OS Book Club Pt II

[mattlanta]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I made this thread in the baseball forum a few years ago and it's got some recommendations:

https://forums.operationsports.com/f...all-books.html

I can vouch for The Game by Tom Tango if you haven't read it. Moneyball obviously. Brian Kenny put out a book last year I think, he's a big advanced stats guy. Ben Lindgbergh and Sam Miller wrote a book about their taking an independent league team and trying to run it sabermetrically. It's been on my list forever, but I haven't gotten to it yet, I want to do some baseball stuff soon. I think Money99 has read it. It's called The Only Rule is It Has to Work.

Did you mean the Book by Tom Tango?


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[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Yeah I did.

[mattlanta]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Yeah I did.

Ah, okay. I actually tried to read this a few days ago but decided to return it to the Kindle store (I didn't even know that was such a thing!) Smart Baseball by Keith Law pretty much goes over all the stats that Tom Tango goes over in his book, but I much prefer KLaw's writing style over Tango's. Highly recommended if you're looking to read into baseball's sabermetrics.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. Du Bois

This has to be one of the most essential pieces to comprehending American History and sociology. Written in the aftermath of the big-bang that was the Civil War and Emancipation Du Bois covers the resulting period up through the beginning of the 20th Century. He begins the book by looking forward to the 20th Century and envisions a country that will be forced to reckon with the problem of the color line. Establishing this problem he traces sociology and history of the country from Reconstruction through it's resulting failure and describes the fallout of suddenly freedmen with no system for freedom, upward mobility, or economic stability.

His chapter on Reconstruction outdoes the cumulative knowledge I had gathered from public school and college and does so fairly easily. He does not touch on the corruption other than the passing, slow drag and double tap of a finger on a singular point. He keenly traces the quagmire of dealing with a population who are suddenly free from the beginning and end of the Freedmen's Bureau and it's restrictions via bureaucracy, unknowing how to handle the situation, and the lack of motivation to do so.

From there he draws a line through the Black Belt and it's tenant farming practices with little economic stability or freedom as the cotton industry falls in steep decline combined with the predatory practices of land and store owners. Not to mention the hostility of the white peers in their communities.

Du Bois weaves an eloquent thread of an important part of our history that is largely ignored much less understood. A group of people thrust into freedom in a country with no interest in taking care of them or building them up to equal status after using their bodies and bones to set it's foundations atop. There's little bias in his writing as he deftly balances opposing sides with the interest of a researcher. Cumulatively you can feel his impatience at waiting and his frustration for struggling. His understanding of his feelings and ability to address these via his sociological eloquence is nothing short of brilliant.

Spoiler

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn't bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, - this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society.

The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.

America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.

Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.

What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?

[aukevin]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I just finished listening to Ready Player One. Wil Wheaton did a good job reading it. Really loved it, I hope the movie next month does it justice. I got a lot of the references in the book but I was about 3 years behind what the author thought was cool. My first game system was an Atari 2600 so I played some of the same games mentioned in the book but my big introduction into the gaming world was with the NES which is hardly mentioned in the book. But movie-wise, the ones mentioned in the book are the ones I remember growing up with.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Kindred by Octavia Butler

I read Bloodchild last year, I picked this up because I don't know of a lot of other black sci-fi writers and because the premise sounded really interesting. It lived up to the hype.

Dana, a black woman in 1976 is transported back in time, at first to 1815 or somewhere around there, to save the life of the white ancestor (slaveowner, though at first just a child) who would go on to start her family. There's not a ton of spoilers there, the part that moves the book is how she deals with the trials she faces as she fades in and out of the past and present, spending months in the past and returning to find that only hours had passed.

Quantum Break was the first time travel story I ever really experienced, and they did something with one of their characters I thought was really cool, so I hoped it would happen in this, and it did. There are some really cool dilemmas to be addressed with time travel and the passage of time, and they're touched on here. It almost makes me want to get into a really epic time travel story. The way the out of time protagonist has to deal with the other slaves, and her masters/ancestors, was told extremely well. Its also in the first person so you get the first hand thoughts and experiences of Dana as she wrestles with saving the life of someone she should and does manage to hate on the surface but loves on a much deeper level, which as I realize it now is a feeling that the author understood quite well and I think many of us do.

