossible. I tapped out at about page 190. One thing to remember: jocks are writers and probably shouldn’t pretend otherwise. It was an awkward read and read like Kennedy drank about ten fingers of Maker’s Mark and muttered stories to Gutman who then tried his best to put them into some readable format. Actually… that’s probably close to exactly how the book was written.

The book is split into two halves. The first half is Kennedy relaying his experiences in the game from minor league coach in the Dodgers’ system all the way through his final gig with Boston. He goes back into his early days managing winter ball in the Caribbean. If there was a whole book written by a good author about managing in the winter leagues, it would probably be an interesting book. Kennedy talks about the differences in the game between here and there… specifically mentioning armed guards on the dugouts and the control bookies have over the game there. He mentions a near-riot that broke out because a pitcher was pulled at 14 strikeouts when the pitcher’s over/under on the day was 15. He specifically mentions a game where the power was mysteriously cut to the stadium as soon as the game was official. There was a lot of money on the game and it was in the bookie’s favor when the lights mysteriously went out. There was no power to the stadium and the back-up generators were never brought online.

He then gets into his first big league job in Montreal and his eventual managerial jobs with the Rangers and Red Sox. He gets into the politics of manager jobs. He also takes the standard digs at how awful the Red Sox were run in the 90s (outlined in much more detail in Now I Can Die In Peace). Dan Duquette played politics with the GM of the Rangers during the strike season to get Kennedy. Kennedy proceeded to manage the team to a division win. Duquette then proceeded to blow the team up and make a ton of moves without consulting his manager. The team sucked the following year. Duquette fired him. He describes the politics and the “good ol’ boy” network that led to both jobs and, if anything, it helps to outline why baseball is so agonizingly slow to grow from within. Old baseball men teach young baseball men all of their prejudices and wrong-headed information. Young baseball men become old baseball men. The cycle repeats.

The second half of the book is the useless and unreadable part. He has four chapters divided in to the best position players, best pitchers, best hitters, best all-around players, and best games he’s ever seen. There’s an awful lot of talk about “confidence” and “swagger” and an awful lot of “I’ve never seen this guy play, so I can’t add him to this list.” I think the most ridiculous instance of this was Ty Cobb. I never saw Ty Cobb play either… but if you want to present an argument to tell me a guy who had over 4,000 career hits, a lifetime line of .366/.433/.512, and a lifetime BB/K ratio of like 3:1 — I’d be interested to hear how much wrong you could fit into one sentence.

Now, for the kinda/sorta good stuff. Kennedy is a big proponent of a running game — something that the statistically inclined will tell you is over-rated. Kennedy makes the point, and it’s probably a good one, that statistics won’t show you if a pitcher makes a bad pitch because he rushes the ball to the plate to prevent a steal. A statistic doesn’t necessarily show you Armando Benitez’s game-losing balk last season because Jose Reyes made a head-fake toward stealing home. The stats won’t show if the shortstop is moving to cover second and leaves a hole for a base hit or a hit that splits first and second because the first baseman is holding a runner. The only raw numbers you really get from a running game, stolen bases vs. caught stealing, doesn’t really tell the whole story of being “aggressive on the base paths.” Could there be something to that? Maybe. Kennedy took over the Rangers in 1993. In 1992, the team was 74-88 with 81 stolen bases, 44 caught stealings (64% success rate), a team line of .250/.318/.393, and 682 runs scored in 162 games. Kennedy took over basically the same team and went 86-76 with 113 stolen bases, 67 caught stealings (63%, indicates much more movement along the bases at about the same success rate), a team line of .267/.326/.431 , and 835 runs scored in 162 games. Could the extra hits have come from pitchers rushing their throws or guys being out of position? Yeah. Could the 150 extra runs be from moving more guys into scoring position? Yeah. Is it definitely those thing? No idea. It’s almost impossible to make a similar comparison during his stint on the Red Sox because he took them over between 1994 and 1995. Baseball was in a bit of a mess at that point and the seasons were shortened.

