Reading is about quality, not quantity...but this month I managed to pull off both! This is a long one, folks...buckle up and take a look!
2 Articles I Like This Month
"Baseball's Mental Health Reckoning" by Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated. 15 minutes.
Playing professional baseball is inherently stressful, given the public pressure, travel schedule, and high stakes. Add COVID-19 and a national racial reckoning on top of that, and an alarming number of players have already decided this year that enough's enough and have walked away from the game.
"Who's Responsible for the Texas Blackouts?" by Christopher Hooks, Texas Monthly. 12 minutes.
In the wake of February's power outages, Texans were hopping mad and looking to learn who was responsible. Was it ERCOT? The PUC? Ted "Cancun" Cruz? Ultimately, according to Christopher Hooks, the buck stops with the state's most powerful politicians, the men and women who appoint the overseers of our electricity grid. And if history is any judge, they will continue to take credit for the grid's successes and pass the buck when it fails.
Reading Through the Fantastic Four- #46-74, Annuals 4 and 5
Too much to adequately cover here, but suffice it to say that the issues I read this month are among the best and most consequential in the 60-year history of the FF. It began with a bang: the introduction of the Inhumans, a family of mysterious, superpowered beings living in a Great Refuge in the Himalayas. Immediately after that, the FF met the mighty Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, and his herald, the Silver Surfer (these three issues are often considered the high point of Marvel's Silver Age). While Galactus was defeated, the Surfer was bound to Earth after betraying his master to save humanity—an exile which allowed the villainous Doctor Doom to steal his powers and embark upon a reign of terror that only his own ego could bring to an end. And lest you think the cosmic goodness ends there, Stan and Jack follow those adventures with the introductions of both the Kree (including Ronan the Accuser) and the enigmatic Him (later to be known as Adam Warlock).
That's not all, of course. There's the introduction of the Negative Zone, a dimension made up of anti-matter, and one of its most dangerous residents, Blastaar the Living Bomb-Burst. There's the romance of the Human Torch and Crystal, an Inhuman who was separated from him for weeks when Maximus the Mad established a seemingly unbreakable barrier around the Great Refuge. And there's the announcement that Reed and Sue are going to have a baby, bringing a new dynamic to Marvel's First Family.
And it's all presented with Stan Lee's customary mix of bombast and humor and with Jack Kirby providing what is, in my opinion, the best art of his career, aided by the stellar inker Joe Sinnott. Every issue this month was an absolute delight. Excelsior!
BREAKOUT CHURCHES: DISCOVER HOW TO MAKE THE LEAP by Thom S. Rainer
What does it take for a good church to become great, for stability to give way to excitement and steady erosion to become a tidal wave of success? Breakout Churches seeks to answer that question through a study of thirteen churches, all of whom saw their attendance, conversions, and attitude explode after a long period of plateau. None of these churches did so by changing pastors, nor by turning everything upside down and starting from scratch. Rather, these transformations were the result of Christlike, intentional, bold leadership.
The genesis of Thom Rainer's study was a popular business book, Good to Great by Jim Collins, which explained what it took for mediocre businesses to reach the next level. Recognizing that the church could apply some of Collins' lessons but not all of them, Rainer sought to determine what ingredients "breakout churches" had. After surveying thousands of churches, thirteen fit the criteria Rainer and his team were looking for (a testament to both the specificity of their task and the declining state of the church in America.)
For those who have read other Rainer books, his findings will sound familiar. Churches needed humble leaders who were willing to set a vision and stick to it, but not so stubborn that they drove their churches places they weren't ready to go. Churches needed to be outwardly focused instead of inwardly focused, thinking about the community more than their own needs and preferences. And churches needed to be on the same page, able to articulate their vision and commit to it.
While the overall points aren't anything new to this Rainer reader, this is probably my favorite of his books that I've read so far, both because he is able to point to case studies instead of speaking in generalities and because the book's longer length allows more room for detail. His shorter books, while breezier reads, can feel like expanded pamphlets—this one demands to be taken more seriously. For pastors who share my general skepticism about church growth books, this one is worth checking out—it has the data, the theology, and the common sense you're looking for without the off-putting salesmanship.
