Einstein: His Life and Universe

Einstein: His Life and Universe

By Walter Isaacson

I've been hearing a lot about this guy Walter Isaacson over the past year. From what I heard he is the world's pre-eminent (or at least the world's most famous) biographer. Isaacson is noted for his in-depth biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissenger. He achieved runaway success with his most recent biography of Steve Jobs (which just happened to coincide with his death.... hmmmmm....). Which such a wide array of subjects (from such a wide breath of history) I figured I needed to get my hands on one of his biographies just to see what all the hullaballoo was all about.

I finally tracked down a copy of an earlier biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe and it's easy to see why Isaacson has garnered such a stellar reputation. Writing a comprehensive account of the life of one of the 20th century's brightest and most enigmatic scientific minds is no simple task and the sheer volume of primary sources (including all of Einsteins papers and correspondence as well as his wife, Else's) must have made the research for this tome Herculean in nature.

Furthermore, since Isaacson is dealing with a genius whose name is synonymous with being a genius, he is unable to hide behind his writing skills in an attempt to distract the reader from noticing that he, like virtually everyone else on the planet, doesn't particularly understand the intricacies of general relativity and unified field theory. No sir! Isaacson went out and figured this stuff out and wrote about it. Trouble is, Einstein's science as filtered through Isaacson remains as unintelligible to the average reader as it was when he scribbled his equations on the backs of old envelopes at the Patent Office in 1905.

I have read books that have presented Special and General Relativity in a far more engaging and entertaining fashion (after reading David Bodanis's book E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation I walked around for about five days explaining it to anyone who would listen.... then promptly forgot it). However, one can forgive Isaacson for his scientific opacity as it pertains to Einstein. After all it is Albert Einstein and after all again, you probably didn't pick up his biography to learn about relativity, photons, unified field theory or quantum physics. If you did, you're doing it wrong.

I imagine that you, like me, are more interested in reading about Albert Einstein the boy, the husband, the father and the unabashed pacifist as opposed to Albert Einstein the scientist. Don't get me wrong, I appreciated all the science (when I understood it) but I was more interested in reading about his relationships with his contemporaries, most notably his complicated relationship with Max Planck, his close kinship with Niels Bohr and his lifelong rivalry with the anti-Semitic (and later Nazi party member) Philipp Lenard. These are names that are familiar to most of us from high school (or university) science class but rarely get discussed as human beings.

Isaacson is an objective observer of Einstein's aloof and often chilly demeanor in reference to his own family. I was completely unaware of his (and his first wife, Mileva Maric's ) first child, Lieserl, who was taken to Maric's home country of Serbia and raised by family members. Her memory is so completely erased from Einstein's personal records that her fate is still unknown. Einstein also maintained tumultuous relationships with his two sons Hans Albert and Eduard of which Isaacson presents Albert as an ofttimes cold and uncaring father (though one may argue that it was just his way). And yet Einstein maintained a tender side that, which not often visible to his friends and family, existed for those close to him, most notably his second wife (and cousin) Else.

Isaacson also delves deep into Einstein's notion of pacifism and his flirtation with Chaim Weizmann's brand of Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s. Einstein's obsession with personal freedom and his abhorrence for political parties and the machinations of the establishment made him the perfect spokesperson for the burgeoning notion of militant pacifism that gained a certain credence during the 1920s. Though he retreated from this stance when Adolf Hitler attained power in Germany and even played a small part in the development of the atomic bomb (another fascinating portion of this book), Einstein remained astutely anti-war throughout his life and was an early proponent of a United Nations (though his vision was of a much more powerful UN with a standing army to settle international disputes. This militant pacifism, unsurprisingly, would later get him in a degree of trouble with J. Edgar Hoover during the Red Scare that followed World War II, though absolutely nothing came of that nonsense.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book (for me) was Einstein's relationship with God and religion. I was surprised to note that a young Einstein (not Yahoo Serious... the real young Einstein) dabbled in devout Judaism before abandoning the notion of organized religion and ascribing to a more Spinoza-esque notion of the divine. I was always under the impression that Einstein was either atheist or, at the very least, non-practising. But it turns out that he was quite the spiritual fellow and loved to wax intellectual on the nature of the divine with anyone who would listen.

