Butterflies are free...why not books?

I'm not sure what Yglesias is thinking here. It seems that he's unhappy about having to pay $33.59 (on Kindle; $95 if he wants a paper and glue copy) for a philosophy book (which Yglesias admits is "relatively obscure"):

Given that the marginal cost to Cambridge University Press of giving me a Kindle copy of the book is almost $0 it seems a bit absurd for the price to be so high. What’s more, according to the CUP website: “As a department of the University of Cambridge, its purpose is to further the University’s objective of advancing knowledge, education, learning, and research.” It seems to me that knowledge, education, learning, and research are not being advanced by seeking to extract exorbitant monopoly rents from relatively obscure philosophy books. Would not knowledge, education, learning, and research be better advanced by making such books as widely available as is practical? Obviously, in an era of physical books even a commitment to such a policy would imply a fairly high price. But electronic publishing via Kindle, it seems to me, ought to change the occasion.

We live in a world where, in principle, it ought to be viable for CUP to offer Peter Railton’s books for sale quite cheaply....That, it seems to me, would be a world in which knowledge, education, learning, and research are being advanced.

Perhaps Matt is so fixated on the Internet that he's decided everything should be free, though his own book (not even available for Kindle) sells at a discounted rate of $15.57 at Amazon. But his argument doesn't hold up at all.

First of all, let's dispense with the Kindle vs. tangible book point. I can pretty much guarantee you that 408 pages, even including printing, handling, and delivery, doesn't require a premium of $61.41. Clearly, the price comes from other considerations than just those of production costs.

Second, why does the obscurity of the book matter? Sure, Railton might sell more books if each was priced at $5, or $1, whatever the medium, but the publisher has made a decision that the right price point is $95 or $33. This exposes a common myth, that markets exist to get products to people; that's untrue, of course, markets exist to maximize profits. If CUP can make the most money selling 1 copy a year, they'll price it in just that way (I'm deliberately ignoring the odd aspects of university presses).

And that point is true regardless of the popularity or sales of the book.

Let's move on to the nub of the argument, that books should be priced in such a way as to advance "knowledge, education, learning, and research." You know, I'd love that too. I have all kinds of books that were bought for just those purposes, and I would certainly love it if all of them had been virtually given away.

If you want to contend that Matt's point is specifically about Cambridge University Press because of the statement he found on their web site, well, that's just not enough. Presumably every publisher could list similar goals, even if profit is a little higher in the mix for a commercial publisher, but CUP has employees and a building and expenses that need to be covered, and that's not going to happen if they're just freely disseminating information.

And why would any author sign up with a publisher that told them, "You're not going to make anything from your work because we're here to advance knowledge"? (Of course, one could argue that the book isn't publishable by a mainstream publisher due to its obscurity; then why is it publishable at all?) Yglesias himself writes a blog that may advance knowledge, and he's paid for that, even though his organization could advance more knowledge if he gave them his blogging skills for free.

A couple of follow-ups

1) Sunday, I wrote about Kevin Drum's struggles with Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, a book that, for no particular reason, has vaulted the author into the pantheon of pundits. His unremarkable observation that "bad things happen," cloaked as it is in self-indulgent tracts of virtually unreadable prose, struck me as a very few good ideas in search of a book.

Kevin found it "odd" and "intensely annoying":

The problem is that Nassim Nicholas Taleb basically sounds like a crank. His prose has all the usual markers: everyone else is an idiot (this includes philosophers, economists, historians, journalists, and pretty much all social scientists, among others); he's the only one who truly understands the world as it is; there's a monocausal explanation for this almost universal lack of understanding in others; and there's a tiny cast of other unappreciated geniuses who do get it (Benoit Mandelbrot, Karl Popper, G.L.S. Shackle, Daniel Kahneman, etc.).

But what of the content (and Taleb certainly pushes against the idea that we can separate style from content)?:

Generally speaking, he wants to persuade us that we know less than we think and that forecasting the future is a mug's game because history is primarily governed by huge, unpredictable events that come out of nowhere (black swans). But this is sort of a banal point: scholars have been arguing about the importance of contingent events vs. broad historical trends forever, and the difficulty of predicting technological breakthroughs is well-trod ground. Worse, Taleb doesn't add much to what's already been said about it. Just the opposite, in fact. In one chapter he cherry picks some inventions here and there to help make his case, but even using his own hand-picked examples he's not very convincing. We all know that penicillin was discovered by accident, but the computer? Taleb seems to think it sprang out of nowhere, but that's sure not how I remember it. It was a big invention and a huge discontinuity, but it was hardly unpredictable and hardly an accident.