THIS OLD MAN: ALL IN PIECES by Roger Angell
Roger Angell is the dean of baseball writers, considered almost universally to be the greatest living chronicler of the sport. How remarkable then that Angell, 99 years old at the time of this writing, has never been a full-time baseball writer, serving rather as the fiction editor for the New Yorker for decades and contributing a variety of pieces (including and especially his baseball essays) regularly to the magazine. This Old Man is a collection, likely the final one in his lifetime, of pieces from the late 2000s.
Not surprisingly, the baseball writings are the best, glittering with Angell's intelligent but still down-to-earth prose. Whether he is memorializing departed legends (something he has to do a lot given his own age) or wittily summarizing the latest World Series, these brief essays show that the master's still got it, that even in twilight he has retained his love for the game and his capacity to convey that love in language.
Other essays deal primarily with two things: his life an upper West Side New York intellectual and his career and famous friends at the New Yorker. While not unenjoyable, these pieces are pretty provincial, the kind of stuff I almost always skip when I'm reading my weekly issue of the magazine. Nevertheless, when he talks about some of his contemporaries, from John Updike to his stepfather E.B. White, there is a certain fun in getting a look behind the curtain.
This Old Man is a collection primarily for Angell completists and New Yorker fans; it's not something I'd loan to just anybody. But I had enough connection to the author that I enjoyed it. Nevertheless, my next Angell collection will be strictly about baseball.
MY LOSING SEASON by Pat Conroy
You can learn more from losing than from winning. That's the premise at the heart of Pat Conroy's memoir, My Losing Season, which tells the story of his high school and college basketball career, specifically his senior season at the Citadel, a military university in South Carolina. While most sports memoirs take you on a journey to the championship game, My Losing Season is a voyage of mediocrity, of Conroy's attempts to endure the harsh environment of his school and the disappointments of a failing coach and an underachieving team.
The star of the book, as so often seems to be the case in Conroy's stories, is the Citadel itself, a merciless system which seeks to instill discipline and conformity into its cadets at all costs. In numerous books, Conroy exposed the school's flaws even while declaring his love for it, and this book is no exception to that pattern. Set side by side with the Citadel in that regard is Conroy's father, an abusive tyrant of a man who the author made infamous in his thinly veiled fictional memoir, The Great Santini. Though the elder Conroy was not living with Pat during the year this book chronicles, his presence is deeply felt, and no chapter goes by without him playing a role.
Secondary to the abuses of the school and the father are Conroy's relationships with his teammates and his enigmatic, hard-to-please coach. Conroy does a good job of spelling out their motivations and idiosyncrasies, and by the end of the year you have a good feel for what the team's makeup was like, both on the court and in the locker room. As for the action on the court, there is probably too much for those who don't care about basketball and too little for those who picked this book up thinking it was about sports—a good sign, in my opinion, that Conroy struck a good balance.
Ultimately, the book isn't really about sports (the best sports books rarely are), nor about victory (since the team rarely won.) Rather, it's about how Conroy grew into a man at the Citadel—and not the kind of man the Citadel wanted him to become—and how his experiences with his team shaped him. Told in Conroy's familiar lyrical style, it's a delightful read, worth picking up for any of the writer's fans.
THE CONQUERING SWORD OF CONAN by Robert E. Howard
If you've read my previous two entries, you know what to expect from this third and final collection of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. In tale after tale, Conan is thrust into trouble, usually thanks to the machination of an evil sorcerer. Conan befriends an attractive woman and gets deeper into trouble. Ultimately he rescues the damsel and slays the monster by the strength of his arm and the slash of his sword. Some of these stories are more beloved than others, most notably the final story, "Red Nails," which feels like a primer for all sword-and-sorcery books, featuring all the sorcery, sex, and monsters the genre promises. But truthfully they're all pretty similar, something Howard himself was conscious of by the time of his self-inflicted death in 1936.
One thing that left a bad taste in my mouth while reading this book was the racism which gets pointed at both African-Americans and Native Americans. In "The Man-Eaters of Zamboula" he depicts a tribe of black men as savage cannibals; in multiple stories the fictional Picts are thinly disguised Native Americans and portrayed similarly as savage, unthinking brutes. Howard was a white man from Mission, Texas writing in the early 1920s, so I don't expect him to have 21st century values. Nevertheless, his presentation of Conan as the "great white hope taming the savages" was a tough pill to swallow in several stories and distracted me from the otherwise fantastical tales.