One of the reasons that people tend to call moving on the base paths “running yourselves out of an inning” is because it’s usually practiced by bat-shiat crazy managers. Ozzie Guillen of the White Sox would be a prime example. Kennedy makes the argument that with proper studying of pitcher’s tendency, what they throw on each count, how long it takes them to get to the ball to the plate, a level-headed manager can control a smart running game that disrupts the defense and creates chaos in the infield. The problem is: instead of backing this stuff up with statistics and a coherent argument, he just presents it as “this is the way it is and here are three anecdotal stories about the time my gut was right.” That’s great and all, but the reason no one ever tries to prove a running game helps on offense is because the people who defend running games defend it with nothing but gut instincts and anecdotal evidence.

Kennedy also outlines a few ways in which managers help their teams win game. Stealing signs, positioning the defense, and studying player tendencies so his team doesn’t have to are a few examples he gives. If a batter tends to hit a certain pitcher into shallow left, a good manager should know that and position his defense accordingly. It should be on the manager to know these things, not individual players. A statistic doesn’t show that a good manager has his left fielder playing shallow instead of deep in that situation leading to an out that may not have happened if his player was positioned incorrectly. I agree with that examples. One can’t necessarily expect players to follow these things. A manager has play statistician and psychologist over the course of a season. A good manager can do both. Kennedy also gives us a decent look at various types of signs… even telling us different ways that guys communicate on the field. For instance, a second baseman leaning on his left foot instead of a right foot can be a sign of who’s moving to cover second.

All told, the book was a rambling mess. The first half is, at least, an interesting rambling mess.

Sticking with my habit of reading books with absurdly long titles: the proper name of this is Now I Can Die In Peace: How ESPN’s Sports Guy Found Salvation, With A Little Help From Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank, And The 2004 Red Sox by Bill Simmons.

You might know him as the guy on ESPN’s Page 2 who tells us every week about how awesome the Patriots are and how much the Celtics are going to rule. Going back before that, Bill Simmons was a long-suffering Boston fan who happened to be in the right place at the right time at the beginning of this whole Internet thing.

This book wasn’t anything that I was expecting. I thought it was actually going to be new material. It isn’t. It’s a republishing of Sports Guy columns going back to his old bostonsportsguy.com website. So basically, if I’d been a loyal Sports’ Guy reader through thick and thin I would have read this entire book already save for the small introductions to each section. The columns are annotated… boy are they annotated. The gimmick is the columns are being republished with Simmons footnoting them… filling the reader in on what he was doing, what he was thinking, explaining an inside joke or two, clarifying things, and in some cases eating his words. They’re not small annotations either… there’s almost another whole book of footnotes. It took me way longer to read this book than books of similar sizes. For each page, there’s almost another whole page of footnotes. The effect is a lot of back and forth between the actual body of the columns and the footnotes. It gets distracting.

One thing that becomes obvious pretty quickly into the book is how little Simmons’ style has changed in the last eight years. The First Godfather reference comes two pages in. He makes the same references now that he made years ago… and the book wears out Godfather and Shawshank. I love Shawshank as much as the next guy, but I was sick of seeing references to it by the quarter point.

It’s also very long. I’m a non-Red Sox fan and a non-Boston guy, so I guess the book isn’t really written with me in mind. By the time I got to the end of the book, I felt like I never wanted to watch another second of Red Sox baseball (and this was about a week before they won the title… well timed on my part). In fact, I enjoyed the 50 or so pages of fresh introduction than I did of the hundreds of pages of Red Sox copy.

To it’s credit: there were some interesting historical things in it. Simmons’ included his first ESPN.com column and the events that led to it. It was cool to read his take on the Aaron Boone game (well before I started reading him semi-regularly).

Funny thing in the introduction… Simmons’ mentions the four reasons that, during that fateful summer of 1997 when I had to choose a major, I chose CompSci over English and Writing. Back in my high school and college days, I was a religious reader of Sports Illustrated and other sports related magazines. Even at those tender ages, I noticed that SI didn’t have one writer under the age of 50. Simmons mentions this: guys get a column and they keep it forever. It’s an impossible industry to break into. This goes right back to my theory that I graduated at the wrong time to do anything. Had I been in college a little sooner with web programming, I could have really hopped on the dot-com bandwagon, cashed in some absurdly inflated Amazon stock, and bought the Dallas Mavericks. Had I been in college a little later, I could have gone for journalism… since now there was a whole new medium where people who weren’t 1000 years could get jobs writing.