Kevin seems to be surprised that there is so little there there, but is willing to concede that he may have missed the point. I would say, Kevin, you didn't miss the point at all; the real challenge is to explain why so many others have been so influenced as to make "black swan" a hot term, and Taleb a media star.

2) As for the disappearance of the great blog Carrie's Nation, in a comment to my follow-up post, 2Truthy unfolds the speculation that she shared with Melvin Toast on her fine blog, to wit:

In a nutshell, the entity known as 'Carrie's Nation' was likely one or more professional researchers working for a firm that pulled the plug at the end of April. That explains the blogger, CC's sudden and mysterious disappearance. Job over, on to the next disparate gig, maybe with tax codes. Detroit housewife? Fine. Sure.

That may be so, and fits the facts as we know them as well as any other explanation (including 2Truthy's offer of CC's suicide as an explanation, and mine of the Obama Indian technology cabal pulling the plug and sending her off to Gitmo).

If that is so, then there is actually a kind of Turing Test insidiousness to the Carrie's Nation experience, no matter how much I might tend to agree to the purpose to which it was put. The creation of a back story, complete with blog posts containing out-the-front-door pictures of a snowy day; the personal e-mails that I exchanged with CC; the idiosyncracies that, at least, seemed grounded in quotidian life: If all of these are fictions, I am left with a peculiar feeling.

Again, accepting 2Truthy's theory requires me to accept that a lie lay at the heart of Carrie's Nation. I have discussed my reasons for cloaking my real identity, but I am still the person I have revealed here. My name wouldn't add anything to the discussion, but every material fact I have written is, indeed, a fact. I can't really say that I like the idea that CC may have been a corporate figment, partially because my own representation of "her" is put in question, but more because it casts doubts on anyone who adopts a nom de plume for whatever reason.

So a part of me resists the theory, even as time and logic dictate acceptance. If that's the case, then perhaps 2Truthy is the passionate alter ego of George Will (he doesn't really believe the stuff he writes, so expresses his true feelings under an alias), mcfnord the online avatar of Bill Gates - heck, maybe I better go check my driver's license to make sure I'm not some consortium of think tank-ers writing my little blog each day.

Lotsa luck, Kevin

From Thursday, Kevin Drum, talking about the media reaction to the swine flu:

So will we ever know if SF 2.0 was The Big One? If it kills a billion people, yes. If it doesn't, no. We'll just have to keep wondering. Which, to my surprise (and to change the subject completely), turns out to be a big chunk of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about in The Black Swan. After I was (properly) smacked down over my airy dismissal of Taleb a few days ago, I finally decided that maybe I ought to actually read his book instead of relying on the odd blog post about it, and I have to say that it's not at all what I expected. So far, anyway. It's a real mishmash of odd potted historical anecdotes that go nowhere, interesting insights about human nature, opinions about historical contingency that are strangely unmoored from even an acknowledgment that lots of other people have thought about this subject before, and conventional observations about things like confirmation bias and the limits of induction. However, Taleb swears that he's a doer, not an idle idea spinner, and by the time I'm finished I'll get some genuinely concrete advice about how to deal with uncertainty and the limits of knowledge in real life.

We'll see. I'm a little skeptical based on the first few chapters, but I suppose Taleb himself would warn me that even a long string of mediocre chapters doesn't mean there won't be a phenomenal one that will rock my world when I least expect it. If I finish it this weekend, I'll report back.

Had Kevin asked me, I could have told him that there is no black swan in The Black Swan, but I guess he'll just have to figure that out on his own.

I have failed

I know that you, Gentle Reader, look to me for my opinions on issues of globalization. As such, I imagine that you are all anticipating my take on yesterday's Charlie Rose show, not the part on female desire, but the interview with Nandan Nilekani, co-chair of big Indian offshorer Infosys, who has a new book, and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who has the same old books to plug.

I wanted to watch and listen and give my impressions, to offer up some insights as to what I saw as flaws in the logic, on how these high priests of globalization would discuss changes to the model in light of the world financial crisis. Of course, I didn't expect them to take up basic questions of how American politicians justify visa policy or offshoring, but I could hope.

