November Reading Log

It's a short log this month—thanks to a week in Waco with my family for a pair of conferences and the Thanksgiving holiday, a lot of the time I normally would have spent reading was instead spent with family. A trade-off I'll take any time. Nevertheless, I did some reading...take a look!

2 Articles I Like This Month

"Worshiping Screens in Our Temples of Consumption" by Joshua J. Whitfield, The Dallas Morning News. 4 minutes.

Much has been made of the rise of the "nones," i.e. the religiously unaffiliated. In this piece, Catholic priest Joshua Whitfield argues that this is not because of a lack of spiritual hunger, but because people are seeking meaning, community, and purpose online instead of in communities of faith. A stark, challenging read.

"This Tom Hanks Story Will Help You Feel Less Bad" by Taffy Brodesser, The New York Times. 23 minutes.

Most celebrity profiles are written with an eye for the extreme, to show that stars are not, in fact, just like us. This piece on Tom Hanks accomplishes that goal, but not by showing eccentricities or a lavish lifestyle—it simply illustrates for the reader that, in a town obsessed with image, Tom Hanks is a picture of sincerity.

BIG DATA BASEBALL: MATH, MIRACLES, AND THE END OF A 20-YEAR LOSING STREAK by Travis Sawchik

My timing could not have been worse in terms of when I chose to read this book, which chronicles how the 2013 Pittsburgh Pirates built a winning baseball team using previously unknown or underrated statistics and strategies. For one thing, the Pirates were arguably baseball's biggest mess last season, a last place team who only seemed to make headlines when they prompted a dugout-clearing brawl on the field (something which happened with absurd frequency given their pitchers' tendency to pitch inside.) For another thing, the stars of the book, manager Clint Hurdle and general manager Neal Huntington, were both fired this offseason (in fact, Huntington was fired the day before I started reading this book!) Nevertheless, this book was worth reading because it captured an important moment in time, the dawn of sabermetrics' universal acceptance by MLB's 30 teams.

The book opens with a meeting between Hurdle and Huntington, both of whom are on the hot seat after 20 straight seasons of the Pirates finishing below .500, including several under their watch. Hurdle and Huntington jointly agree to take the plunge into sabermetrics and use the season as a laboratory for strategies previously considered too radical for the big league level. By embracing on-field strategies like defensive shifting and pitch framing and mining proprietary "big data," the Pirates were able to turn a low-budget ball club into a playoff team.

If this all sounds like Moneyball II, that's exactly what it is, the story of an underdog team which used sabermetrics to overachieve. And just like Moneyball, there are some blind spots—Andrew McCutchen, who won the National League MVP in 2013, is barely mentioned. Nevertheless, it's a compelling story, one that author Travis Sawchik tells without getting too lost in the statistical weeds. If you like baseball and want to better understand how and why baseball front offices have started to seem like Silicon Valley startups, this book is a good place to turn.

THE JUNCTION BOYS: HOW TEN DAYS IN HELL WITH BEAR BRYANT FORGED A CHAMPIONSHIP TEAM by Jim Dent

I have a really hard time with this book. This is actually the second time I've read it, with the first coming in college. As the subtitle indicates, it's the story of how Bear Bryant, in his first year coaching at Texas A&M, put his team through a hellish training camp that saw only 38 players stick with the team by the end, and how those players served as the core of a team that would win the Southwest Conference Championship two years later. Jim Dent tells the story with Texas flair and respect for the old adage that "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Style is not my issue with Dent or his book.

My issue is that, in telling the story of Bryant's harsh training camp in Junction, Dent not only forgives but arguably glorifies coaching behavior that is nothing short of abusive. In Dent's telling, Bryant, who was obsessed with toughness, sought to weed out weaker players through fear, intimidation, and outright violence. Some of this can be waved off by saying "it was a different time": practices where players were denied water (even in 100+ degree heat), forcing players to play through minor injuries, etc. But to cite one infamous example, Dent tells a story about how Bryant, just to make a point, headbutted one of his players hard and repeatedly until he broke his nose. In another example, Bryant told his quarterback that if he refused to play despite broken vertebrae, he'd lose his spot on the roster. What are we supposed to admire about that?

In the book's second half, as the training camp in Junction draws to a close and Dent narrates the team's progression over the next two season, he makes clear that Bryant eventually came to regret his methods and mellowed. However, Bryant's repentance is limited to halfhearted apologies along the lines of "I probably should have treated y'all better," and nothing close to penance. What's more, every trace of disapproval Dent shows with Bryant is countered by testimonials from Bryant stalwarts who insist that his methods made them into the men they are today.

To sum it up, my issue with The Junction Boys, an unquestionable classic of sportswriting, is that it sends a message that winning permits any behavior, that the ends justify the means. I hear that enough these days on the news. I won't endorse it here.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA by Ernest Hemingway

Hard to explain what I thought of this one, an undisputed part of the American canon and winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize. Did I appreciate it? Yes. Did I enjoy it? That's where it gets more complicated.