The other three reasons: 1) the break-in jobs really, really suck and don’t pay anything 2) there are no hot women reporters and (most importantly) 3) Sports reporters all kind of struck me as star-f*ckers.

What I did enjoy about it was the little bit of personal, biographical stuff I got about Simmons. There was some historical stuff about his time in New England and his move to the West Coast. There was some very interesting stuff about how his writing from a “fan’s perspective” was very different than the stuff going on at the time. Thinking back on it, even seven or eight years ago, it really was all old codger-y writers who wrote their take and the readers were just expected to agree… exactly the kind of stuff that entire websites are now dedicated to tearing apart. Most sports’ bloggers write from the fans’ perspective because we have no choice. No one’s going to give us press credentials. He goes into WHY he still writes from the fans’ perspective… even though working for the Worldwide Leader he has access to every club house in the country. Basically: he doesn’t WANT to know if his favorite guy is an asshole to reporters. I think that’s why, even though his schtick hasn’t changed any in the last seven years, I still like him. It’s one of the reasons I like Tony Kornheiser, too. They get why people boo their teams. They get why fans are the way they are. They actively have kept themselves from becoming so immersed in the journalism aspect of sports that they forget why they started watching them to begin with. Those were the parts I liked which were, admittedly, few and far between.

Final Verdict: not really for me… but I’m admittedly not a Red Sox fan. This review kinda sucks, but it’s tough to review a collection of blog posts.

Freakonomics: A Rouge Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner can be summed up thusly: It’s that book that claimed abortion reduced crime… and oh did the talking heads flip out.

I’m not sure what other motivation one would need to check this book out. Surprisingly, this was on my bookshelf and not on by BookFlix list. Ms. L has a tendency to buy books of half.com. Why, I have no idea. I think she likes clutter.

Steven Levitt is introduced as “the most brilliant economist in the country.” He also admits in the opening pages that he’s really not good at economics. Instead, he uses statistics and financial models to try and solve the regular riddles of every day life. For example: If no expert was able to forcibly prove why crime dropped, why did it? Why do the homes of real estate agents always sell for more than their clients’ homes? How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents? How much does a name hinder your child’s future?

The book is broken out into six chapters, with each chapter addressing a different mystery. Chapters one and two are more table setting than ground-breaking. The first chapter addresses people’s tendency to cheat and studies how it can be prevented. How one can strike the correct balance of social, moral, and economic incentives to stop people from cheating. The second chapter, “How Is The Ku Klux Clan Like a Group of Real Estate Agents?” addresses the theory of information imbalance. That is: when you go to a realtor, especially before the dawn of the Internet, he had you at a complete and total disadvantage. He knows what houses in the area are really worth. He knows what the seller really wants. He probably has a pretty good idea of the trends in the neighborhood. But he doesn’t have to tell you. How were they like the KKK? It delves into the story of a guy who joined the KKK simply to find out their secrets. Information imbalance again: once everyone knew everything about the inner workings of the group, it lost a lot of its power.

These two chapters set-up the tools he’ll use for the rest of the book. They show the way that Levitt collects his data and the questions that he poses to assess the problem. The third chapter, “Why Do So Many Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers?”, is an attack on the idea of “conventional wisdom.” He brings up instances of experts who create numbers and statistics and the idea that if something is repeated enough times and confirmed enough by the media, it becomes the truth. Together with information gathering and the vivisection of conventional wisdom, he gives some new insight into old arguments.