And then they launched into the interview, and the first thing they talked about was how Nandan gave Tom the idea for his Einsteinian revelation that, THE WORLD IS FLAT. It's a story that sums up the work of Friedman so well that I recreate it here (from the transcript on Rose's web site):

CHARLIE ROSE: The least. Just quickly, let’s review that. What happened? You were in India.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: And Nandan was actually out of the country when I came over. And we had shot about 60 hours of film over 11 days. And over those 11 days, I was getting this sinking feeling that something really big had happened with globalization, and I had missed it. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

And the last interview was with Nandan. He just came back. And the film crew was setting up in his office. I was sitting on the couch outside. Nandan came out, we sat down, I took out my laptop, as is my habit, and started interviewing him.

And at one point, Nandan said, “Tom, I’ve got to tell you, the global economic playing field is being leveled.” And it all just sort of -- I said global economic -- leveled -- and I wrote down in my notebook -- and we did the interview. But that just stuck in my head. And in the Jeep on the way back to the hotel, I just kept going over the global economic playing field is being leveled. I said the global -- but Nandan said global economic playing field is kind of being flattened. And then it just sort of popped into my head that what Nandan Nilekani, India’s premiere engineer-entrepreneur was telling me was that the world was flat, and that was a book.

And then we actually went over to his house that day. It was your birthday, I think, right?

You know, historians of the future are going to be so lucky. We have little idea how Tolstoy came up with the concept of War and Peace, but we have in laborious detail the story of how Tom Friedman came up with the flat world idea. And we will also know that Friedman was a very important man, because he dealt only with very important people, and was even invited to their homes on his birthday.

I don't want to belabor the infelicities that define the "thought entity" that was Tom Friedman (but I can't resist one; as David Smick showed in his book, the financial world is curved, even crooked; Friedman's flat world is a vinyl sheet laid on a non-smooth underfloor, and we're seeing the results of that now - it's a lousy analogy, and I'm royally tired of it), but, as he launched into this story for the umpteenth time, I couldn't take it any more. I grabbed the remote and turned to something, anything else.

You see, I could just tell how this interview was going to go. Friedman, there for no appreciable reason other than to give his NYT bestseller cred to his buddy's new book, was going to butt into the conversation whenever he could with yet another faux insight, and Rose would let him get away with it. Nilekani would likely get very little time to talk about his book, even though Charlie would hold it up a couple of times. The viewers would gain no insight into, well, anything. Then Charlie, Tom, and Nandan would head out to one of New York's finest steakhouses for a big piece of beef and a couple of bottles of wine, while Charlie and Nandan would wait around for another Friedman gem ("It's interesting that beef and wine are both red, and businesspeople love both of them, but they hate it when their numbers are in the red - there's a book there, and I'll call it "The Redding of Business.")

In the interest of serving my public, I went back today and checked out the transcript of the interview (mercifully, there isn't one of the steak dinner). And it went just as I said. Nilekani made some banal observations about the challenges facing India today - his book may be better than that, I don't know. Any attempt to dig deeper was interrupted by Friedman's usual drivel (six-lane superhighway, market and Mother Nature hitting a wall, sustainable living, we're not too big to fail - all the usual stuff that real people have been seeing for years, but comes as revelation to this Pulitzer winner).

What's sad is what's always sad. There is a real opportunity to ask Nilekani some tough probing questions. They don't have to be adversarial, they just have to be firm, recognizing the challenges that confront these two nations. Maybe he's dealt with them in his book, maybe he hasn't, but they are questions that won't be asked on any broadcast outlet in this country other than, possibly, PBS.

And Charlie Rose missed this chance, so busy was he offering hospitality just short of cigars and brandy. But it isn't polite to let Friedman ramble on in the same vein as he always does, it's a disservice to the viewers. Rose needs to emerge from what I like to call his Friedman fog; if Tom's presence isn't a help, get him off the show.

David Foster Wallace

I apologize to whomever pointed me to this.  I followed a link to this New Yorker story so I could read it later.  Now I have, and want to point my readers to it, but I can not give a proper hat tip.  Nevertheless, if you want to ruminate on creativity, depression, and the frustration of reaching for something that you can never quite find, read the piece on the life and death of writer David Foster Wallace.  D.T. Max has produced a heartbreaking story about a genius who remained forever restless.

Kick him while he's up

Oh, is there any point in talking about Tom Friedman again? He's wealthy, influential, a best-selling author whose every word, whether in a column for the New York Times, a book, or one of his many television appearances, is taken as immensely significant. Surely there's nothing I can say about him which will derail the train of the jowly, gesticulating pontificator.

