Pure Baseball – Keith Hernandez and Mike Bryan, 1994 ★★★½

Breaking Down Balls and Strikes

It's one thing to watch the game of baseball. Understanding the ins and outs of your typical major-league contest is something else: The more you see, the deeper and trickier it gets.

Explicating the strategy that results in balls and strikes, and how those balls and strikes in turn require strategic adjustments on the fly, is the focus of this detailed analysis of two Major League Baseball games played in June of 1993.

Marathon: The Pursuit Of The Presidency 1972-1976 – Jules Witcover, 1977 ★★½

The Election that White Forgot

The United States tried something a little different on the 200th anniversary of its creation.

The candidates for president that year were two men who had never before run for national office; in fact, the incumbent had never run for anything larger than a congressional district. The challenger had only run for state office on a couple of occasions, winning the second time to become a one-term governor of Georgia.

Something new was happening when it came to documenting that 1976 election, too: For the first time in 16 years, the premier writer of election histories, Theodore H. White, celebrated author of The Making Of The President series, was taking a break. He'd be back in 1980, but in the meantime, it was open-mike night for willing commentators. Jules Witcover does his best to fill White's breach by taking the nation's political temperature in dispassionate style.

I, Claudius – Robert Graves, 1934 ★★★★★

Surviving Your Family

There once was a Roman named Claudius

Whose family was rather quite naughtius,

Their dispositions so cruel,

He would stutter and drool

To keep them from thinking him haughtius.

It's been a television miniseries, a radio play, a stage production, even an aborted movie starring Charles Laughton. So why not a limerick? I suppose not. You really need a goodly amount of space to tell the story of this runt who would become emperor, at least as it is related here in this fictional reconstruction of his life by Robert Graves, a British World War I veteran who was both a celebrated poet and a Classics scholar in civilian life.

This story is a cacophony of plots and counterplots ranging across more than three generations of a family with life-and-death command over the whole of the known world.