There is so much more to this book. Isaacson presents a complex man and his world from literally millions of pages of reference. Isaacson discusses his relationship with Germany, Charlie Chaplin, his two wives, his parents, Robert Oppenheimer, his involvement with women, communists, socialists, Caltech, Princeton, Switzerland and Marie Curie. There is dimly no end of the layers in which Isaacson peels away.

I could go on for hours about how Walter Isaacson reclaimed, re-constructed and humanized a figure that long ago was co-opted by though who scarcely understand him or his work. It is a testament to Isaacson's well-deserved reputation as a biographer that he obliterates the lies and half-truths that we have come to accept about Albert Einstein (He never failed math in school, he did finish high school and although he spoke later than most children, he never exhibited serious developmental problems). From the rubble of such obliteration, a comprehensive (and I would add definitive) biography of science's greatest mind has been created. If you think you can stand the science, it's worth the read!

Iggy Pop: Open Up And Bleed

Iggy Pop: Open Up And Bleed

By Paul Trynka

Unrelated note about this blog post. Sheila from Book Journey challenged me to use the term "awesome sauce" in a blog post this week. I have fulfilled the challenge. Read on and see how...

Boy, do I ever read a lot of rock and roll biographies. And if you look at them, you can trace a very obvious interest in artists famous for their self-destruction. In the past two years I have read biographies (or autobiographies) about Keith Richards, Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue and Anthony Keidis. Iggy Pop: Open Up And Bleed seemed to be the logical end point in a reading trip to the pits of rock and roll depravity and beyond. So to say that I was looking forward to this book it a bit of an understatement. I love rock and roll depravity and there is simply nobody more depraved than Iggy Pop (except, perhaps Phil Spector, but I'll have to wait for that biography).

For anyone who has never read a rock and roll biography, allow me to explain the basic formula. They all follow the predictable pattern from precocious childhood into an adolescence full of talent and promise, a difficult rise to stardom which, in turn, provides the inevitable introduction to drugs, a brief episode of hyper creativity and bliss is always followed by the long, slow and often painful descent into depravity (the bulk of the biography). What follows is the ultimate rebirth of the artist, a phoenix rising from the ashes of self-destruction. It's a career pattern as cliche as rhyming "cry" and "die."

I've been a fan of Iggy Pop and his band The Stooges for a long time and I have always found Iggy Pop to be one of rock and roll's more enigmatic figures. He also stands outside rock and roll to a certain degree. During his peak creative years between 1969 and 1979, Iggy Pop (first with the Stooges and then with David Bowie) created music so ahead of its time that it was seen as (at best) a curiosity or (at worst) noise.

Only year later would critics and music fans comprehend the very real impact that Iggy Pop had on both the punk and new wave movement in the late 1970s and pop music as a whole. But Iggy Pop is simply the myth behind the very real man known as Jim Osterberg. I was ready when I opened the book. I wasn't going to be surprised to find out that Iggy Pop was simply a talented man with substance abuse problems like all the rest. He was (and to a degree, still is) rock and roll's wild child and the stories are legendary. Iggy Pop is the unpredictable madman famous for cutting himself onstage with a steak knife, rolling around in broken glass, throwing feces on his band, exposing himself at every turn and vomiting his awesome sauce all over the audience. If anything, Iggy Pop was known as the performer most likely to die onstage rather than the influential artist he has become over time. This book was going to follow the pattern to a tee and I wasn't going to be surprised.

Except I was.

And for a good portion of the book I was confused.

To say I was disappointed in this book is an understatement. A biography about Iggy Pop should write itself. It's not like there's a shortage of stories about a man who sacrificed his body for his art night in and night out and survived to tell the tale. I mean he spent a large portion of his life in and out of mental institutions and snorted enough blow to power a mission to Mars. He once performed a show entitled: Killing a Virgin. How could this book fail? Get these stories down on paper and let his fans bask in their depravity.

