The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1986 – Bill James, 1986 ★★★

In Search of Lasting Greatness

Over the brief run of his annual looks back on individual baseball seasons, Bill James was concerned with demarcating the difference between ordinary performance and true excellence. This is made clear in this, the rough series midpoint which examines 1985.

It was a year like no other for James, because his team, the Kansas City Royals, finally won it all.

In the best and longest section of the book, James examines the history of baseball in Kansas City, from the dog days of the Athletics in the early 1960s to the Game 7 whipping of the Cardinals last October. It could have been a book of its own. Perhaps it should have been, because the rest of Baseball Abstract 1986 can only pale in comparison.

The Man With The Golden Gun – Ian Fleming, 1965 ★½

A Goodbye that Still Stings

Ian Fleming should have been taking his ease in 1964. The year before saw him survive a nasty lawsuit and nastier heart attack. Just relax and enjoy the coronation of creation James Bond as moviedom’s most famous superspy in Goldfinger, opening in theaters that September.

Fleming always wanted more. So he launched a new book project, not about Bond but a flying car. The “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang” series became another lasting success, but one Fleming would never see to publication, as he died in August.

It was the sort of self-destructive impulse in pursuit of duty that Bond himself obeys in the other project Fleming allowed to consume his last year of life: the 13^th and penultimate Bond book.

Hamlet – William Shakespeare, c. 1599-1601 ★★★★★

The Ultimate Rabbit Hole

Yesterday someone on Reddit said they had just read their first Shakespeare play. To my surprise, it was Hamlet. Not that it play isn’t the greatest thing ever. But it’s too long, dense in meaning, and full of subtext to be close to accessible.

Talk about skipping the bunny trail.

My advice: read something else by Shakespeare first. Then, if you are still up for a challenge, have at Hamlet. That way, you don’t risk putting yourself off the Bard of Avon by biting off more than you can chew. As the hero of our play says in Act I: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio/Then are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The Making Of The President 1972 – Theodore H. White, 1973 ★★★½

Nobody Loves a Winner

The problem with total victory is that victors often have a hard time overcoming them. It offers no moral guardrails, no ego checks to counter bad impulses, while falsely beguiling the beholder into seeing only a clear road and an open horizon ahead.

All this was a problem for President Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign long before the votes came in. The fourth and final volume in Theodore H. White’s “Making Of The President” series examines what happens when four years of success becomes its own poison pill.

In so doing, White turns in an engaging book even while it struggles to get a handle on the elephant in the room: the arrests of men connected to the Nixon re-election campaign who had broken into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel.