Books of the Teens: Non-fiction Stay-Aways

People in my circle read way more books than I do.  Looking back from 2010 to 2019, I read 183 books.  While I will recommend books from that period over the next few days, it's important for friends to warn friends about books that just stink.  So, we shall start with the seven non-fiction books I hated most this decade with the worst at the top.  Let's see if all of my friendships survive the airing of these opinions.

Worst of the Teens: Non-Fiction

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver, 2007, read in 2012

Ugh.  Barbara Kingsolver.  Having subscribed to a community-supported agriculture farm for over a decade, I was interested in Barabara Kingsolver's family's experiment with eating locally-grown food for a year.  I borrowed this book from my then-boss and dragged my feet before reading it.  Maybe it's because I knew that Barbara Kingsolver - so popular with some - would drive me absolutely bats.  I remembered that my boss finished this book angry and confused that she'd been told for years that organic dining would save us all.  Now, it turns out if it's organic but from far away, it might as well have been pesticidally factory farmed.  Kingsolver loves her own writing most of all and her personal virtues second best.  It's enough to make the reader puke.  I can see her finishing a sentence and then stepping back to admire it, polish it with a white cloth and then move on. An example: I'm glad I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I'd heard a lot about it, and it's interesting to learn what it takes to really eat locally even for just a year. But then I come upon this description of her daughter with clementines:

"No matter where I was in the house, that vividly resinous orangey scent woke up my nose whenever anyone peeled one in the kitchen. Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing."

Too precious by half for the likes of me. And it gets in the way. Her sanctimony clouds the narrative and her worthy points.


The Code: Baseball's Unwritten Rules and Its Ignore-at-Your-Own-Risk Code, Ross Bernstein, 2008, read in 2011

Although this book was published in 2008, it started popping up various places in my environment in late 2010. The title and premise rock. The book...not so much. Start with the author bragging about the 30 sports books he's written in the last 20 years. That reminds me of a Pennsylvania winery I visited that produced 54 wines, none of them quite drinkable. The good Mr. Bernstein takes the volume approach. He also starts the book with three forewords by current or former baseball players. I love baseball and baseball players, but three forewords on the topic of the game's unwritten code by player types produce an unappealing drumbeat of repetition about respect and not throwing at guys' heads. It's not as if the book itself isn't littered with player quotes. Bernstein interviewed lots of people. While I admire his hard work, i wish he hadn't showed quite so much of it. The narrative, especially early on, is interrupted as much as five times on a page by block quotes in gray boxes. Obviously, players, managers and umpires have to be the source, but take a little more time and weave them into a narrative. Some of the block quotes are more than a page long. For good measure, he gives the last word to a player, block quoting Dave Winfield, saying something that doesn't really put a button on all that went before. I don't know if it's good or bad policy, but Bernstein saves his best stuff for last. The stuff about throwing at guys gets dull and goes on a long time. Summary: throw at guys when they "disrespect" you or a teammate or the game; don't throw at guys' heads. Second summary: throwing at a guy is easy, and it is really difficult. The stuff about bench-clearing brawls is better. Where he really shines, though, is in talking about stealing signs. The best part of that material, though, focuses less on the code and more on how signs work, which I, as a fan, didn't really know. I wanted more out of this book. Perhaps John Feinstein could rewrite it from Bernstein's notebook (which it felt like I was reading anyway) and come up with a worthy book.


Present Shock; When Everything Happens Now, Douglas Rushkof, 2013, read in 2013

I hate Douglas Rushkoff.  I'd never heard of him before hearing about this book on Marc Maron's podcast, but I hate him.  There was a sign outside my sister's high school that said "Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more."  Douglas Rushkof never saw that sign.  He is quite brilliant at cultural observation and synthesis.  He can name what's happening in a way that I have not seen other people do.  The problem is that in this book he just proceeds to name what's happening over and over again in multiple ways ad infinitum without ever getting to the "so what?" questions; without ever getting to what I as a person might do about the phenomenon he labels present shock.  It's relentless, this book, and then it pays off almost not at all.  He does coin the word "digiphrenia" to refer to when a person is physically in one place but mentally and emotionally is elsewhere thanks to a digital connection to that other place.  His example of a young woman at one party texting and Facebooking the whole time to figure out what better party she should be at crystallizes the phenomenon beautifully.  Beyond that, he never gets to a worthwhile point despite all of his pointed observation and analysis.  Grrrrrr.


The Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam, 1981, read in 2014

Bill Simmons calls this one of the best sports books of all time, so I felt I had to read it. 

Because I like Simmons, Halberstam and the NBA, saying I didn't like it feels like sacrilege.  Although Halberstam did an incredibly exhaustive research job, authors have learned in the last 33 years what stays in the notebook and what makes it to the book.  The print and margins are very small, and the narrative is super-dense.  Halberstam may have established the modern sports book with Breaks of the Game.  

