Greetings fellow readers. Just back from my last big trip of the year, this time to Slovenia (which I would enthusiastically recommend a trip combining Slovenia and Croatia, especially the Dalmatia coast on the Adriatic in your dream travel plans). 2 books to report on.
The first is a return to one of my current favs, Michael Connelly. This is my 3rd or 4th Connelly book. I seem to be working backwards in the Harry Bosch series. Seems Harry spent 25 years in the LAPD then retired for 3 years. This is the first week of his return to the police force. He has been assigned to the open-unsolved (i.e. Cold Case) unit. The first case is the 17 year old unsolved case of a half-black/white high school girl in Chatsworth. The clues lead around a west valley hate crime group, her family, HS friends, potential political pressure within the police force. The case takes an unusual turn during a stakeout that directs the investigation in an unexpected way that all comes together in a matter of what seems like minutes. Now I need to go back a book to see what caused Harry to leave the force. Might be easier if I read these in chronological rather than reverse order. But it works for me. Connelly remains in my power rotation.
The second was recommended to me during a meeting a had 2 weeks ago with the UNC women's soccer coach (as an aside, if you don't follow women's college soccer, which I'm sure you don't, Anson Dorrance is probably the most successful coach in NCAA history. I think his record is over .900 for the last 25 years, and has won the NCAA women's national championship something like 18 of 25 times. Sports Illustrated listed UNC women's soccer as one of the NCAA's top dynasty's in history, the only women's team so honored. Dean Smith used to say UNC wasn't a men's basketball factory, it was a women's soccer factory..but enough of that). Anson brought up Moneyball during the conversation, so I checked it out of the library.
The theme of Moneyball is just how do the Oakland A's, with one of baseball's lowest salary structures, manage to compete in baseball. The General Manager is Billy Beane, but the book, while it revolves around Beane, is not about Beane. it's about a new generation of baseball people and how they view the game, its ridiculous volume of statistics, and how it gets used to identify diamonds in the rough. The minutae of detail about baseball probably make it unreadable to anyone without knowledge of the game (FIFA David, I am guessing). You really need to know something about the game. There are some really fascinating chapters, like baseball draft day, picking up a free agent, signing an undervalued pitcher, trades and the sort of liar's poker that goes on when trading players back and forth, how they lost Jason Giambi to the Yankees and filled his production with a player being paid maybe 10% of what the Yankees paid for Giambi, and throughout is the finding, drafting, signing, and development of a player no one ever heard of into a front line big league player. A fascinating book if you like baseball.
East Coast Don
No comments:
Post a Comment