Thanks to all of your interest in the blog, we’ve passed the 15,000 page view mark.
Some of you may remember that we reached the 10,000 mark in June. July has been a record month, with more than 3,500 page views and counting as of this morning.
A big THANK YOU to all who have been reading the blog. The community is growing!!
Posted in Current Books
The image of Adolf Eichmann behind glass while on trial in Jerusalem haunts us still. Neal Bascomb's new book provides a new vision of Eichmann and the compelling story of his capture.
It was one of the starkest of its, or any other, time.
Adolf Eichmann, to his families’ victims one of the masterminds of the Holocaust but by his own description an ordinary, Jewish-loving functionary following orders, sitting behind the glass while being put on trial in Israeli on behalf of the Jewish people will continue to haunt us for years to come.
In her classic work, Eichmann in Jerusualem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, philosopher, writer and former lover of Martin Heidegger Hannah Arendt focused on Eichmann’s lack of hostility toward Jews, his ordinariness.
In addition to arousing widespread enmity among people who felt that she accused the Judenrat as being complicit in their community’s destruction, Arendt and her interpretation have become widely used, if not universally accepted.
A new book by Neal Bascomb challenges Arendt’s vision.
In Hunting Eichmann, Bascomb tells the story of Eichmann’s capture in Argentina by Israelis and reveals a man who actively knew and relished the mass murder he designed and helped carry out.
Many thanks to dear friend Ava Kadishshon Schieber for lending me the book.
Bascomb’s work is a gripping account of a daring mission carried out at great risk and for which the stakes could not be higher. Each person involved in stalking, apprehending and flying Eichmann back to Israel knew that he or she was participating in a higher cause-to bring some vengeance and justice to the world.
It was a delicate operation that took more than 15 years to realize.
Bascomb opens the book just before Eichmann’s capture, pivots back to the war and the survival of Zeev Sapir, who later would be one of the survivors who testified against Eichmann.
He then moves through Eichmann’s escape and refuge in Argentina, where he lived among a veritable collection of World War II-era fascists of all stripes.
The chase for Eichmann was fitful, starting and then stopping for years at a time. Bascomb picks up the action in the period when he was identified.
I will not give too many details, but will simply say that the planning was enormously intricate and fraught with danger. One wrong move and he could be gone, forever.
One of the most fascinating parts of the book is Bascomb’s description of the mixed emotions his captors feel toward the high level Nazi. At different points nearly everyone involved with the mission must restrain himself or herself from attacking and killing Eichmann because of the heinous actions he took.
But boredom at the long wait once he was captured and before the El Al plane arrived set in, too. So did bewilderment that this harmless, compliant and even pathetic man could have been responsible for so much murder, including some of the families of the people involved in the mission.
The trial, which is the focus of Arendt’s work, feels more like a coda to the dizzying action Bascomb has skillfully laid out in cinematic and page-turing form in the preceding 300 pages.
He ends the book with a poignant moment between one of Eichmann’s captors and his dieing mother, with whom he shares his role in snaring the notorious Nazi, who was responsible for his sister’s death.
The tender connection in which a devoted son gifts his mother peace of mind before she passes is a fitting moment to wind up this fast-paced and emotionally rich work that adds to our understanding of one of the most notorious Nazis and keeps us turning the pages as fast as we can along the way.
I just had lunch with Craig Townsend.
He’s a former inmate I met last year through a story I wrote about children with incarcerated parents.
Craig got out of prison last Thursday.
He’s trying to put his life back together, one small piece at a time.
We are talking about basics.
Where to live. Getting a job. And building a relationship with his family.
Craig and his wife have known each other 17 years. She was born in Serbia and emigrated to the United States when she was 5 years old.
He is black and grew up in Chicago.
They have two intelligent and thoughtful daughters, who are entering ninth and seventh grades respectively.
Craig has been incarcerated twice, both times related to his drug addiction.
The year after he got out the first time went horribly. The family had no preparation, he got back onto the street, used again and ended up getting arrested and sent back to prison.
Craig and I exchanged a lot of letters since we met last summer.
I’m just a year older than him and we shared thoughts about basketball, politics and our families.
He speaks five languages, including Spanish, Polish and Serbian. He also reads voraciously, so I would sent him copies of blog posts I had written about books I had read.
One of them was about Ava Kadishshon Schieber’s The Soundless Roar.
It tells through poems, stories and images her experience of survival during World War II. As a Jew, she was in danger of being killed like her father and sister were during that horrific time.