As for the abortion and crime association? It’s not that crazy. He begins with a history lesson. The ruler of Romania, declaring his country would be a bastion of New Communism, changed his country’s abortion policy from anything goes to completely illegal along with contraception. He then proceeded to neglect agriculture for manufacturing. All the children who were born were born to families who couldn’t afford them. When people are poor, they resort to crime. The very children who likely would have never been born in Romania were the ones whom eventually brought the ruler in front of a firing squad. So what Levitt did was to compare the abortion rates to the crime rate and discovered their was a correlation. In states like New York and California, where abortion was legal before Roe vs. Wade came along, crime rates dropped sooner than in states which didn’t allow abortion. Certainly a controversial topic but also one that is built on attacking conventional wisdom… that is, the 8 general explanations that people try to pass off as the true explanation.

The final two chapters kind of lost me. It goes off into questions about parenting. It addresses the things a parent does to encourage their children to learn and, surprisingly, it turns out that you can buy your kids all the books you want, but if you don’t actually read them they don’t help. It then goes off into a fun chapter about baby names and how some of the more interesting names in the African-American community may hinder a child more than help it. It goes through naming trends and mentions some doozies: including Temptress (Incorrectly after Tempestt Bledsoe), Amcher (named for the first thing the mother saw after birth), Shithead (pronounced shuh-TEED), brothers Winner and Loser, and brothers OrangeJello (a-RON-zhello) and LemonJello (la-MON-zhello). It sadly does not mention lil Apple Paltrow, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, or Suri Cruise.

This book is definitely to be read with an open mind. If you are completely and totally anti-abortion and that’s the only thing you’re reading for, you’ll certainly hate it. The reader gets a decent look at ways to solve problems by thinking outside the box; something most people in this country are so morbidly lacking.

Solid recommendation. Instead of returning it to the library, I will now set it back on the shelf to collect dust for all eternity.

Or, by the full name Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager by Buzz Bissinger.

When the Fire Joe Morgan guys talked about this book they gave it one paragraph:

If you haven’t already, I invite you to read Buzz Bissinger’s book 3 Nights in August, about La Russa. The purported aim of the book is to show how brilliant La Russa is as a strategist. The actual accomplishment is to make one feel like one wouldn’t trust La Russa to take care of one’s cats, much less one’s baseball team. It starts with an anecdote about how Albert Pujols has a severe arm injury — one that allows him to swing a bat but not throw. La Russa wants to play him anyway, to like intimidate the other team (which doesn’t know about the injury), so he puts him in left field and tells him to casually underhand the ball to the SS if it gets hit to him. A doctor has told La Russa that Pujols, the most important player on the team by a factor of fifty, is risking severe like career-threatening shit if he throws a baseball. This is a not-super-important game. I mean, what the hell?

In fairness, that’s not exactly true. The Pujols anecdote, I think, was supposed to show La Russa thinking “outside the box” to keep his team in a playoff hunt. It was the middle of August and the Cardinals were fighting out the division with the Cubs and the Astros. La Russa couldn’t really afford to have Pujols out of the line-up and didn’t have a DH slot to hide him in so he had Jim Edmonds shade over to left on deep balls and Edgar Renteria shade back on shallow balls. Pujols was ordered to not fire the ball to the infield under any circumstances but rather to flip the ball either to Edmonds or Renteria. This was after they attempted to play him at first for a bit until runners realized they could steal bags even on a pick-off throw. It wasn’t exactly a “not important game”. It was more “middle of a divisional race.” Pujols was in because he was the most important guy on the team.

As much as I expected this book to be a response to Moneyball (especially considering it promised in the opening that it would not be) it really didn’t turn out that way. It didn’t delve into stats or overvalued and undervalued players. It didn’t start by underlining the woe that is the St. Louis payroll, though it did get in it’s shots at the Yankees and Red Sox over-hyped rivalry. I quote:

The rivalry between the Cubs and the Cardinals is probably the oldest and perhaps the best in baseball, no matter how much the Red Sox and Yankees spit and spite at each other. That’s a tabloid-fueled soap opera about money and ego and sound bites. That’s a pair of bratty high-priced supermodels trying to trip each other in their stilettos on the runway.