Oh yeah, it's about the Portland Trailblazers 1979-80 season, two years removed from their meteoric championship year.  Although he traveled with the team that year and covers that season in particular, a reporter only showed interested in that season because of the two that had gone before, in which Portland stormed to a championship and then stormed to 50-10 the next year before Bill Walton's feet betrayed him and the team.  So Halberstam covers those seasons as well as the transformation occurring in professional basketball throughout the 70s - the ABA, college basketball getting better TV coverage, the beginning of eye-popping salaries.  Of course, the salaries would not pop any eyes today; some of the "what's happened to this humble game?" stuff comes off as rather quaint from this distance.  He also reaches up and down the ranks of the organization from the owner to the execs to the scouts and coaches to the nascent union and the players' wives.  Halberstam worked his butt off for this book, and I learned things I didn't know and was sometimes gripped.  By the end, however, it felt like work to finish it.  I'm glad I did, but I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone who's not a hoops junkie goner.  It seriously might have been more interesting if I'd read it in a less interesting, stimulating time, like, say 1981.


Basketball (and Other Things), Shea Serrano, 2017, read in 2018

There's a lot about this book that I seriously disliked.  I'm not talking about the writing yet.  I'm talking about the physical object.  The book collects Internet-column-style essays about NBA basketball written by someone with a level of basketball junkie-ness that I can appreciate.  Serrano worked at Grantland with Bill Simmons and now works for The Ringer, his HBO-backed multimedia sports and culture empire.  To supplement the essays, there are lush drawings by Arturo Torres.  Many of them are cool and evocative.  The thing is: the soft cover book is printed on square, heavy paper to support the drawings.  I mostly read in bed.  Heavy, oversized paper with a soft cover means that the heavy book flops and drops when trying to read it in a reclined position.  Fault 1.  Also, every fifth page or so is printed on a page that is covered completely in an often-dark color.  Who commits this kind of crime against legibility?  Shea Serrano, Arturo Torres and the Abrams Image corporation.  Fault 2.  Finally, a combo platter: the font of the main text of the book is pretty damn small, and then Serrano fleshes out or clarifies points in a lot of footnotes.  Footnotes can be cute or helpful, but when they are adding to what is already an illegible, physically difficult book, they're just annoying.  Fault 3.

Now, to the content.  Too cute by half.  The thing about Internet opinion pieces is that they’re usually meant as quick hits, to be easily consumed on a screen.  Also, they should have arguments or ideas that make people want to share and/or argue over them.  Serrano's essays have many of those features but not the brevity.  They can be dense, and their cuteness wears thin.  He writes in a very self-conscious way at points that I would classify in the Lena Dunham Millennial vomit-inducing category if that weren't such a broad and negative brush. Any collection of essays will have winners and losers.  You may not be surprised to know that the essay formed on the premise "Who would do better if you swapped their environment?  Karl Malone or a bear?" drove me absolutely batshit crazy.

It doesn't help that I read the majority of this book while marooned in my bed suffering through and recovering from the flu.  But actually, I'm pretty sure I would have been just as angry and dismissive if I'd been well while reading it.  The book may have induced the illness.


The Last Job; The Bad Grandpas and the Hatton Garden Heist, Dan Bilefsky, 2019, read in 2019

Sometimes a story is too good not to write a book about it.  I can only guess that this book got stuck in some publisher scheduling issue and rushed to print.  That would be surprising, considering the book was published 4 years after the heist in question, but I found myself searching for an explanation for why the book was not super well written and even more poorly edited.  Bilefsky is a NY Times reporter who covered the heist for the paper contemporaneously.  I might have expected better.  The book itself and its chapters are structured strangely.  Information gets half told and then told in depth.  There aren't that many straight-up typos (although they do appear), but lots of places made me ask myself if anyone had read the draft before it all got hard bound and sold.  The true story - a bunch of senior citizen thieves undertaking an audacious heist by drilling through a concrete wall into a safe deposit box full of jewelry and other loot - is pretty amazing.  The book is rather awful.



Grit; The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth, 2016, read in 2017

Angela Duckworth made the rounds of my favorite nerd media outlets when Grit came out.  She gave great interviews, and there was a lot to learn about grit in the space of 20-45 minutes.  Namely that grit is equal parts passion and perseverance.  Gritty people love what they're doing so much they don't necessarily realize how much they're putting into it.  And yet, real accomplishment derives from deliberate practice of that skill, trade, art, or sport.  That's what takes perseverance.  Ten thousand hours yadda yadda.   Actually, the ten thousand hours guy is the source of the deliberate practice idea.   

I really wanted to like this book.  The problem is that when she tried to take 30 minutes of interview fodder and turn it into a 270-page book, she ran out of interesting material.  Many business best sellers do a better job of staying interesting by combining results of multiple different social science research studies.  Duckworth relies mostly on her own research, some interviews, and collected quotes from profiles of "gritty" people.  Lacking the necessary quantity and variety of sources, she goes to the same wells too often.  Lots of swim coach quotes, for example.  Also, I called this a business best seller (aspirant, anyway), but I'm not super clear who Duckworth thinks her book is best for.  There's a "parenting for grit" chapter, but it's not a parenting book.  There's the social science research, but it's not really an academic book or a business manual.  Finally, there's a section on building one's own grit, but it's not prescriptive enough to qualify as a self-help book.  All in all, not enough there there.  It took a certain...perseverance to slog through this so so book.