So I read books for pleasure every night right before turning off my light (try it, it will help you to fall asleep faster) and at other random quiet periods during the days, and thought it would be enjoyable and good practice for me to keep a journal of summaries of the books I read. And I guess I should probably rate them also. We can go with a 7 star scale, with 1 being a book that was so bad I couldn’t finish it and 7 being one I absolutely adored. I am also a member of goodreads.com, so feel free to add me if for some reason you want more up-to-the-minute updates about my reading habits, but I hope that I will be able to give you at least a paragraph or two about each and every book I read. So let’s get this thing started.
street art behind Cortez
How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer
(Image to the left borrowed from amazon.com) Last week I finished this very enjoyable novel, and as I regularly played recreational soccer as a youth and still enjoy catching a match on the television today, soccer was an ideal vessel for lessons on globalization. If you do not already enjoy the real football, you probably should not read this. The book will probably bore you if the game on which it is based bores you. Other similarly seemingly obvious maxims on which you can base your behavior include If you don’t like crab, you probably won’t like lobster and Yes, a ferret really is just a big rodent. Anyways, on we go to my review of the book: In the book’s introduction, the author starts by telling the tale of how little soccer was televised in the United States back in the dark ages before the internet, and then parlays the internet’s power to connect different places in the world into globalization’s power to connect different clubs with exciting new players from different parts of the world. Foer is an American journalist by profession, so it is important to point out that this is a book written by an American for a primarily American audience. After a brief introduction, Foer shares ten distinct vignettes to prove that globalization has drastically changed soccer, and these make up the book proper. The vignettes cover myriad topics, from the Old Firm, or the rivalry between Celtic FC and the Glasgow Rangers in Scotland and how it mirrors the Scottish divide between Catholics and Protestants, to the Top Hats or Cartolas who manage Brazilian soccer teams and embezzle money away from the clubs.
I will provide a brief summaries of my favorite vignette. The first chapter that really resonated with me was How Soccer Explains the Jewish Question. The chapter describes a pre-Holocaust time when Jewish soccer clubs were considered elite teams. Yes, this does go against all the racist imaginings of the Jews as an intellectual, sickly people. One of these clubs was Hakoah, a club from Vienna who were dominant in the period directly before World War II. Hakoah was made up entirely of Jewish soccer players, with the coaches alone being Gentiles. This team was so good that in 1923 it is recorded as being the first continental club to defeat an English team on English soil when they defeated West Ham United. Foer gives as the reason for Jewish sporting excellence Max Nordau’s doctrine of Muskeljudentum, or muscular Judaism. At the time, Jews were required to live in dirty ghettos, and Nordau believed this lifestyle contributed to stereotypes of Jews as weak. So Nordau proposed that to combat these negative imaginings by the public Jews of his time needed to radically improve their athletic abilities, and thus arose muscular Judaism. And for a while, his doctrine was seemingly very effective. Out of 52 Olympic gold medals captured by Austria between 1896 and 1936, a full 18 were won by Jewish athletes. The proportion of Jewish gold medals to gold medals overall far outweighed the proportion of Jewish citizens to the Austrian population at large. The newfound Jewish athletic excellence would soon be abruptly halted when Hitler began his proposed elimination of these people. This little vignette got me thinking about what the Jewish people would look like now had an overwhelming majority of their best young people not been eradicated by a madman.
Rating: 4 stars
Murder at Fenway Park by Trey Soos
(Image to the left borrowed from amazon.com) The most recent book I finished was a short little novel called Murder at Fenway Park that Kathy gave to me a couple weeks ago. (Kathy is my beautiful, loving, amazing mother. Yes, I call my mother Kathy. And no, it is not weird.) Anyways, I was raised as a Boston Red Sox fan, so even though she knows I’m not much of one for murder mystery novels she figured I would get a kick out of this one. The book takes place in 1912, the year that Fenway Park was constructed. The oldest baseball stadium in America, Fenway gets its name from the fens in which it is situated, and I have spent many a pleasant afternoon meandering through these marches and the lovely gardens that suffuse the area in Boston around the ballpark-actually, it is due to an event that occurred while I was doing just this that I first declared my hatred of geese and all of goosekind; but that is a tale for another day. If you are at all a fan of the Sox, you will know that it wasn’t until 1918 that they sold Babe Ruth to the rival Yankees and kicked off the Curse of the Bambino, so the book takes place during the old golden years of the Red Sox when they were expected to challenge for the pennant every year. The main character-Mickey Rawlings-is a utility infielder, or a very useful player that doesn’t get much glamour, and he gets traded for in the middle of the season to help the Sox push for the pennant.
While exploring the magnificent new stadium of his new team, Mickey finds the body of a dead man and instantly becomes the top suspect. He figures the best way to clear his name is to solve the murder himself, so with the help of some woman who plays piano at a local bar he gets to work. He plays the game with famous characters such as Smokey Joe Wood and Ty Cobb, and there is plenty of intrigue as Mickey tries to balance between solving the mystery while still performing well enough on the field to keep his job. Even though the writing and character development was far from great, this was still a fun, quick read at about 240 pages that brought me back to memories of past trips to Boston.
