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| Phillip on Pensacola Beach my favorite beach in Florida |
Summer Begins on Monday
What are you reading?
“Knowing you have something good to read before bed,” the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov (think Lolita) wrote, “is among the most pleasurable of sensations.” It’s easy to feel similarly about summer. Knowing you’ve got a few fine books tucked away for beach or lawn is akin to bliss. As a nod to the 2016 Rio Olympics our first 7 picks are sports-themed.
7 Best Sports Books Summer 2016
Sure, you could swill beer
and ogle bodies on the sand.
Or you could learn something.
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| Phillip, swilling something |
1. How Cubs Manager Joe Maddon IDs the Clutch Players
I'm Fascinated by Sacrifice Files: Inside the Game We All Love, by Tim Kurkjian
$16.86 at Amazon
"Maddon arranged for a local zookeeper to bring a 25-foot boa constrictor into the clubhouse. 'Some of our guys just left the room as soon as the snake was brought in,' Maddon said. 'Some guys touched the snake, but nowhere near his mouth. And a couple of guys went right up near the head. I thought, Wow, maybe this is the type of guy I'm not going to worry about with two outs in the 9th."
2. The First Sign that Lance Armstrong Was Cheating
Shut Up, Legs!: My Wild Ride On and Off the Bike, by Jens Voigt
$17.76 at Amazon
"In that Tour of Georgia, it took six days of racing and hard, steep uphill finish to Brasstown Bald in Georgia for me to lose 1 minute and 20 seconds to Lance. Two and a half months later in the Tour de France, I was losing 10 to 15 minutes to him a day in the mountains, when I was in peak condition. . . I trained hard. I was healthy. Was I doing something wrong? Or did something else come into play?"
3. The Fascinating (Really!) History of Bowling, and 20 Other Sports
On the Origins of Sports: The Early History and Original Rules of Everybody's Favorite Games,by Gary Belsky and Neil Fine
$14.26 at Amazon
"Ninepins was typically played outside of bars and taverns, and as a result the otherwise innocent game was closely associated with a pair of disreputable pursuits: drinking and gambling. That association soon caused many localities to declare the game illegal. Shockingly, this did not stop the American people from either drinking or gambling, and they soon arrived at an ingeniously simple way to skirt the law: adding a 10th pin! By the end of the 19th century, more than 200 10-in alleys were open for business in New York City alone."
4. The Most Valuable Body Part in Professional Sports
$16.19 at Amazon
"The $1.5 billion [that] Major League Baseball spends annually on pitchers' salaries is five times more than the combined cost of every starting quarterback in the NFL. It exceeds the top 200 NBA salaries put together. And yet the most over-analyzed sport in the world, with an industry of bright minds studying its intricacies loses half a billion dollars a year to injuries. [Over half of that goes to pitchers' injuries.] More than 50% of pitchers end up on the disabled list every season, on average for two-plus months, and one quarter of major league pitchers today wear a zipper scar from Tommy John surgery along their elbows."
5. What Elite Athletes Will Do for the Love of Their Sport
Life as Sport: What Top Athletes Can Teach You About How to Win in Life, by Jonathan Fader, Ph.D.
$15.77 at Amazon
"In the annual Race Across America, cyclists test the limits of human endurance in a 3,000-mile trek across the USA. After days of grueling cycling, many of the riders start to lose control of their neck muscles and have to tape their helmets to the back of their seats to stay upright. Exhausted by the effort of pedaling and the lack of sleep, they often hallucinate that they are being chased by mythical creatures. Even in this dazed state, the subconscious mind is still trying to help them complete the goal because their motivation is so deep-seated, internal, and authentic."
6. How You Know You're Training at Your Peak
Today We Die a Little!: The Inimitable Emil Zátopek, the Greatest Olympic Runner of All Time, by Richard Askwith
$18.38 at Amazon
"When the German shepherd realized that Emil and Dana were going running every day, it agitated to go with them. So one day, the three of them would head off on the mountain paths, jogging at first before Emil found somewhere to do more serious training. . . mile after mile, at full speed, culminating in a set of flat-out repetitions around the lake. That evening, the dog's owner was perplexed. 'I don't know what's wrong with this dog,' she said. It showed no inclination to eat or drink, let alone play. It just lay there, exhausted. The next day, Emil came to fetch the dog for another excursion. When it realized who was there, it whimpered and crawled deep into the back of its kennel. It was a reaction with which a growing number of Emil's humans rivals could identify."
7. Why the Italian Men's Soccer Team Sucks
Soccer Without Borders: Jürgen Klinsmann, Coaching the US Men's National Soccer Team and the Quest for the World Cup, by Erik Kirschbaum
$17.65 at Amazon
"Punctuality isn't a virtue of any special merit in Italy. [German-born] Klinsmann showed up on time for practice and was surprised to find himself the only one there. Many of his teammates didn't start arriving until a quarter hour later; their thinking was: Practice starts when everyone gets there. Punctuality and precision are traits that perhaps explain Germany's success in many areas. Trains run on time, workers are paid on time, soccer players come to practice on time."
12 New Books We're Planning to Read This Summer
by Emma Cline (June 14)
$16.20 at Amazon
Here’s the debut novel that the publishing world can’t stop talking about. It’s a coming-of-age story, set in Northern California in the late 1960s, that involves a thoughtful teenage girl who drifts into a Charles Manson-like cult. This promises to be a perceptive page-turner, a volume to haunt summer’s warm nights.
by Arthur Lubow (June 7)
$25.45 at Amazon
Diane Arbus is one of the most important and unsettling figures in the history of photography, known for her pictures of people on the margins — dwarfs, cross-dressers, giants, sideshow freaks. Mr. Lubow’s biography of this pioneering artist, the subject of an expansive show at the Met Breuer opening on July 12, is the first since Patricia Bosworth’s in 1984, and it looks serious, sensitive and wide-ranging.