This is before it gets in to the history of the Cubs/Cards rivalry which in itself was pretty interesting. What it did end up responding to was the Moneyball, or more precisely Billy Beane’s, view of a manager. Beane considers the manager of a baseball team to be a middle manager. A guy with (usually) very little education who is tasked with managing the most important asset of a major league baseball club: the team. Beane points out that no other industry in the world would consider doing business this way. Hence, in Oakland, the manager is a figurehead while the front office decides who bats where, what reliever comes in when, and who pitches when. The manager is just there for show.

Three Nights In August takes a different view of it. It picks up the Cardinals’ 2003 season in the midst of a three-game series against the Cubs in the midst of August. At the beginning of the series, which runs from August 26th to August 28th, the Cardinals’ record sits at 68-63. They are a half-game behind the Cubs (68-62) and one game behind the division leading Houston Astros (69-62).

The format of the book is pretty simple. Bissinger takes you through each game, step-by-step, starting with the pre-game meeting the team has before each series and culminating with the post-game celebration following a walk-off home run in game three. Along the way, you’re treated to a little backstory on some of the players as they come up. Much like Moneyball branches off into chapters about Scott Hatteburg and Jason Giambi, Three Nights branches off into chapters about even lesser known names, like Cal Eldred and Bo Hart and even delves in to Rick Ankiel and Darryl Kile.

It allows the reader insight into parts of baseball he’d never see: like a pre-game meeting between the Dave Duncan and Garrett Stephenson. Duncan sits each starter down before a start. He has spent hours watching DVDs of Cub batters and has a strategy for each batter. He tells Stephenson that Kenny Lofton kills him when he throws a sloppy breaking ball but that he tends to strike Lofton out with his change-up. He lets us know that Cub hitters are overly aggressive and tend to attack the first pitch. We find out that Moises Alou, in particular, has feasted off Cardinal starter’s first-pitches to the tune of four home runs. He tells Stephenson that another hitter, Randall Simon, has killed him whenever he gives him something up in the strike zone… so don’t do that.

Of course, it does then delve off-course into it’s (thankfully) few forays into the world of statistics. The reader finds out that Stephenson has been complaining at the lack of run-support on the season. We also discover that La Russa is angry about Stephenson being angry. After all, it proclaims, Stephenson should be pitching in his 2000 form if he wants to go 16-9 again. It then uses Stephenson’s statistics to make the point:

2000: 31 starts, 16-9, 4.49 ERA 209H 31HR 63BB 123K in 200.3 IP
2003: 25 starts, 7-12, 4.41 ERA 148H 26HR 57BB 83K in 159.3 IP (it’s only August).

Meanwhile, if I couldn’t outline the absurdity of the “Win” before, allow those two lines above to do so. Stephenson has been essentially the same pitcher in 2003 as he was in 2000, except in 2000 he got 16 wins because the team scored more runs.

It took a lot of effort to muscle through that chapter.

Fortunately, it got better. After the team meetings, the book takes you in to the dugout. It gives you a chance to actually be in the manager’s head and see what he’s thinking and why he makes the calls he does. You see why the manager pulls a hit-and-run when he does and when he decides to send the runner. It gives you the reason why managers view certain guys as bench players and some guys as full time players even giving the story of one of the Cardinal’s bench players who makes a trip from the doghouse to superhero in the course of the series.

It even manages to be oddly psychic. The Cubs started Mark Prior in Game 1 and Kerry Wood in Game 2. Mark Prior was framed as the entitled, cocky young pitcher who didn’t have a care in the world. The book uses that chapter to give some history on another cocky, young pitcher who didn’t have a care in the world; Rick Ankiel. It mentions that Prior, who at the time was on top of the world, should be careful that he doesn’t take his arm for granted. The Game 2 starter is Kerry Wood. While it doesn’t make specific notes about Wood’s personality, it does mention that Dusty Baker had a tendency to overuse him a bit.

What it does particularly well is convey the million things that are going on during any given ballgame that the casual (or even the hardcore viewer) doesn’t realize. One particular anecdote, in the part of the book that delves a little bit into sign-stealing and ways to avoid it, tells about Roger Clemens warning a proficient sign-stealer that if he didn’t stop, “somebody was going to get killed.” Also, in this same section, it mentions that Shawn Green, currently of the New York Mets, has an almost uncanny ability to steal a catcher’s signs. It gives you a sense of how manager’s go about responding to one of their player’s getting hit (On the Cardinals, the order always comes from La Russa). The manager’s inner struggle over whether to hit-and-run or steal. While it doesn’t go so far to say that certain batters “clog up the basepaths” when they work walks, it does make the rather obvious assertion that a walk isn’t always the best thing to get… especially as an 8-hitter in the National League.

Now, the stat-head in me can easily say that any person can make that decision. Any person could look at a hitter’s trends and know where to position a defensive player. Really that the manager could be replaced with a particularly well-programmed super-computer that analyzes match-ups and trends and positions the player’s accordingly. But other stuff that managers have gut instincts for, like managing 25 egos ranging from fragile to over-entitled, is a talent. JD Drew, for instance, is the guy in the book set forth as the one person that La Russa has no idea how to motivate. He said, frankly, that there is nothing he can do to get Drew “fired up” to play. On the drastic other end he gives you Matt Morris. Morris, days before his start in game 3, twisted his ankle badly. Instead of going on the DL, he made his start. Most of Game 3 is written with Morris in mind, as he manages to hit 2 slow rollers that force him to bust down the line on a gimpy ankle. He does it both times.

The Morris part is springboard into the death of Darryl Kile. While “play the game right” is a line that stat-heads like to tear apart and goof on, Kile is the guy who taught Morris to play the game right. By that, they mean be there when the team needs you. As much as I respect most of the Jamesean theories and statistics, I think the tendency to ignore player’s personality is the biggest. The issue, outlined particularly well with JD Drew, is that no matter how good a guy’s numbers are: he doesn’t help you when he isn’t playing. Bissinger makes it a point to mention all the situations where La Russa could have used JD Drew during the series. Since Drew is on the DL, it does him absolutely no good.

What you walk away with at the end is the sense that the manager has a million things going on in his head during the game. Whether to hit-or-run, steal, defensive positioning, pitch-outs, trickery, sign-stealing, and the like.

One final thing to mention is the Epilogue. It jumps to the 2004 post-season. It mentions how the entire city of Boston conspired to beat the Cardinals in Game One and Two. The Red Sox, sportsmen that they are, booked the Cardinals in a hotel 40 miles outside the city. A security guard at Fenway Park left his car parked in front of a team bus, stranding them at the stadium until the wee hours of the morning. By the time they got back to their hotel, the kitchen had no real food left to serve them. To the book’s credit, it also mentions La Russa’s tendency to get swept in the World Series.

The Yard Sez: Fantastic read if you’re even remotely interested in the game of baseball. Otherwise: interesting read but much of it will be lost on you.

Or, its full name: Ladies And Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City by Jonathan Mahler.

Believe it or not, the ESPN series wasn’t exactly the reason I found this book. I was talking about the series to a co-worker who mentioned that he had read the book. I don’t usually do non-fiction but I knew that the book hit up a few historic events in New York’s history that I was kind of interested in; the Blackout and the Son of Sam Killer… all of this behind the backdrop of baseball. Of course, the baseball it dealt with was Satan’s team. In fact, the only cameo the Mets made in the book was the Tom Seaver trade…….. because the Mets’ have a history of being run brilliantly.

Anyway, there are six central storylines:

1) The Death of the Neighborhoods: New York City in the 1970s and 1980s wasn’t quite as glitzy as it is today. In fact, before the ghettos and public housing started to take over various neighborhoods, most of the outer boroughs were middle-class suburbs for the dudes who worked on the docks, railroads, and other standard middle class jobs. Think of your city, then think of the random suburbs around it, then attach a subway. This was Brooklyn and Queens. The early neighborhoods out in Brooklyn were enclaves of immigrants who all clustered in one part of the city. There are remnants of these even now… Carroll Gardens and Howard Beach are heavily Italian, Woodlawn in the Bronx is heavily Irish, the shell of Little Italy remains in Manhattan… but a lot of them were broken up in the sixties and seventies. New York City, in an effort to break-up the “ghettos” that had formed in Harlem, decided to relocate the people living in them. The plan of awesomeness was to build public housing in the neighborhoods… dropping 10-20 floored apartment buildings of subsidized housing in the middle of a neighborhood full of Italian or Irish folks.

