A great loss

Last night I was half-watching the Red Sox postgame show when I looked up and suddenly realized they weren’t talking about the game anymore—they were reporting that writer David Halberstam had been killed in a car accident in San Francisco. He was reportedly on his way to an interview for a book he was writing on the 1958 NFL championship game.

Halberstam is probably best known for his political and war reporting (he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting on the Vietman War), but I know him best for his books on baseball. “Summer of ’49” is an excellent reminder that the heat of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is not a recent, ESPN-fueled development. And I loved “The Teammates,” a book about the relationship between four Red Sox players from the ’40s and ’50s—Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio.

Halberstam was the master of the telling anecdote. One scene in particular from “The Teammates” stands out in my mind as a compelling illustration of Williams’ moody perfectionism: Williams berating his good friend Doerr for not slicing an orange in the proper way.

Whether he was writing about baseball or weightier topics like the United States’ involvment in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf, Halberstam was a master of his craft. It is our great loss that he will not be writing any more books.

Conservation of Apostrophes

When I started this blog, I promised to write about some of the books I have read earlier this year. I have been very delinquent in doing so, so here is an effort to catch up:

"Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss is manna for punctuation nazis like me. (The book's fantastic subtitle is "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.") If you are like me and shudder whenever you see a sentence like "The dog barked it's head off," you should read this book. The much-misunderstood apostrophe gets the most treatment, since evidence suggests that most people were asleep during the apostrophe lesson in their 5th-grade grammar class. My favorite tidbit from this book is Truss' "Law of Conservation of Apostrophes," which states that "For every apostrophe omitted from an it's, there is an extra one put into an its. Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our head against a wall."

Aficionados of other punctuation marks should not fear—the comma, dash, semicolon and other marks all get their fair share of attention too. The book even comes with a handy set of comma, apostrophe and period shaped stickers, so you can go around fixing other people's punctation mistakes. (Don't worry, I haven't actually used any of them.)

Patriot's Day

Ah, Patriot's Day: that holiday that is hardly known outside Massachusetts but is one of my favorite days of the year. It has all the ingredients of a perfect day - a Red Sox game (in the morning!), the world famous Boston Marathon, and gorgeous spring weather. Oh, wait a minute. Scratch that last part, at least for this year. Monday, April 16 found Boston in the last throes of a nor'easter, complete with 50 mph wind gusts and steady rain. The race went on, but for the first time in several years, I was not there to watch it in person (partly because of the weather and partly because I had to make a little trip to the doctor's - nothing serious, just a little conjunctivitis). So, I only got to watch it on TV. As always, I was amazed by the sheer number of people who are able to run such an incredible distance. If those 60-year-old duffers can run 26.2 miles, why can't I? Maybe someday....

But, as great an accomplishment as running a marathon is, it pales in comparison with some of the exploits I have been reading about in "Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner." Dean Karnazes, the author, one day had a premature mid-life crisis and realized that his yuppified, sedentary San Francisco existence needed a jolt. His answer? Run. As far as possible. This guy is hardcore. He starts with a 100-mile race up and down several mountains in California. Then, a 130-mile race through Death Valley. In the middle of the summer, of course. That race ends with a run up the highest mountain in the continental United States. Not challenging enough? How about a marathon run to the South Pole - approximate temperature -30 degrees Fahrenheit. I know what you are asking - why on Earth would any sane person do these things? Karnazes offers this answer:

"What kept me going? Easy. The adventure. The challenge of pushing the human body beyond reality ... I had something to prove, if only to myself: that it could be done, that nothing was impossible."

Almost as unbelievable as Karnazes' running exploits is the list of food he consumes during races. During one 199-mile race (which is normally run as a team relay), he consumed 28,000 calories, including eight Power bars, an entire cheesecake, three burritos, five chocolate chip cookies, and the list goes on and on. Crazy!

You are what you read

I almost never read poetry, but I couldn't resist taking this Internet quiz, "What Poetry Form Am I?" (April is National Poetry Month, after all.) It turns out that I am a heroic couplet:

I am heroic couplets; most precise
And fond of order. Planned and structured. Nice.
I know, of course, just what I want; I know,
As well, what I will do to make it so.
This doesn't mean that I attempt to shun
Excitement, entertainment, pleasure, fun;
But they must keep their place, like all the rest;
They might be good, but ordered life is best.


Pretty accurate for a personality quiz that only has 10 questions. Check it out - maybe you will turn out to be a limerick! Or a terza rima (whatever that is!).

The book is always better....

Well, that's not always true. Sometimes the movie is as good as the book. Last weekend I saw "The Namesake," based on the incredible book by Jhumpa Lahiri. Once I got over the hilarity of seeing the guy who played Kumar in "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" in a serious role, I really enjoyed the movie. Kal Penn was actually very good, but Tabu, the Indian actress/singer who played his mother, was the heart of the movie. You could sense just by looking at her the anguish she felt over being torn between two countries, neither one of them really being home. One minor quibble is that the setting of the movie was changed from Cambridge to New York, but it seemed to work. I had forgotten how much the book made me cry, and the movie did too. Kind of embarassing ;) (Let me note for the record that I almost NEVER cry over books - the only other one in recent memory is "The Time Traveler's Wife." If you haven't read it, do so immediately.)

I also recently saw "The Devil Wears Prada," which was definitely not as good as the book. Meryl Streep was fantastic though. Apparently the movie producers decided to give her character some glimmer of a human soul, unlike the book version of Miranda, who was purely evil. I didn't really like Anne Hathaway as the main character - she seemed much shallower than the book character. I also hated both her boyfriend and the suave writer who kept chasing her around, so I really didn't care which one she ended up with. (I won't give it away, but you can probably guess.)

"The Dead Beat"

After all that angst, I decided to just let go of "Wickett's Remedy." I felt guilty for at least 10 minutes, but I have moved on. Now I'm reading "The Dead Beat," by Marilyn Johnson, which I picked up at the Harvard Book Store after hearing the author speak there. It's a book about..... obituaries! I know, you are wondering why on Earth anyone would want to read (or write) such a book. It turns out that there is quite a cult-ish group of people who zealously read obituaries, and after reading this book, I've become convinced that some of the best writing in journalism can be found on the obit page (depending on the newspaper, anyway). I have written more than my share of obits, but never one with a lede as spectacular as this, which Johnson quotes from the New York Times:

"Selma Koch, a Manhattan store owner who earned a national reputation by helping women find the right bra size, mostly through a discerning glance and never with a tape measure, died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 95 and a 34B."

That's just one of the quirky tidbits scattered through this book. There's also a hilarious description of a convention of obituary writers and the frenzy that broke out when Ronald Reagan died on the last day of the convention. The chapter I'm on now describes the obituary obsession among London newspapers, who take a no-holds-barred, get-the-skeletons-out-of-the-closet approach to memorializing the dearly departed. The author includes a particularly amusing translation of some of the euphemisms often used in those papers - i.e., "tireless raconteur" = "crashing bore," and "affable and hospitable at every hour" = "chronic alcoholic," etc.

You might think that a book about obituaries would be hugely depressing, but this one has actually caused me to laugh out loud on the train (or at least crack a smile).