Today's Reviews

Winning in Baseball and Business by Earl Bell

Review: This is a soup-to-nuts book on how to run a business. Bell has taken anecdotes from his work with a Little League baseball team, added some business biographies, and provided a slim volume that is aimed at business leaders and entrepreneurs. The business advice was relatively innocuous, the same as I've read in quite a few books, maybe a bit better broken down into bite sized chunks. The baseball-related content was unfortunately underwhelming. When he talks about "Little League principles" in the subtitle of the book, he's not talking about playing, he's talking about organizing
and coaching. This is a very small part of the book, and the organization aspects are similar to those dealt with by any local membership organization (I'm thinking of the local history museum). Bell also talks about his family's baseball experiences, which were interesting in a family story kind of way, but also very brief. The business biographies he includes are a combination of well know folks (think Bill Gates and Andrew Carnegie-types) and kid entrepreneurs. This is a strange combination unless used motivationally, and that's how Bell uses them. I think Bell missed a chance to dive deeper into his Little League experience to pull more examples from, and to provide guidance on more specific business issues. These tacts would have made the book more interesting from both the baseball fan perspective and the business book reader perspective. As a workbook on how to think about your small business or start-up, this is perfectly adequate. Available on
Hoopla.

The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams

Review:   In my experience, telling a partisan story with some subtleness is powerful. Telling the same story with gratuitous and repetitive side stories to re-illustrate your point but that really add nothing to the narrative, well,
that’s when a reader feels he’s being preached to. This book turned preachy early on, and stayed that way throughout with constant reminders of the ill treatment of animals being tested in the name of science. Animal testing is the raison d'etre of this book. And the author is firmly against.
 

As for the story, it’s an interesting romp. My first thought was it was like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” with talking dogs, although it strayed quite a bit from that by the end. Adams made a world where the animals talk and have their own folklore about how they fit in the world, and share some human foibles, like seeing ghosts and making up songs. His
world-making with animals as the stars is enjoyable – it’s obvious Adams can see himself in his protagonists. One of the protagonists has been mentally mutilated in an experiment, and his strange view of the world, while just odd in the beginning, does get a bit excessive by the end. The humans in the story, and there are a lot, are a mixed bunch, a few played over the top. The author is also a character, or at least he is mentioned by name and by role. Overall the story was OK and the action really pulled you along, but the ending was not up to the level of the beginning. Too many strange
occurrences at the end to tie things together and leave an undeserved ending.

I listened to this on audio, and one of the animal characters, not a dog, speaks in a brogue such that I could only understand every third word or so. I am not sure if this was how it was written, or just how it was performed. From the dog’s point of view this animal spoke in a barely intelligible way, so this fit in well with the story, but the effort to try to understand it didn’t add to my enjoyment of the book. It might be worth looking at the book to see how that character’s patter is written, and if it is easily understandable there – read the book instead of the audio.  Audio available
in Hoopla.

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

Review: There were two things that kept this from being a five star book for me. One was the focus on the author in the beginning of the book – too much autobiography of a Brooklyn kid growing up and having characters as relatives and friends, and becoming a journalist (more characters involved here as well). This entire section I didn’t expect – who knew “The Boys of Summer” referred to sports writers? I think I might have enjoyed it more as a stand-alone book – life of a sports writer in and out of sports, filed with Journalism in the library. Second was the way the player’s stories were told. The stories of the players, highlights from their prime seasons followed with their how they lived when they were tracked down after a few decades, are excellent – humorous, full of pathos. But there have been so many books written in the same way focusing on single players (“The Last Boy” or “Sandy Kofax”), or even teams (“The Teammates”) that this
will get lost in my memory. So it’s not really a weakness in the book when it was written, but in how it stands up over time. A success is copied, and the copies wear away at the success. Nevertheless, an excellent book showing time marches on and heroes are forgotten, but also showing the unexpected staying power of being on a close-knit team.

Duplex by Kathryn Davis

Review: Ah, a nice short book the library has in science fiction. Good. And the cover description doesn’t actually describe much. Intriguing. And it won lots of awards and made lots of lists. Sounds like it’s worth a try. What I forget is that when these things all happen at the same time, the book tends to be more of a chore than I expect. This one was a chore to read. The writing – the sentences -- were beautiful. Even some of the paragraphs. Putting things together longer than a paragraph was were the difficulties came in, because it was written like a dream. Things didn’t happen in the ways you would expect in this world. And yet on reflection there are many things that happen that are “remixes” of mythology and archetypes. The power in town is known as a sorcerer, although you don’t see much magic. Some of the neighbors are robots, like people but they know the future and can portend if they feel like it as they try to become more human. Babies
come not from storks but from stuffed animals, or for the robots through mechanical accessories. And death involves, in one case, crossing a river (like Styx) and ending up in a hotel you cannot leave (like the Eagle’s Hotel California). A few times in the book the author’s characters talk about their own myth stories, like the "Rain of Beads" - when the robots
tried to become human with disastrous results. These come across as surreal but understandable in this universe. This is one of those books that I will be thinking about for quite some time.