Ava hid with the family of her sister’s fiancee, farming folks who told her she could not speak because she would be identified as not from the area and, therefore, as Jewish.
To speak was to die. And not just her death, but the murder of the family who sheltered.
So she pretended to be deaf and mute for four years.
Craig liked the blog post, so I later sent him a copy of Ava’s book.
During our lunch today, he talked about rebuilding trust with his daughters, applying the lessons of patience he learned while in prison and about the inspiration Ava gave him.
He said he talked about Ava during one of the meetings, about how she wrote and said that light can pierce denial and ignorance.
I don’t know what will happen with Craig, but I do know that I am rooting for him and his family.
I also know that I look forward to introducing him to Ava, to hearing them speak Serbian and to seeing him meet the woman who inspired him to do better when he was locked up hundreds of miles from his family.
Tracy Kidder is one of America's foremost practitioners of narrative nonfiction.
Tracy Kidder has forged a place among the pantheon of American narrative non-fiction writers.
Starting with his Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Soul of A New Machine, the former Vietnam Veteran has combined his impressive powers of observation, ability to turn a phrase and sense of character into highly memorable works.
While I’ve not read all of his boos, here are some of my favorites by the man who many consider the dean of writers in and about Western Massachusetts:
1. Mountains Beyond Mountains. This story tells about the remarkable Paul Farmer and his journey from humble beginnings in Florida to committing and acting on an unstinting dedication to the world’s poor and underserved. Based initially in Haiti, the adoptive homeland of his heart and wife’s home country, Farmer’s organization Partners in Health now works in countries around the world like Russia and Venezuela.
2. Among Schoolchildren: This book follows a year in the life of a fifth grade classroom, with all the accompanying highs and lows. Mrs. Zajac, a teacher with heart and grit working in working class Holyoke, is the book’s likable protagonist. In the end, the reader is drawn to Kidder’s conclusion that she didn’t give up on the children, but she did run out of time.
3. Old Friends: This work is set in a nursing home in Western Massachusetts and depicts the tender friendship that exists between two elderly men. Kidder does an effective job of making the seemingly mundane moments and later stages of life have vitality, poignance and meaning.
4. House: I put this book lower on the list not because I didn’t like it quite as much, but because the clients who were having their home built from the ground up grated on me. Kidder shows what a painstaking process, rife with stress, cost overrides and architectural compromise, making a home can be. I particularly enjoyed his descriptions of the workers’ background, relationships and desires. He also has a touching scene at the end when the foreman, who has put so much into the house, has to leave it to the new owners.
This book about Operation Pedro Pan can give context to people seeking to evaluate the 50 years since Fidel Castro took power in Cuba.
Yesterday marked 50 years since Fidel Castro and his band of guerrillas assumed power in Cuba after toppling U.S. backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.
The now ailing Castro stepped down a couple of years ago after outlasting nine U.S. presidents and leaving his country a decidedly mixed legacy for supporters and detractors alike to debate passionately in the upcoming years and decades.
Maria de los Angeles Torres was born in Cuba and was one of more than 10,000 children who left the island in early 60s on Operation Pedro Pan.
Decades later and after a stint in Harold Washington’s administration, Torres returned to her childhood experience with a scholar’s eye.
The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the U.S., and the Promise of a Better Future is the book that resulted from her efforts and lawsuit against the CIA to declassify documents related to the program.
Operation Pedro Pan has generated novels and poetry, and Torres’ work argues that the children in the program were used by the United States government locked in a Cold War struggle with the former Soviet Union.
The experience of the children, particularly those who did not reunite with their families, was painful and even heartrending. Singer Candi Sosa, who starred in the propaganda film by the same name as the book title, is just one example of the many children who suffered abuse in the United States.
A fascinating personal connection for me was that Penny Powers, the British woman who administered the Kindertransport program by which my father and uncle left Germany in the late 1930s, ran Operation Pedro Pan, too.
This is just one of the many informative aspects of this worthwhile book for those looking to learn more about the island that marked a half century yesterday since a bearded leader entered its capital brimming with triumph and possibility.
Getting to know Frank Sotomayor is just one of the many positive aspects of being part of the Institute for Justice and Journalism's network.
Steve Montiel, Bobby Kirkwood and this year’s crop of environmental justice fellows from the Institute of Justice and Journalism were in town last night-a fact that generally means three things: lots of eating; lots of drinking; and plenty of animated conversation.