To be honest, after three months I'm kind of glad to be done with these stories. While crucial in the development of the sword-and-sorcery genre (indeed, arguably the forerunner of that genre), Howard's Conan tales had started feeling pretty laborious and redundant by the time I finished this third and final collection of his stories. My next encounter with the character will be in comics (there's an Essential Conan the Barbarian that I eventually need to get around to), and I'll be curious to see whether or not I prefer him in that medium rather than in Howard's prose.
CHARLOTTE'S WEB by E.B. White
Andrew and I read this one together, one chapter per night, in the month of April. I wanted his first chapter book to be a special one, and Charlotte's Web certainly qualifies as special. It's a classic for a reason, folks.
If you need a refresher, Charlotte's Web tells the story of Wilbur, a meek little barnyard pig, and his friendship with Charlotte, a spider who lives in the barn's doorway. Fearing that Wilbur will be slaughtered by the farmer, Charlotte sets about weaving messages in her web, labeling Wilbur "SOME PIG," "TERRIFIC," "RADIANT," and "HUMBLE." Her plan works, as Wilbur becomes famous around the region and beloved by his owners. But as the story draws to its conclusion, Charlotte's life comes to an end, leaving Wilbur with her newly hatched children to carry on her legacy and be his friend.
E.B. White (who, incidentally, was the aforementioned Roger Angell's stepfather) is a master children's storyteller, writing in a simple but elegant style that is understandable for children but never dumbs things down for them. I was particularly impressed by his willingness to "go there" when it came to the facts of life around the farm: when we meet Charlotte, she explains to us how she traps bugs and sucks their blood for food; Wilbur's number one fear is being killed by the farmer. White doesn't hide the truth from the kids reading Charlotte's Web, he trusts them with it.
It's that commitment to the truth, to both the good and the bad of friendship, maturity, and love, that have made Charlotte's Web so beloved since its publication in 1952. I'll leave you with this gorgeous paragraph from the penultimate chapter:
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Yes, I cried when I read it aloud to Andrew. How could I not?
ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS VOL. 7 by J.M. DeMatteis, Peter Gillis, Don Perlin, Alan Kupperberg, et al.
Sometimes series end with a whimper instead of a bang. For The Defenders (rechristened The New Defenders at the end of vol. 6), that was certainly the case. In a book that felt more like an X-Men spinoff than anything (owing to the presence of Beast, Iceman, and Angel, all original members of the merry mutant team), the identity that had been carved out over 100+ issues was cast aside in favor of more conventional stories. As a result, the book faded into the background of the Marvel Universe and was cancelled after its 152nd issue. This volume doesn't make it that far, ending after #139, but I'm confident I didn't miss much.
The primary running plot in these issues is distrust among the team's members, which makes sense—half of the members are leftovers from the previous Defenders roster, while the other half are buddies from the X-Men. However, rather than setting up a Civil War-style split, the mistrust is primarily directed at one member of the team, Moondragon, a telepath whose incredible power and prickly personality have always made her a difficult teammate to tolerate. This is complicated by the attraction felt by both Angel and Iceman for her.
Sounds interesting, right? Yeah, you'd think so. But the love triangle angle is dropped without explanation, and Moondragon is never made sympathetic enough to make the reader care about her teammates' suspicion—instead of wanting to see her redeemed in their eyes, you kind of wish they'd just kick her off the team and be done with it.
Beyond that, it's pretty standard superhero fare, heroes vs. villains with the occasional guest star. A fine way to kill 15 minutes, but nothing worth remembering.
Also included in this volume are two miniseries, The Beauty and the Beast and Iceman. The former sees Beast team up with Dazzler for a four-issue story in which they fall in love and fight off a gladiatorial villain. The latter, which I preferred, has Iceman proving himself as a hero to his hometown, including his parents. Both miniseries are fine, and in some ways actually superior to the Defenders comics found in the rest of the volume, but they're far from essential, and I'd rather they have been excluded so that the book could have made it all the way to the final issue #152.
With that, my journey with America's favorite non-team comes to its conclusion. The Defenders was never Marvel's best product, but in its prime it was the kind of kooky fun that epitomized Bronze Age Marvel. Never a threat to win any critics' awards, it was nevertheless good for a smile.
SUPERMAN: KRYPTONITE by Darwyn Cooke and Tim Sale
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