This book bothered me from the very beginning. Paul Trynka's work is so exhaustive, so expansive and so detailed I had to continually check to see whether I was reading the biography of Winston Churchill or John F. Kennedy or some other such historical heavyweight. And for a time I was inclined to trash this book when it came time to write this blog. I very nearly did. But I figured out what it was about this book that was bothering me.

Trynka's research is so painstakingly thorough. He has collected interviews from literally everyone from Jim Osterberg's life (everyone that was still alive in 2007, that is) and combed through reams and reams of material (school records, newspapers, magazine articles, medical records etc...) in order to put this work together. It's not really a rock and roll biography at all. Paul Trynka has written an academic work on the life and work of Jim Osterberg. The book is so scholarly (the endnotes by themselves would make a decent sized biography) that there were points where I had to read passages two or three times over. Iggy Pop: Open Up And Bleed is an opus. It's so definitive that I can't imagine anyone ever writing another word on the subject of Iggy Pop, unless it was a revisionist history (and if someone did hypothetically write another academic work on the life of Iggy Pop, I suppose someone would then have to write the historiography. Egads!).

While the research is obviously sound, Trynka's agenda is sometimes suspect. Trynka often overstates Iggy Pop's contribution to the world of pop music. While I would, personally, place Iggy Pop extraordinarily high on the list of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Trynka often oversteps academic objectivity and proceeds into hero-worship and often dives straight into pretension. I actually tossed the book aside in disgust at one point when he compared Iggy Pop's collaboration with David Bowie as the greatest meeting of creative minds since Gauguin and Van Gogh worked together at the Yellow House. C'mon! Really? Such nonsense has no place in a scholarly biography and only served to pile on the pomposity and compromise the integrity. Unfortunately, this book has stretches when it drips with pomposity.

In the space of 375 pages, Trynka managed to name-drop literally every single human being of consequence since the French Revolution. Again, I know Iggy Pop is an influential character in the history of rock and roll, but dropping names like Vaslav Nijinsky and Napoleon Bonaparte and Eldridge Cleaver even though hey have little to no importance to the life of Iggy Pop. I got the feeling that Trynka was trying (valiantly at times) to authenticate the mythology of Iggy Pop while his thesis was obviously an attempt to humanize him. This conflict was apparent to me throughout the book.

Despite this, Paul Trynka is fast on his way to becoming a very erudite biographer of artists that have, until now, not been given the academic treatment. This is probably a good thing. I just hope  he can keep his myth-making in check. That's the artist's job (and Iggy Pop has spent his career shrouding himself in his own myth). The biographer's job is to cut through the myth. Trynka seems to do this inconsistently at best.

However, it's difficult to dislike this book. Paul Trynka has put everything he had into this book and it will stand as the conclusive work on the career and legacy of Iggy Pop. For that reason alone, it's a must read for anyone who is interested in this particular genre of music. But it's not a typical rock and roll biography. I have since learned that Trynka has written a similar work on the career of David Bowie (which makes sense since Bowie plays such a major role in the career of Iggy Pop). I can only imagine that it too will prove to be conclusive.

My Year in Books

My Year in Books

Holy cow, it's 2012! How did that happen? I was still writing 2010 on deposit slips and stuff well into November and now I've got to remember to write 2012. Actually, it only occured to me the other day that the 1990s are over a decade ago now... insanity. Years fly by.

It still seems like only a few weeks ago that I started this blog but it has already been over a year. I have somehow managed to write something (sometimes only just) about every single book I read. I didn't think I would have very much to say after the first few books but I found that I was already crafting many of my blog posts in my head somewhere in the middle of most books I read. It has become part of my reading routine, which I think is worthwhile.

Not all of the books were fun to write about, mind you. There were some real clunkers on my reading list this year and since I always finish what I start, writing about some of these books was far more difficult than I would have expected. It's hard to muster the ambition to write about a book you barely finished, didn't like and would sooner forget. It is even harder to make it interesting. I suspect I failed on more than a few posts over the course of this year.

I started this blog as a bit of a reference experiment, really. I read so much that I often forget about a lot of books I read. I pick books up that I have read and forgotten about and it takes me dozens of pages for me to realize what's happening. This actually happened this year when I picked up How to be Good by Nick Hornby and realized about 30 pages in that I read it a few years ago. It obviously hadn't made an impact.