I reviewed his tribute to globalization, The World Is Flat, almost a year ago, and I tried to be even-handed, to take what I saw and look at it freshly. But I've seen him quite a bit in television appearances over the last year (Charlie Rose has a love thang going on), I've read more of his columns, and I've tried to get through his current best seller, Hot, Flat, and Crowded (mini-review of the first half: remarkably boring, extremely obvious, and subject to the usual Friedman flaw of speaking only to princes and sheiks, CEOs and international consultants, all of whom are the shameless name-dropper's "good friends"). I have seen what his most ardent critics have, that he is self-aggrandizing, specious in logic, and late to every party (TWIF wasn't published until 2005, after globalization was well under way).

One needs only consider his 1/20 appearance on Charlie Rose, in which he blathers on without much to say (for a summary, go to the 13:45 mark, where Tom states that the message of Obama's inauguration speech and presidency is "what I call nation-building at home." There, in a nutshell, is all the pomposity and self-love of Tom Friedman in the way he whips off this not-so-clever bit of wit.)

But I freely admit my betters, that there are those who can express themselves better than I. I don't know, a) where I first saw a reference to these pieces, or b) why I haven't seen them before, but the most entertaining excoriations of Friedman's think piece books come from Matt Taibbi in the New York Press. These two pieces, Flathead about The World Is Flat, and Flat N All That about Hot, Flat, and Crowded, are incisive, accurate, and fall-down funny.

If I start quoting, all of both reviews will be here, and that's not right. But I don't want to leave you, Gentle Reader, without a taste, so here, from the first:

Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s.

And:

It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there.

From the second:

Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute.

Just one more:

Approach-and-rhetoric wise, however, it’s the same old Friedman, a tireless social scientist whose research methods mainly include lunching, reading road signs, and watching people board airplanes.

Like The World is Flat, a book borne of Friedman’s stirring experience of seeing IBM sign in the distance while golfing in Bangalore, Hot,Flat and Crowded is a book whose great insights come when Friedman golfs (on global warming allowing him more winter golf days:“I will still take advantage of it—but I no longer think of it as something I got for free”), looks at Burger King signs (upon seeing a “nightmarish neon blur” of KFC, BK and McDonald’s signs in Texas, he realizes: “We’re on a fool’s errand”), and reads bumper stickers (the “Osama Loves your SUV” sticker he read turns into the thesis of his “Fill ‘er up with Dictators” chapter). This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs.

I have to stop now, except to tell you that Taibbi deftly takes down both Friedman's logic and his style. If you didn't already look cross-eyed at pretty much everything Friedman writes or says, you will after reading these reviews.

So, please, stop reading my blog right now, and click on those two links, and have yourself several minutes of pure enjoyment. (Then come back here if you'd like some more of my less-inspired but heartfelt and thought-out prose.)

Books of 2008

As promised, here is my only year-end list. I'll leave it to others to collect the biggest entertainment stories of the year, or the stupidest things Republicans said, or the best and worst movies - I'll just talk about books I've read and reviewed here.

Oddly enough, I have 53 reviews out there, a bit over one a week, which means it was an unusual year; probably a little too much reading, too few other activities. Looking at the categories, it was certainly a mixed bag; that's what comes from letting one's reading be influenced mainly by going to the "New Books" shelves in the library. There are 13 books listed as politics, 12 as fiction, and 6 as sports (though there are some specific sports that I didn't classify as "sports"). Otherwise, no topic came up very often, which may indicate an unfocused set of interests, or a chaotic classification scheme.

My method for developing the following was simple, I went through the list of reviews and determined whether the book was Important, Entertaining, Disappointing, or Uninteresting. Just as the reviews were subjective, so too were these classifications, and the vast majority fell into none of these - they were, in general, competent and good, not standouts for me. Here goes.

The Most Entertaining (these are books I simply enjoyed, whether fiction or non-):
4) A TV Guide to Life (review from 12/21)
Purports to be a method of applying lessons from television shows to life, intelligently abandons this for some funny (and, at times, trenchant) observations about the idiot box.
3) Hunter's Moon (1/22)
Atmospheric mystery set in the North Woods.
2) Harlan Ellison's Watching (11/20)
Dated movie reviews might seem uninteresting, but Ellison's passion and bite makes them worth reading 20 - 40 years after the fact, plus you get to step inside the psyche of this fascinating man.
1) Red Mandarin Dress (4/7)
Passable mystery set in mid-90s Shanghai, but truly fascinating in its look at China in transition as seen through one of the great fictional characters, Inspector Chen.