Spoiler

"The boy was literally growing up as I watched - growing up because I watched and because I helped to keep him safe. I was the worst possible guardian for him - a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children."

"And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted so easily into this time. We weren't really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting."

"She went to him. She adjusted, she became a quieter more subdued person. She didn't kill, but she seemed to die a little."

"My back had already begun to ache dully, and I felt dully ashamed. Slavery was a long process of dulling."

On go Toni Morrison and Playing in the Dark.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison

I was listening to a podcast last week with some NY Times writers and Ta-Nehisi Coates about Black Panther. One of the writers mentioned how it was almost magical realism to see a world so untouched by other races and kept in place. I don't remember if Coates asked or was asked but the question was asked is it even possible to separate the identities, do black people (in America) have an identity completely separated from white people? He said no.

Toni Morrison, in this book, turns the question on its head. She asks, when the early Patriots and American writers extolled the virtues of freedom, what example were they measuring against to show it? Basically, the argument is that in venerating freedom and holding it as the end all be all while also holding in contempt the ways of the old world (and not wanting to be associated with it) the new American identity was developed in contrast not to the old European one, but to the new enslaved African one (which she calls Africanist). The hierarchy of the country determined partially by race, the symbols of light and dark began to take on a whole new meaning in romantic literature. The Africanist persona was imbued with all of the qualities of darkness, and the new American identity formed in opposition to it. It's not a long read, but it's an interesting one. If I had to try to summarize it in one sentence, it would basically be that she's trying to show how the qualities of darkness helped to fictionalize a part of the population that couldn't speak for themselves and tell their own reality, and how those fictitious creations can be traced to teach us more about the person who created them.

Spoiler

"As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this."

"The world does not become faceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial at. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand."

"My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served."

On to Arrow of God, and finishing the Achebe trilogy. And then, finally...Native Son.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

There's a quote from Coates' Between the World and Me that's been seared into my mind.

The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean.

As I've read books since then it pops up when reading relevant literature. Paying attention to the diction writer's use, particularly in dialogue between characters of different races, adds more depth to the quote every time.

I'm currently reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Characters calling the protagonist "boy" rather than sir or mister brings Coates' quote to the forefront as I'm reading. It isn't a matter of trying to reconcile "all men are created equal," but to question who exactly are "men." The characters don't see the protagonist as a man much less as a human being of equal standing. I don't want to **** on the founding fathers, but I would be hard pressed to rush to their defense that they had anybody but themselves and their equal-standing peers in mind when they talked about all men.

[Chip Douglass]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finished Richard J. Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich yesterday. Probably the definitive single-volume account of Hitler's rise to power.

The money quote from Franz von Papen, the man who bore more responsibility than anyone for Hitler being appointed Chancellor: "Within two months, we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak."

Whoops.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I don't want to **** on the founding fathers, but I would be hard pressed to rush to their defense that they had anybody but themselves and their equal-standing peers in mind when they talked about all men.

Hardly ****ting on them, I would think this to be a pretty open and shut case given most of them owned people lol.

In all seriousness, it's a weird thing. There's a lot of deep dives into the meaning of those 5 words. It's interesting to say the least.

Side note, I just found out HBO made a miniseries on John Adams in 2008 based on a biography written in 2001. I'm gonna have to get into that.

[WaitTilNextYear]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finished The Arm by Jeff Passan. A pretty quick read. It reads more like several long-form internet articles stitched together, which is not surprising given Passan's background as a Yahoo! baseball columnist.

Worthwhile to grab for the snippets on the history/status of Tommy John surgery as well as the deep dives into the careers of pitchers Todd Coffey and Daniel Hudson. Cubs fans will also like the "insider" info chapter on Theo Epstein and how the Cubs snagged Jon Lester.

[Money99]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants, and Stars: True Tales of Breaking Barriers, Umpiring Baseball Legends, and Wild Adventures in the Negro Leagues by Bob Motley

Baseball is life. Baseball history is American history, for better or worse.

This is the life story of a man who dreamt of becoming a major league umpire. He originally wanted to play, but after a Negro League team came into his hometown and basically let him try out on the spot and he embarrassed himself, he changed his sights. He fights in a segregated regiment in WW2, comes back to umpire in the Negro Leagues, tries to get into umpire school (can't for years because of his race), then finally gets in and graduates from umpire school at the top of his class only to be told he can't work in the league because of his race.