The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an elderly fisherman beset by bad luck who sails out to sea determined not to return home until he has some success. Alone at sea, he comes upon a marlin of such size that is almost seems mythological; he spends days with his line in its mouth before he finally catches it and hauls it aboard his boat. However, the monstrous catch is not without complications, as he is attacked repeatedly by sharks on his way home due to all the blood from the fish. By the time he makes it home, little remains of his catch, but the journey serves as convincing proof that, despite his bout of lucklessness, he is still a man of the sea.

As I read the book, I had to admire Hemingway's craft. Essentially, this is a 140-page book about catching a fish, and yet Hemingway fills it with far more meaning than that, allowing the story to say a great deal about perseverance, pride, and manhood. Furthermore, Hemingway manages to tell the story with barely any dialogue; the vast majority of the story is a man vs. nature story, and the only voices in the narrative are the author's and the thoughts of the old man. Finally, Hemingway's prose is as advertised, matter-of-fact yet beautiful, never relying on flowery language when simplicity will do the job.

But did I enjoy the book? Look, it's a story about man catching a fish...that's a tough sell no matter how good the writing is. As much as I was able to appreciate Hemingway's craft, there were sections where reading it was a chore. Some books you love, others you merely appreciate. For me, this was the latter.

THE IMMORTAL HULK VOL. 1-3 by Al Ewing, Joe Bennett, Lee Garbett, et. al

Depending on who's writing him, the Hulk can be a lot of things: a primal beast, a source of comic relief, and a Jekyll-Hyde analogue, just to name the most popular examples. Sometimes his book is a a standard superhero book and sometimes it tries to do something more. In The Immortal Hulk, writer Al Ewing goes a route rarely traveled with the character, writing his stories as a horror book.

Ewing lays out the ground rules in the first issue. First, the Hulk is back after his latest 'death' in the Civil War II storyline, and Ewing establishes that the Hulk is in fact, as the title suggests, literally impossible to kill. Second, going back to a dynamic not used since the Hulk's first few appearances in 1962, Bruce Banner now becomes the Hulk at night and then transforms back at sunrise—"night belongs to the Hulk." Third, this Hulk is a "devil Hulk," a reasonably intelligent monster whose brutality comes not from mindless rage but from frightening purpose. Ewing, in other words, is not doing a book that uses the Hulk as a metaphor for anger—the traditional take on the book—but as a metaphor for our inner darkness.

As for the plot, we see the Hulk acting as both pursuer and pursued, acting as a dark vigilante even as is being chased by enemies with good intentions (Sasquatch, a Canadian Hulk knock-off) and bad (General Fortean and Gamma Base). The highlight comes when Hulk and Co. actually go to Hell, where he wages psychological warfare against his ultimate enemy, Bruce Banner's abusive father.

This is not a perfect book by any measure—Ewings scripts can be messy and Joe Bennett's art is a Mark Bagley-esque mixture of cartooning and realism that doesn't always fit the tone of the book. But The Immortal Hulk at least feels like a fresh, energized take on a character that has seemed stale in other people's hands. I really enjoyed breezing through these initial four volumes, any may well pick up the next few.

ESSENTIAL CAPTAIN AMERICA VOL. 6 by Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, Steve Gerber, Sal Buscema, Roger McKenzie, et al.

After diving into Jack Kirby's wacky, cult classic run on Cap in the 1970s with Essential Captain America Vol. 5, I couldn't resist completing the run, which continues into this volume. While the King never quite achieves the heights of the Madbomb storyline which began his run, the stories continue to be delightfully imaginative and absurd, utterly unlike anything else being produced at the time. As I said last month, even Kirby in twilight is better comics than 90% of what was being put out in the Bronze Age.

And that's proven by the second half of this Essential, which sees a return to middling, aimless Cap stories once Kirby leaves the title. The primary storyline is a manufactured one about Cap seeking out information about his past, before Steve Rogers received the Super-Soldier Serum. Apparently, though it had never been mentioned in the nearly 20 years of comics since Cap was discovered and revived by the Avengers, Steve has had amnesia about his pre-World War II life. So most of the issues here are about him leaving his partnership with the Falcon and his responsibilities with S.H.I.E.L.D. to go on a navel-gazing vision quest that ultimately pits him against a Nazi supervillain because, you know, comics. If it all sounds pretty self-indulgent and even a little boring, well, I can't disagree with you there.

These stories illustrate the surprising thing I've found after reading hundreds of Captain America comics—despite being my favorite Marvel superhero, his is a pretty difficult title to keep compelling on a month-to-month basis. Cap just works better in the context of a team, or at least a partnership, and when he's forced to fly solo the stories almost always veer into angsty melodrama or generic villain-of-the-week stories. The subtitle of the first Captain America movie—The First Avenger—speaks to the core of the character; he's almost always more interesting when leading a team than when going it alone. The post-Kirby material in this Essential proves it. Look for volume 7 next month, which sees the book move past the drudgery of the Bronze Age into the 1980s and the classic Roger Stern/John Byrne run. See you then!