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Book Claims Louisville Provided Basketball Players And Recruits With Escorts
Pat Forde at Yahoo Sports has gotten his hands on a copy of a book written by self-described madame Katina Powell and journalist Dick Cady. The book, which has not yet been published, is called Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen, and is all about Powell’s alleged involvement in...
<i>Purity </i>Went To Communist East Germany And Found Itself
We’ll move further along in Purity in just a moment. First, I want to relay the story of what happened the first time I opened the book up after the last dispatch, in which I discussed how much truer and more knowledgeably written Jonathan Franzen’s one-paragraph description of Santa Cruz’s weather ...
I Found <i>Purity</i>'s First Honest Paragraph, On Page 66
When last we met, Jonathan Franzen had mucked up the early pages of his novel Purity with repeated appraisals of the sex appeal of his main character, Pip. I was creeped out, but leaving room for the possibility that Franzen might be up to something that would redeem—or at least make some sense of—a...
Jonathan Franzen Wants To Bone Pip, I Think?
So Jonathan Franzen is doing kind of a weird thing in the early going of Purity, his latest novel. He’s not the first author to do a version of this weird thing, but the particular way he’s doing it, at least so far, made me want to write about it now, before I’ve finished the entire book....
Married To Surfing: Talking to William Finnegan About His <i>Barbarian Days</i>
I picked up William Finnegan’s surf memoir Barbarian Days on a beach this summer, and felt—I was stoned, the sky was astounding, the waves were delirious—that I’d fallen into an almost violent communion. As with the excerpts previously published in The New Yorker, where Finnegan’s been a staff write...
Daniel Bryan's <i>Yes! </i>Is The Worked Shoot Of Wrestling Books
Late in Yes!, the new memoir from the great pro wrestler Daniel Bryan, there’s a moment where Bryan comes to an epiphany about what he’s doing in the WWE—the place where he’s been employed since 2009: “I came to the realization that what we were doing in WWE was no longer pro wrestling,” he writes. ...
<i>Go Set A Watchman </i>Isn't A Good Book, But It Is An Important One
If it weren’t for the circumstances surrounding Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, the novel’s deep flaws might pass by unnoticed. It began life as a private manuscript that, after much editing, became 1960’s critically acclaimed and universally beloved To Kill a Mockingbird, and the two share the same...
Hey, You Don't Have To Read Harper Lee's New Book
So Go Set a Watchman, the second book about the main characters from the 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, comes out today. That’s the safest way to write that sentence: It permits, I think, all the abundant uncertainty and controversy. This is a book, written by someone, about those characters, and...
Ty Cobb Was No One's Antihero
For no obvious reason, 2015 has become the summer of Ty Cobb. Two new books about the famously belligerent outfielder are in print this year, one from SI editor Charles Leerhsen and another, more ambitiously-subtitled one—War on the Basepaths: The Definitive Biography of Ty Cobb—by independent histo...
What Happens To Enforcers When Hockey Uses Them Up?
More winter Friday nights than not through my first few years of high school, I was in my usual seat at the local arena, three or four rows up behind the home team's bench. On the ice, the Ontario Hockey League's Ottawa 67's, a group of—boys, really, aged 16 to 20. A handful of them would go on to...
How Monopoly Helped Win World War II
In her book The Monopolists, Mary Pilon explores the secret origins of the game Monopoly, which begin with Lizzie Magie, a forgotten feminist who patented her Landlord's Game in 1904—not, as many think, a man during the Great Depression....
<em>Thrown</em> Is The Only MMA Book Anyone Ever Needs To Write
Nearly no one writes really well about fighting, which I've always thought was less because of the sport itself than because of the institutions around it. Promoters, matchmakers, agents, sponsors, and reporters are, after all, at all times engaged in a conspiracy to deny the essential humanity of t...
The Professional: Donald E. Westlake
Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008) was one of our most prolific and entertaining writers. Now, we've got this posthumous treat: The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany, published by the University of Chicago Press and edited by Levi Stahl. The book is a ton of fun. I recently had the ch...
So Normal It Hurts: The Triumph And Tragedy Of Phil Hartman
There were few thrills in preadolescent life as dependable as the voice of Troy McClure. That first resoundingly confident "Hi!" triggered a Pavlovian response like no other single syllable: Here, without a doubt, comes a belly laugh....
Haughty Dipshit Gregg Easterbrook Makes Terrible Book Recommendations
For today's Buffalo News, columnist Greg Connors did a neat thing, asking a bunch of sports media people—some local, some national—to name their favorite sports books. They listed some really good titles, and it's fun to see what writers like Bryan Curtis, Will Leitch, and Josh Levin came up with. Y...
White And Needy: What I Learned From Richard Ford's Sportwriter Trilogy
Be they neurotic, tragic, horny, or (preferably) all of the above, white guys entering midlife have plenty of novels to reference on their journey. But John Updike's Rabbit series, Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman books, and the like don't offer real-world models of behavior any more than Slim Shady p...
Ruud Gullit: The Netherlands' Response To White Supremacy
From Eduardo Galeano's classic, now available as an ebook. We'll have excerpts throughout the week....
<em>Joga Bonito</em> Incarnate: The Joy And Tragedy Of Brazil's Garrincha
From Eduardo Galeano's classic, now available as an ebook. We'll have excerpts throughout the week....
"Soccer," From <em>Soccer In Sun And Shadow</em>
From Eduardo Galeano's classic, now available as an ebook. We'll have excerpts throughout the week....
The Eternal Martyrdom Of Lance Armstrong
The following is excerpted from Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (HarperCollins), which is available now on Amazon....