Where the story shines for me is when he's telling tales directly from his time in the Negro Leagues. To have seen players like Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Ernie Banks before they became who we know them as just sounds incredible. The idea that we could've missed out on Willie Mays because of racism is insane. How good was Satchel Paige in his prime if he came into the majors at 41 and pitched to a 165 ERA+? How many homers would Josh Gibson have hit?

The thing that stood out to me is the joy and showmanship he describes as having been key to the Negro Leagues success, and it's importance to the community. It became clearer to me why I've been falling further and further away from baseball and more towards basketball. Maybe I need to start watching Winter League games, seems like they're more in tune to the spirit I want to see. Baseball being fun, and people being allowed to have fun within it, seem foreign to me. Hearing that pastors would have to hurry up their sermons to let everyone out and that towns would close down their shops to go to the game, it was like football is to certain towns now. Finding out the Negro League all star games were often outdrawing MLB all star games was cool. I'll add quotes later.

Next up is Kindred. I want to find books about Willie Mays and Buck O'Neil now as well, along with a more comprehensive history of the Negro Leagues. I'll save that for later.

Sounds like a very interesting book.
I've always had interest in the Negro Leagies so this sounds right up my alley.

I've read 'The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America' and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Mr. O'Neil sounds like he was an amazing human being. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

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[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Hardly ****ting on them, I would think this to be a pretty open and shut case given most of them owned people lol.

In all seriousness, it's a weird thing. There's a lot of deep dives into the meaning of those 5 words. It's interesting to say the least.

You'd think. Then again there are people who will bend over backwards to rationalize the motivations of Confederates in support of memorializing and worshipping them.

Side note, I just found out HBO made a miniseries on John Adams in 2008 based on a biography written in 2001. I'm gonna have to get into that.

We started watching this on vacation last year, but never finished it. From what I saw it was a very good show.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Shelving Arrow of God for now, going to Native Son. Had a very busy weekend, now my reading schedule is off. Hopefully I can catch back up soon enough.

[Chip Douglass]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

Very readable account of life in Stalin's encourage from the death of Stalin's second wife in 1932 to Stalin's own death in 1953. Weaving together interviews with surviving family members, memoirs of the key players, and Soviet archival documents, it almost reads like a novel at times.

This is a book about personalities rather than ideas or events. If you're looking for a detailed explanation of how Soviet agricultural policy contributed to the Ukrainian Holodomor, for example, you'll have to read elsewhere; there's more discussion of Svetlana Stalin's sex life than the Holodomor. Page after page is dedicated to stories of palace intrigue, sexual escapades, drinking sessions, and oafish horseplay. It's a good snapshot of “life in Stalin's court”, even if it came across as a bit tabloidy at times. As a character study of Stalin and the key personalities in his regime, though, it's priceless. The book is replete with anecdotes of Stalin and his henchmen's casual cruelty, like the time Stalin sent an air force officer to the Gulag when the officer had the temerity to criticize him for the air force's sub-par planes (“You shouldn't have said that...You shouldn't have said that...”, Stalin whispered to the pilot), or the NKVD chief Beria cruising the streets of Moscow with his bodyguards looking for women to prey on.

The first 200 or so pages were a slow burn (for me, at least) before Montefiore dives into Stalin's role in the Great Purge and the war, which is where things really get interesting. The scope of the purges was truly terrifying: other than Stalin himself and his immediate kin, no one was safe. I lost count of the number of friends, family members, and close associates of Stalin that got caught up in them. Stalin didn't ease up on the repression when the German invasion came, either. Of all the grizzly and macabre statistics in the book, two stand out to me: 994,000 and 157,000, the number of Soviet soldiers imprisoned and executed, respectively, during 1941 and 1942. The Soviet Union was in a life-and-death struggle against a powerful enemy committed to its extinction, yet Stalin saw it fit to execute 15 divisions' worth of troops during the war's most critical period. The brutality and incompetence represented in those numbers is staggering.

Overall, I think the book does a superb job giving the reader an intimate portrait of Stalin and his inner circle, and showing how their brutality was imprinted on Soviet government and society, but large parts of the book were a drag for me as Montefiore stocked the book with details more befitting a tabloid than a serious historical biography. I'd still recommend the book to history buffs, though.