I wanted a place where I could record my thoughts, snide comments and theories about everything I read and maybe spark up a discussion or two along the way (and I won't lie, I'm more than narcissistic enough to enjoy knowing that people are reading what I write and I love comments). In that respect, this blog has been a huge success for me and I look forward to writing it (almost) every time I finish a book.

Moving forward, I am going to try carrying a notebook with me while I read. I found that I often had great ideas about a book only to forget about the idea when it came time to post a blog. This lack of planning made many of my blog posts feel rushed and superficial. I want to be a bit more astute in the coming year.

That being said, I didn't take any notes on this post and I'm writing it with a New Year's hangover. Even so, I'm going to try and divide my year in reading into a few year-end lists, with some superficial comments to go along with them. I provided the links to the actual posts, some of which aren't terrible. All of these are in no particular order.

Best Fiction of the Year

1. Hater by David Moody

I cannot wait to read the second in this series. What a great take on the zombie mythology.

2. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

This book surprised the hell out of me. I expected to hate it and it blew me away.

3. Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

Who knew that fantasy could be so riveting. Another first in a series that I expect to continue in 2012.

4. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Absolutely sublime. One of the best books I have read in a decade.

5. Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides

If not for Never Let Me Go, this would have been the best book I read this year. It is such a masterful piece of fiction.

Best Non-Fiction of the Year

1. Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer

2. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom by Peter Guralnick

3. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

4. Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

5. Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

(I read so much good non-fiction this year that I could have had five more here and I wouldn't have felt I left anything off.)

Worst Books of the Year

1. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max

Blogs don't make good books (My Life in Books: The Movie!). Besides, college humor is so 2000.

2. Henry's Sisters by Cathy Lamb

This book is quite probably the worst book I have ever read. If anyone brings this book up in conversation I still go off on insane rants.

3. The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant

New age hokum.

4. Endymion Spring by Matthew Skelton

Harry Potter without an ounce of fun.

5. Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

Anyway. Hope everyone had a great New Years (I did) and I look forward to continuing the blog into 2011... I mean 2012. As a parting gift, here is the complete list of my reading this year...

1. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell – Tucker Max
2. Smoke Screen – Sandra Brown
3. The Mirror Crack’d – Agatha Christie
4. The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
5. Peter Pan – J.M. Barrie
6. Life – Keith Richards
7. Blue World – Robert McCammon
8. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden State of Everything – Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
9. Welcome Home: Travels in Smalltown Canada – Stuart McLean
10. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
11. Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follet
12. The Walking Dead Vol. 13: Too Far Gone – Robert Kirkman
13. The Power of Myth – Joseph Campbell
14. Stanley Park – Timothy Taylor
15. The Face of Battle – John Keegan
16. A History of Violence – John Wagner
17. Three Day Road – Joseph Boyden
18. Angela’s Ashes – Frank McCourt
19. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
20. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
21. Black Ajax – George MacDonald Fraser
22. In a Free State – V.S. Naipaul
23. Clara Callan – Richard B. Wright
24. Cutting For Stone – Abraham Verghese
25. The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time – John Kelly
26. The Rolling Stones Interviews – Jann S. Wenner
27. The Butcher’s Boy – Thomas Perry
28. Henry’s Sisters – Cathy Lamb
29. Flashman – George MacDonald Fraser
30. 6 x H – Robert A. Heinlein
31. Scar Tissue – Anthony Keidis
32. Every Man Dies Alone – Hans Fallada
33. Just So Stories – Rudyard Kipling
34. Dead Famous – Ben Elton
35. People of the Book – Geraldine Brooks
36. Hater – David Moody
37. Think of a Number – John Verdon
38. Thinner – Stephen King
39. Drowning Ruth – Christina Schwarz
40. The Stranger – Albert Camus
41. The Phantom Tollbooth – Norton Juster
42. A Spy in the House of Love – Anais Nin
43. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – Michael Chabon
44. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom – Peter Guralnick
45. The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You – Dorothy Bryant
46. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
47. I Am Ozzy – Ozzy Osbourne
48. A Long Way Down – Nick Hornby
49. Where Men Win Glory – Jon Krakauer
50. Endymion Spring – Matthew Skelton
51. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
52. Atonement – Ian McEwan
53. Eleanor Rigby – Douglas Coupland
54. Fifth Business – Robertson Davies
55. Formosan Odyssey: Taiwan Past and Present – John Ross
56. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Berniere
57. Helmet For My Pillow – Robert Leckie
58. Why China Will Never Rule The World: Travels in the Two Chinas – Troy Parfitt
59. A Game of Thrones: Book One A Song of Fire and Ice – George R.R. Martin
60. Middlesex – Jeffery Eugenides
61. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
62. Pygmy – Chuck Palahniuk
63. Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace
64. My Life as an Experiment: One Man’s Humble Quest to Improve Himself – A.J. Jacobs
65. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie
66. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
67. Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole – Benjamin R. Barber
68. Dust – Joan Frances Turner
69. Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement, 1895-1945 – George Kerr
70. That’s Me In The Middle – Donald Jack
71. The Education of Little Tree – Forrest Carter
72. Sabriel – Garth Nix
73. Let The Great World Spin – Colum McCann
74. Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game – Michael Lewis
75. The Help – Kathryn Stockett
76. The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde

Moneyball

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

By Michael Lewis

Full disclosure here: I suck at math.

I essentially dropped out of math in the eleventh grade (and the behest of my math teacher!) to concentrate on subjects that provided me with the least numbers possible: English, history, geography and certain science courses. I have nothing particular against math and I am perfectly capable of doing simple, day-to-day math in my adult life. I just wasn't interested in the higher concepts involved in mathematics. I never saw the practical application for me. Twenty years later, I still don't.

I don't have a learning disability, though, and I can prove it. When I was younger still, I was an avid collector of baseball cards. I wasn't one of those sports collectible guys who bought individual cards (or entire series) as investments. I was a collector of the old school variety. I would haul ass down to the corner store and buy as many packs of cards my allowance would provide. I'm talking about the packs with the tongue slicing shards of gum that dusted one card in the pack with sugar. I accumulated my cards the old way: luck of the draw and a mouth full of cavities.

Baseball cards did a few things for me: First, and probably most important, they moulded me into a baseball fan. It's hard not to collect baseball cards and not want to watch these guys in action. I quickly became a fan of my hometown Toronto Blue Jays (this was 1985 so as luck would have it were it the Jays were on the early track to league dominance that would culminate in two World Series in 1992 and 1993... good time to be a Jays fan) but also acquired affinities toward a lot of other teams and individual players.

The second thing baseball cards did for me was provide my Asperger Syndrome with an ideal outlet. I'm not entirely sure whether I had Asperger Syndrome but looking back it sure looks like I did. I would obsess for hours over my baseball cards. Sorting and resorting them into all sorts of absurd orders. By team (obvious), by season (okay), by photo (???), and by stat. Since the first two are self-explanatory and the third is weird, let me explain the fourth.

For those who have never seen a Topps (always Topps) baseball card, the player's photo appears on the front and his career statistics appear on the back. I would take career totals in things like home runs, RBIs, batting average, stolen bases, slugging percentage, wins, ERA, strikeouts etc... and organize my cards thusly. I loved to see who the top ten players were and found myself actually rooting for certain players to make the top ten. If that's not Asperger Syndrome I don't know what is.

What I'm getting as is that I loved those stats. I obsessed over them. And, I'm fairly certain that had my math classes incorporated baseball statistics into the curriculum, I would have continued math right up to graduation. But... (and here's the scary part) had I ever gotten my hands on Bill James' Baseball Abstracts back in the early 1980s, I shudder how my life might of changed. More on that in a second...

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis is essentially the story of two people: Bill James, the baseball enthusiast turned freaknomic writer turned baseball guru who is celebrated (or reviled) for the invention of sabermetrics and Billy Beane the can't-fail prospect that failed turned general manager of the Oakland Athletics who took James' odd take on the game and applied much of it to an actual team, with dramatic results.

Lewis begins the book with a simple question: How did one of the poorest teams in professional baseball (The Oakland A's) win so many games? Since baseball is one of the last professional sports without a salary cap, one supposes that the system favors the richest teams, the ones who can buy the best talent while leaving the poorer teams with everything that was left. By and large, that is the case. The rich teams are perennially good (with an odd bad season in there) while the the poor teams are perennially bad (with an odd good season in there). Except Oakland. They were always poor and always good. Why?

This led Lewis to Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's. Beane, who is strapped with one of Major League Baseball's lowest budgets for player salaries, cannot compete with the likes of the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers. He is the GM of a small market team and he must find creative ways to build a winning team lest he become the Pittsburgh Pirates or, worse, the Montreal Expos. Beane has made scouting, drafting and finding diamonds in the rough an art form. Through statistical analysis (and some psychological profiling) Beane is able to weed out all the players who don't fit his mould and zero in on those who do, namely those who show a particular knack for simply getting on base. Thus while other GMs in baseball concentrate on numbers such as hits, home runs, RBIs and the such, Beane focuses all his efforts on On Base Percentage and Slugging Percentage. where did he get such a crazy idea?

Enter Bill James. James is the father of what is now known as sabermetrics, a system of statistical analysis that more accurately described what is happening on a baseball field. James asked wildly fascinating questions like: what would happen if Mike Schmidt only batted against the Cubs? Did quick young black players loose their speed earlier in their careers than quick young white players? Does fielding account for that much over a 162 game schedule? In its current incarnation, a fielding error is when a fielder either fails to control the ball in play or throws the ball wildly resulting in the achievement of one or more bases for the opposition. What the statistic does not take into account is how hard the ball is hit, how much range that particular fielder can cover (a fielder with more range can cover more ground which would give him more opportunities to make an error but is obviously more valuable to a team than a fielder with limited range) and the fact that in order to make an error, a fielder had to have done something right: be in the right place at the right time to make a play.

As you can see, Bill James is a riot at parties.

Anyway, Moneyball is a fascinating look inside the world of baseball statisticians, oddball players like Scott Hatteberg, Jeremy Brown and Chad Bradford and one of baseball's most bizarre front offices. Beane, via James, went on to create a finely honed system that stacked the deck statistically in their favor by determining how many runs it would take to win 95 games (95 wins being a benchmark for making the playoffs), finding the players who, together could be reasonably predicted to produce said number of runs, eliminate the improbability from the game (no sacrifices, no bunting, no base stealing... all of them risk eliminating potential base runners and, ergo, potential runs). Add players who see an inordinate amount of pitches per plate appearance and you have the sort of team that grinds their opposition into the ground in a cold, heartless but ultimately unsexy way.

To see the game stripped down to commodities and statistics is simple extraordinary and anyone who assumed that Beane was an aberration in the league (for example: Pat Gillick) has been proven entirely wrong. Both my Toronto Blue Jays (who are poised for great things in 2012, mark my words) and the Boston Red Sox have incorporated many of Beane's systems into their own. Theo Epstein, a Beane convert, assembled the Red Sox teams that won World Series in 2004 and 2007 was recently hired by the hapless Chicago Cubs (one of the richest teams in baseball) to overhaul their team and (hopefully) bring a championship to the Southside for the first time since 1908.

I know there is a movie and I'm certainly not covering new ground here, but if there is anyone out there that has not seen the movie, read this book or heard of Billy Beane I urge you to sit down with this book It's worth it on so many levels. Michael Lewis has written a classic piece of non-fiction that has the ability to appeal to baseball fans and non-fans alike. Whether you collected baseball cards as a kid or don't know the difference between a bat and a glove, Moneyball is worth the read.

It should have come with a stick of gum.

Where Men Win Glory

Where Men Win Glory

By Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer has always had an innate ability to dive headlong into a topic and deliver a nuanced look into subjects that are poorly understood by the general public. Mountain-climbing. Mormon fundamentalism. Survivalism. Like him or hate him, Krakauer brings the details. All of them. Where Men Win Glory is no exception.

So it seemed logical that Krakauer would tackle (no pun intended) the story of Pat Tillman, the former strong safety for the Arizona Cardinals who walked away from his multi-million dollar NFL contract to enlist in the American Army following America's invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. A vast majority of us would have a hard time understanding the logic behind that decision. Krakauer does his best to explain it while setting up his broader narrative for its collision course with tragedy.