It went about as well as you would expect.

People started leaving the neighborhoods. Some by their own accord and some fueled by real estate brokers convincing them to “sell now before the property values go down.” As the people left, the neighborhood crashed. Instead of breaking up the ghettos, they’d managed to create them all over the city. While the poor folks had a place to live, that no one really cared to go to, they still were the same uneducated poor folks they were in Harlem. Now they were just in Bushwick instead. There was civil unrest… most of which came to a head during

2) The Blackout of 1977: The city, in the midst of a financial crisis brought on by gross overspending, the middle class exodus from the neighborhoods, and banks refusing to back the city’s bonds, had the lights go out at 9:30pm on 7/13/77. It did not take long for the “civil unrest” turn to looting. So sayeth Wiki: Looting and vandalism were widespread, hitting thirty-one neighborhoods, including every poor neighborhood in the city. Among the hardest hit were Crown Heights where seventy-five stores on a five-block stretch were looted, and Bushwick where arson was rampant with some 25 fires still burning the next morning. At one point two blocks of Broadway, which separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, were on fire. Thirty-five blocks of Broadway were destroyed: 134 stores looted, 45 of them set ablaze.

3) The Democratic Mayoral Primary: You know how when two really great teams meet in the AFC Championship game and two totally mediocre teams meet in the NFC Championship game writers tend to call the AFC Championship game the “actual Super Bowl”? Well, up until Giuliani’s victory that was pretty much the Democratic Primary in New York City. This primary actually featured an incumbent loss… such was the level of hell that was New York City in the 1970s.

4) The Media: This was the part I cared about the least. It was mostly about how the New York Media machine had grown over the years. How the Post and Daily News came about and the eventual purchase of the Post by Rupert Murdoch. I didn’t really care much about this because I hate the New York media and wish it would go away.

5) The Son of Sam: The serial killer from Yonkers who walked around Queens and Brooklyn and randomly shot people.

6) The 1977 Yankees: The part of this book mostly dramatized in the ESPN series. Mahler goes in to a lot of detail about how Martin came to be the Yankee’s manager and the level of nonsense that Steinbrenner put his manager and team through even in those days. Much like how Billy Beane managed Art Howe in Moneyball, this was how Steinbrenner tried to manage Billy Martin, going so far as to tell Martin where to put people in the line-up and otherwise. Martin, however, was not hired with the understanding that the front office would be running the team and fought back.

Then, in comes the marquee free agent. Reggie Jackson, then the highest payed baseball player in the league, was put on to Martin’s staff and they did not get along, coming to a head when Billy pulled Reggie in the middle of an inning for a defensive replacement for not running down a ball. This nearly led to a fight in the dugout on national television. However, all of the drama was for naught as the Yankees slapped around the Dodgers in yet another World Series and kicked them back out of the city.

Los Angeles Dodgers… more the Bronx’s Bitch than even the Red Sox. At the very least, the Red Sox have never gotten beaten so bad for so long that they had to leave town. The Yankees beat two baseball teams out of town then, they came back for more in the 70s, and got smacked around and kicked out again.

Unless New York City history is your thing, there’s not much of interest in your book. However, the politics that turned one of the largest bastions of immigrations and jobs into the disgusting, bankrupt, ghetto in the 70s and 80s is interesting. Much of these same policies can be seen in California right now. New York, for the most part, has moved past a lot of these policies… because the 80s taught them they couldn’t afford it. While I did find some of the history of the political process interesting, I felt like the history of the newspaper media was a waste of time. I don’t care about Rupert Murdoch and I hardly care about reporters in any sense (as I find the New York Media and, really, the media in general to be parasites who revel in creating fear and reporting on celebrity buzz… but that’s a column for another day). I certainly don’t care about how certain papers grew at the expense of other papers.

Outside of the media theme, though, the other storylines were interesting… but probably only for a New Yorker. Unless you really liked the series, or politics, this book probably isn’t going to be for you.