Founded close to a decade ago, the institute has sought help encourage the development of a critical mass of journalists committed to covering social justice issues. Through its fellowships on racial justice, the environment, and immigration, IJJ has provided hundreds of journalists with stimulating intellectual experiences and helped cultivate lasting friendships.
My brother Jon and I participated in the racial justice fellowship two years ago for our project about undocumented Latino immigrants who become disabled on the job.
During our week alone, we met Nick Ut, photographer of the classic image of a naked Vietnamese girl running along a road after having been hit by a blast of napalm, Father Greg Boyle, maverick priest in East Los Angeles, founder of Homeboy Industries and subject of Celeste Fremon’s very personal book, G-Dog and the Homeboys, and LAPD Commissioner William Bratton.
A Boston boy at heart, Bratton and his accent were on full display when he talked about a gang report written by Connie Rice and released while we were there. He said, in essence and in phonetic cadence, ”I have not yet read the whole repoht, because not only is Coh-nie an excellent wri-tah, she is a very prolific one, too.”
Bratton’s wife is Rikki Klieman, who worked and had a minor dalliance with Jan Schlichtmann in Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action. She also was the prosecutor in the case of the 1980 murder of an Iranian university student in my hometown of Brookline-an experience she writes about in her book, Fairy Tales Can Come True (I have not read the entire book.).
An IJJ-related book that I have read is Senior Fellow Joe Domanick’s Cruel Justice, which tells the story of the origin of California’s ‘three strikes’ law that became a national standard bearer and that he argues has had highly negative consequences for the legal system and community at large.
After close to a decade, IJJ is shedding its affiliation with the University of Southern California and going independent. Montiel is moving to Oakland, where he will both be a “media relations specialist” and direct the new version of the institute.
Wherever it is located, the institute promises to continue to support the work of socially conscious journalists. I recommend it to all journalists interested in these issues and to philanthropic folks looking to support a worthy cause who have already donated to Kuumba Lynx, Facing History and Ourselves, and Community Renewal Society.
Posted in Current Books
Tagged A Civil Action, Bobby Kirkwood, Celeste Fremon, Community Renewal Society, Connie Rice, Cruel Justice, Facing History, Fairy Tales Can Come True, Father Greg Boyle, G-Dog and the Homeboys, Homeboy Industries, Institute for Justice and Journalism, Jan Schlichtmann, Joe Domanick, Jon Lowenstein, Jonathan Harr, Kuumba Lynx, Nick Ut, Rikki Klieman, Steve Montiel, William Bratton
This victorious scene is unlikely to be repeated on Sunday, but disappointed fans have plenty of books about Lance Armstrong to read.
The Tour de France ends tomorrow and, like much else he has done in his life, Lance Armstrong has dominated headlines, if not the race.
The driven Texan who survived cancer and came back to win a record-shattering seven consecutive Tours from 1999 to 2005 will, barring injury or a disastrous fall, not ride into Paris with the maillot jaune on his back.
Instead, Armstong’s not having raced competitively for more than three years, a collarbone injury in an earlier race and running into Tour leader Alberto Contador in his prime have combined to make Armstrong’s presence on the podium far from a given.
Today’s tortuous climb to the Mont Ventoux will provide the answer as to whether he claims his place as one of the top three racers in biking’s premiere event.
During the race Armstrong has alternately sparked derisive commentary from Tour legend and five-time winner Bernard Hinault and praise from French President Nicolas Sarkozy. After a key stage in the Alps where Contador dropped Armstrong and made his victory highly likely, Hinault said:
“I couldn’t care less about Armstrong. If he’s at the Tour or not, it changes nothing. We have nothing in common. There’s also the language barrier, so we’ve never been able to speak man to man. He would have impressed me if at the height of his career, he raced the Giro (d’Italia), the classics. He is the champion of the Tour, nothing more.”
Sarkozy had a more generous take:
“Armstrong has won seven Tours and he is coming back at 37 with the state of mind of a young man. He is coming back to make a good result, to enjoy it—and to fight for his foundation. And God knows how much we need to fight against cancer. It’s giving hope to all the ill people.”
Whether one agrees with the French president or biking legend, those hungry to learn more about Armstrong after tomorrow’s largely ceremonial stage can read the following books:
1. It’s Not About the Bike and Every Second Counts, by Lance Armstrong. Although published separately, these two memoirs are essentially a single book-the story of Armstrong’s life. The first work covers the period from Armstrong’s birth to his discovering a passion for biking to his battle with cancer, recovery and the beginning of his string of Tour victories. Every Second Counts picks up the story where the first one ends and talks about how the accompanying attention surrounding his biking triumph strained his marriage and contributed to his divorce from Kristen, his first wife and mother of his first three children.