Like in his prior books, Krakauer weaves a broad history of the narrative setting around a focused microcosm in an all encompassing storyline that leaves readers literally swimming in facts and quotes about complicated people in complicated situations.

Krakauer pushes beyond the stereotypes of the football player-turned-Army Ranger and exposes a far more subtle account of Pat Tillman, the man rather than Pat Tillman the manufactured legend. A man that was far more than the sum of his parts. Like he did with Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild, Krakauer digs deeper into Tillman's personality to reveal an atypical American jock, a far cry from the theatrical beer-swilling, date-raping Gridiron stereotype. Tillman was a thoughtful, moralistic and complicated character and I thought Krakauer handled him deftly. Krakauer presents Tillman and his family as sympathetic (albeit flawed) people with strong familial bonds. But he is careful to honor Tillman's legacy without mythologizing him. By the end of the novel, the reader really feels as if they know Pat Tillman and understand him, regardless of politics or religion. While some might be put off by his heavy-handed approach, I think it was necessary to understand the full extent of who Pat Tillman was and why he did what he did. It helps understand the tragedy that unfolded in 2004.

Pat Tillman fell in battle during an ambush in on the Afghan-Pakistan border region. He was shot in the head and died instantly. He was a true American patriot cut down by Taliban forces. He was a man who turned away from riches to serve his country and make the ultimate sacrifice. An unbelievable tragedy.

Unbelievable, of course, because it never actually happened. As most already know, Tillman's death was a result of "friendly fire" (a term I am very uncomfortable with. What fire is ever friendly?) and the events immediately following his death were shrouded in mystery and inconsistencies.

It's not an issue of "friendly fire" so much. Casualties by friendly fire are common. Much more common than most are lead to believe. It happens. Often. It's called the fog of war and no technology has ever been produced to alleviate this problem. The issue was: why did the Army cover up the true cause of death for so long? Especially when it was obvious almost immediately after Tillman's death that it was fratricide. This becomes the crux of the second half of the book.

As backdrop, Krakauer spends a large portion of this book chronicling the way in which Osama Bin Laden orchestrated the American invasion of Afghanistan via terrorist activity (culminating in the attacks of September 11th). He wanted to lure the Americans into an unwinnable quagmire where America would be somehow exposed. From their, Krakauer details the manner in which the Bush government steered American opinion toward war in Iraq and, once there, how they continued to massage and spin the truth in order to maintain the popularity of the war on the home front.

There is an excellent side story detailing the saga of Jessica Lynch, the soldier taken captive in Iraq in the first days of the war. What was fed to the public ("She went down fighting to the death") compared to the truth ("She was on a maintenance team, her vehicle was involved in a serious accident, she suffered serious injuries, was transported by Iraqis to an Iraqi hospital where she received compassionate care and never once discharged her gun) is startlingly unscrupulous. It's ironic that Pat Tillman was one of the 1000 Rangers deployed in the Jessica Lynch "rescue mission."

So it comes as no surprise that Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan was used and abused in the same manner. When Tillman died in 2004, Bush was up for re-election and a series of embarrassing setbacks was promising to do real harm to his chances at a second term. The Tillman cover-up was done in order to dilute the negative publicity generated by the disaster unfolding in Fallujah and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Lauding the sacrifice of Pat Tillman, easily America's most famous soldier, became a political toy to lessen the damage of other stories. Death by "friendly fire" simply didn't fit the hero narrative.

Once Krakauer begins to unravel the complicated web of lies, deceits and half-truths told by the army and the Bush Administration is becomes hard to stomach. Literally. There were moments during the latter half of this book where I felt physically ill about the way in which someone's legacy could be so misrepresented and trodden on so completely.

Where Men Win Glory is a difficult book to finish. It's sickening look as the way in which out leaders use and abuse us in order to maintain power and further their own agendas. The fact that Tillman's death was used as propaganda to muscle through a particularly difficult news cycle. If you weren't disenchanted with your leaders before reading this, you most certainly will be when you finish.