$20.05 at Amazon
Earlier in the 2000s, one might have occasionally caught Ms. Klein’s sharply nerdy stand-up comedy in New York. She’s since built a formidable career mostly behind comedy’s scenes, including her current role as the head writer for “Inside Amy Schumer.” Now she’s publishing a book of autobiographical essays, and her brain seems particularly well suited to make the transition from stage to page.
by Joy Williams (July 12)
$15.42 on Amazon
Ms. Williams deservedly expanded her fan base last year with a collection of new and selected stories, “The Visiting Privilege.” This bite-size follow-up is a stunt of sorts, 99 very short pieces — some just a sentence or two — directly or indirectly about the divine. I imagine the subject and Ms. Williams’s sharp wit and the subject matter will make a good match.
by Yaa Gyasi (June 7)
$18.36 on Amazon
This ambitious debut novel opens in 18th-century Ghana and follows seven generations of a family that descends from two half sisters who never knew each other: Effia, who marries an English colonial officer and lives in a coastal palace; and Esi, who is captured and sold into slavery. The novel spans more than 250 years and several continents as the sisters and their descendants wrestle with the physical and psychic scars of slavery and colonialism.
by Ben H. Winters (July 5)
$20.76 on Amazon
In this alternate history, Mr. Winters imagines a horrific modern-day America where the Civil War never happened, and slavery still exists. The persistence of American slavery is a popular alternate-history plotline, along with the Nazis’ winning World War II, but Mr. Winters carves out fresh territory by blending genres, adding elements of detective fiction. His weary and haunted protagonist, a former slave who calls himself Victor, works as a bounty hunter who tracks down escaped slaves for the United States Marshals Service. He’s on the trail of a man named Jackdaw when his mission, and the painful bargain he’s made with his minders and himself, begin to unravel.
by Patrick Flanery (July 5)
$21.01 on Amazon
Summer is a great time for creepiness and paranoia, and so I’m looking forward to “I Am No One.” In this novel, strange things are happening to a New York University professor who has recently returned from abroad. He seems to be under surveillance of the most insidious and unnerving kind. It’s a terrible predicament to be in, but is he hiding something?
by Emma Straub (May 31)
$17.77 on Amazon
While you’re lazing around on the beach, three college friends and former bandmates, now in the throes of middle age, are spending their summer confronting hard truths about their pasts while dealing with their suddenly sexually active teenagers. Secrets unravel, and revelations are made, not just about them but about a fourth band member who became famous on her own.
by Dave Eggers (July 26)
$22.53 on Amazon
After fictional forays to Silicon Valley (“The Circle”) and Saudi Arabia (“A Hologram for the King”), Mr. Eggers takes his dark vision of 21st-century American confusion to the wilds of Alaska. In this adventure-novel-meets-moral-inquiry, a Midwestern single mother at the end of her rope cruises the scenic byways in a rickety R.V. with her two children, dodging raging wildfires, tourist traps, personal demons and epically bad weather, ultimately digging deep to find something close to old-fashioned courage.
by Charles Foster (June 21)
$18.55 on Amazon
Dr. Foster is a British veterinarian, but don’t come to “Being a Beast: Adventures on the Species Divide” expecting James Herriot. In an effort to truly understand animals, Dr. Foster spent weeks burrowing like a badger on a Welsh hillside (earthworms for dinner, anyone?); swimming with river otters (catching fish with your teeth is harder than it looks); and skulking in alleyways with London’s urban foxes, among other escapades. “It’s a sort of literary shamanism,” he writes in this wildly eccentric and chatty book, “and it’s been fantastic fun.”
by Stuart Stevens (June 28)
$18.71 on Amazon
Face it: You’re going to hear about the 2016 presidential race all summer long (more below), unless you spend your vacation in a missile silo. You may as well milk it for laughs, as Mr. Stevens — Republican political strategist, former television writer, all-around nonfiction guy — appears to have done in this novel, his first. The main character is a populist, anti-immigrant Republican presidential candidate. Whatever gave him that idea?
by Nicole Dennis-Benn (July 19)
$20.98 on Amazon
This novel may take place in Jamaica, but do not mistake it for a traditional beach read. It’s for readers who want to know what’s really behind the lacquered smile of the desk clerk at that lovely resort in Montego Bay, and what the pleasant woman at the market is really thinking when she sells tourists her jewelry and trinkets. The answers are often far less pretty than the scenery, but all evidence suggests that this debut deserves its extravagant publicity.
. . . and 1 Must Re-read Sometime this Summer
by Carlo Rovelli (2016)
$10.80 on Amazon
I’ve wanted to reread Mr. Rovelli’s surprise best seller ever since Donald Trump clinched the Republican Nomination. I mean talk about brain dead. Maybe reading Rovell's "Lessons" will explain what black hole American's have decended into.
One reviewer said his breezy “tone would give Brian Cox a run for his quarks.” In just 88 pages, he explores mind-bending topics in physics, like gravitational waves, the heat of black holes and quantum gravity. It is the rare book about physics that can be ingested in a single sitting, which I hope to do again sometime this summer.
ＰＨＩＬＬＩＰ ＬＯＴＴ ＰＨＯＴＯＧＲＡＰＨＹ
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