2. Lance Armstrong’s War: One Man’s Battle Against Fate, Fame, Love, Death, Scandal , and a Few Other Rivals on the Road to the Tour de France, by Daniel Coyle. Coyle moved his family to Gerona, Spain during the winter before Armstrong’s ultimately successful attempt to win his sixth consecutive Tour in 2004. The book is engagingly written and chockful of entertaining details, whether it’s how the bikers pinch each other to gauge their rivals’ fitness to Armstrong’s “Dead Elvis grin” when his body is showing the effects of being supremely tested or Coyle’s comparison of the bikers to two-year-olds who eat, move and sleep. Coyle also has well developed profiles of individual riders like Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton, both of whom subsequently were banned for drug use, as well as the likable George Hincapie, Armstrong’s wing man for all seven of his Tour victories who found love and built a family with a French podium guy.
3. The Lance Armstrong Performance Program: Seven Weeks to the Perfect Ride, by Chris Carmichael.
Armstrong’s trainer Carmichael reveals his program with the Texan. Among the key points: athletes can operate at peak performance for four, maybe five weeks. All that Carmichael would do with Armstrong would be to have him hit that zone during the weeks of the Tour. Carmichael also talks about the importance of assessing and learning from defeat, rather than charging directly into the next race.
Posted in Current Books
Tagged Alberto Contador, Bernard Hinault, Chris Carmichael, Daniel Coyle, Every Second Counts, Floyd Landis, George Hincapie, It's Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong, Lance Armstrong's War, Mont Ventoux, Nicolas Sarkozy, The Lance Armstrong Performance Program, Tour de France, Tyler Hamilton
The sight of Albert Pujols at the plate is a terrifying one for many pitchers.
St. Louis Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols has been getting much deserved love recently.
Baseball guru and founding sabermetrician Bill James wrote recently in Sports Illustrated that Pujols may have gotten off to the most perfect start to a baseball career ever according to the following three criteria:
“1. It comprises brilliant full seasons from Day One in the big leagues. This is extremely rare, as most great players will play a partial season or two before their careers really get going. Frank Thomas, for example, was instantly great and is an excellent early-career comparison for Pujols, but he was called up midseason and played only 60 games his first year. Lou Gehrig played 23 games over two seasons before getting called up for good. Ty Cobb played parts of two seasons before becoming a regular in 1907.
2. It is not interrupted (by a war, a strike, injuries) or diminished by a factor out of the player’s control, such as a lousy home park. This is probably an unfair requirement, but, hey, we are talking about a perfect career. Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams had tremendous careers, but theirs were interrupted by World War II, and Willie Mays’s career was briefly put on hold by the Korean War. Joe Morgan’s greatness was undercut by some rather ordinary numbers that were a consequence of playing seven seasons in Houston’s Astrodome, one of the worst hitting parks in baseball history.
3. It should be made up of Hall of Fame–caliber seasons every single year.
Those three qualifications, of course, eliminate virtually every player in baseball history from having a career that’s considered perfect. One player who is not eliminated, though, is Albert Pujols, who made the Cardinals out of spring training in 2001, had one of the greatest rookie seasons in baseball history—.329 average, 37 homers, 130 RBIs, 112 runs scored—and has been killing the ball ever since, right up through this season, in which he is making his most serious run at a Triple Crown. Through Sunday he had 31 homers (seven ahead of his closest pursuer), 82 RBIs (six ahead) and was hitting .336 (second in the league, 10 points off the pace).”
Pujols has continued his torrid hitting and pursuit of the first Triple Crown since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967 after an eventful All-Star weekend in which he caught President Obama’s ceremonial first pitch, and did not, contrary to expectations, win the Home Run Derby.
Pujols’ rise from humble beginnings in the Dominican Republic and path through Maple Woods Community College is skillfully told in Buzz Bissinger’s Three Nights in August.
The book ostensibly covers a three game set between traditional division rivals Chicago Cubs, then managed by Dusty Baker, and the Cardinals, who were and are skippered by Tony LaRussa. The author of Friday Night Lights and an epic meltdown about the Internet, Bissinger focuses largely on the inner workings of the managers as they make their personnel decisions.
In the process, though, of explaining their thoughts, he also tells about the individual players.
Pujols is one of them. Bissinger chronicles his humility, his religious faith and his relentless quest for improvement.
Pujols’ individual exploits are likely to be the subject of many more profiles and books, even as writers already acknowledge that they are running out of ways to describe his metronomic excellence.
For those who want an earlier take, Bissinger’s book is worth the time.
Joe DiMaggio was a key figure in the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry that is continuing today.
The dog days of July have hit the Red Sox hard.
The BoSox have dropped straight to fall two games behind their arch-rivals with the $201 million lineup, the New York Yankees.
The Yankees seem to have gathered after a disappointing year last year in which they missed the playoffs for the first time in All-Star shortstop Derek Jeter’s career and after weathering the off-season revelations that Alex Rodriguez, despite his previous denials, did indeed use steroids.
This, of course, is not the first time these two ancient rivals have been locked in a tight contest for league or divisional supremacy. I wrote earlier this year about Bill Reynolds’ bookabout the one-day playoff between the Red Sox and Yankees in 1978-a game that ended with legendary left field Carl Yastrzemski popping up a Goose Gossage pitch to Graig Nettles.
The late David Halberstam wrote with intelligence, insight and clarity on an enormous range of topics-the 50s, the auto industry, civil rights and a New York firehouse are just some of his books’ subjects-and sports was a recurring passion for him.
And, within sports, while I never met the man, I have a sneaking suspicion that baseball held a special place in his heart.
The Summer of ’49is an elegantly written book about a pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox that took place 60 years ago this summer.
Key figures in the drama were an aging Joe DiMaggio, who was just two years away from retirement, and Ted Williams, a brash slugger who said the oft-repeated quote that all he wanted out of life was to walk down the street and have people say, “There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.”
Readers of Halberstam’s The Teammates, a slender book that chronicles Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky’s final trip to visit the ailing Williams, will see that he recycled some of the material from the Summer of ’49 in the later book. Both are well worth reading, though.
The DiMaggio that emerges in Halberstam’s book is brooding, aloof, often playing through pain and the consummate professional.
Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Ben Cramer paints a much darker picture in Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. Cramer shows a ruthless and ego-driven player who assiduously cultivated his image from his earliest days as a Yankee, beat Marilyn Monroe, and insisted on being introduced last at Yankee Stadium as the “greatest living Yankee.”
Unsurprisingly, this was not a recipe for lifelong friendships. One of the book’s most painful section is his description of DiMaggio’s final days, when ‘associate’ Morris Engelberg pushed the nearly dead superstar to sign baseballs to eke just that much more money out of him before he finally expired.
Venal, American icon, or both, DiMaggio is unquestionably a key figure in the historic rivalry which is having yet another incarnation this summer. Readers waiting until the September action heats up will enjoy these books.
Posted in Current Books
Tagged Alex Rodriguez, Bill Reynolds, Bobby Doerr, BoSox, Boston Red Sox, Carl Yastrzemski, David Halberstam, Derek Jeter, Dom DiMaggio, Goose Gossage, Graig Nettles, Joe DiMaggio, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, Johnny Pesky, New York Yankees, Red Sox, Richard Ben Cramer, Ted Williams, The Summer of '49, The Teammates
Richard Florida talks about the importance of place in this entertaining book.
Location, location, location.
This oft-invoked phrase is not just for real estate, according to Richard Florida.
Rather where you live is nearly as, if not more, important than what you do, and contributes significantly to your options and happiness.
Florida fleshes out and develops this idea in his new book, Who’s Your City?
It’s a lively, worthwhile and provocative read. Florida starts by talking about going on the Colbert Report and trying to parry host Stephen Colbert’s verbal thrusts about his previous book, The Rise of the Creative Class, before settling into his argument.
It’s an intriguing one. Florida looks at cities and regions in the U.S. and the world as a way to illustrate their importance and growing reach before making the point that one should think about where one plans to work at least as hard as what you do.
The reasons behind where one wants to stay may vary as one passes through different stages of life, and Florida includes a discussion and ratings of cities’ appeal during the years after graduating from college through to retirement.
He ends the book with a step-by-step discussion of the elements to consider when choosing a place to live.
Full of charts and accessibly written, this book is a keeper. I have not yet read his earlier work, which featured his finding that areas where gay folks and artists tend to live are the ones that tend to increase dramatically in value, but plan to do so soon.