The Most Uninteresting (books that were kind of boring):
5) Four-Letter Words (10/26)
Written to capitalize on the documentary Wordplay, there simply wasn't enough substance here to be of interest, and the long lists of crossword-ese are boring to anyone who doesn't already know them (and boring to anyone who does).
4) Michelangelo's Notebook (1/16)
3) The Lucifer Gospel (1/17)
The DaVinci Code made a lot of money, but was pretty bad; these two knock-offs weren't as involving.
2) One World (3/5)
Philosopher Peter Singer's solution to globalization: government of the world.
1) When you ride alone you still ride with bin Laden (2/16)
Any book that gives it all up in the title has problems; if only Bill Maher was as funny as he thinks he is.

The Most Disappointing (I'm going to subdivide this category, into the books that frustrated my expectations, and the books that make me question the wisdom of the publishing industry):
I Was Hoping for More:
4) Book of the Dead (2/18)
One keeps hoping that Patricia Cornwell will pull it together and get the magic of the Scarpetta series back, and each entry gets worse.
3) America the Principled (2/8)
As fine an explanation of the problems that face America as you're going to find, undercut by a long list of completely preposterous "solutions."
2) The Post-American World (11/14)
Fareed Zakaria's explication of the new world we're making; well-written and well-researched, but I found nothing new here. After reading and listening to Zakaria, I was expecting something important, and it was just...OK.
1) The Black Swan (11/25)
An important but relatively ineffective main point, wrapped in a long narrative of self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence. A book that should have been important, but ended up irritating.

Why Were These Published?:
3) Discover Your Inner Economist (1/14)
Tyler Cowen's stab at the success of Freakonomics, providing very little in the way of understanding of what economists do and what insights they might provide.
2) Stat One (3/11)
The baseball equivalent of a physics textbook that ignores Newton and Einstein, it presents a non-novel way of evaluating performance and makes the mistake of falling in love with itself.
1) Patriotic Grace (12/4)
Peggy Noonan's self-consciously "important" book, seemingly dashed off as a stream of consciousness narrative. There is no real attempt here to deal with the world as it exists, and the solution doesn't go beyond the title.

The Most Important:
10) Bill of Wrongs (1/28)
The final book of Molly Ivins, chronicling the ways in which the Bush administration has subverted the Bill of Rights.
9) The Rest Is Noise (12/15)
A selective look at 20th century classical music, exhaustively researched and well-written.
8) Free World (3/20)
An Englishman's look at how America should position itself versus the rest of the world, persuasively expressed from a perspective we don't often see.
7) Escaping Plato's Cave (2/6)
Mort Rosenblum is a real reporter, something of the anti-Friedman, who looks at how America is viewed by the rest of the world - and the results aren't pretty. And our cluelessness hasn't been properly exposed by his fellow journalists.
6) The Second Civil War (2/27)
A look at partisanship, informed by history. The conclusions and suggestions are unremarkable, but the reporting is top-notch.
5) The World Is Flat (3/3)
Tom Friedman's tribute to the wonders of globalization, tremendously flawed. It's this high on the list because it has been hugely influential, providing as it does a roadmap to the brave new world. Much of it is laughably bad.
4) A Problem From Hell (4/1)
Samantha Power's history of genocide, a basis for any thinking on the subject. It raises real questions about the Western world's dealings with this issue.
3) High Wire (12/3)
Impeccable reporting on the extent to which the powerful have shifted risk to the rest of us. The questions raised here have to be answered if we are to come through the current crisis at anywhere close to the level we think we went in.
2) The Limits of Power (12/29)
A compelling theory of foreign policy; ultimately depressing in its conclusion that we are unlikely to change anything substantive, and our way of life will be adversely affected.
1) Supercapitalism (2/19)
Robert Reich's treatise on the extent to which America has allowed capitalism to hold sway over democracy. No action that has been taken in the current crisis will allow you to think anything has changed, and that is profoundly troubling.

Off-the-books books

I'm planning a post later this week on the books I've reviewed this year, kind of a year-end wrapup with biggest disappointments, most important, etc., but I thought I'd take a moment to mention a couple of reading projects that I didn't review, mainly because I didn't have anything particularly cogent to contribute.

First, I read through all of the Harry Potter books, and, while hardly life-transforming, they were pretty darned enjoyable. I see the attraction that they hold for the young people. Rowling creates vivid characters and situations, and the building seriousness over the course of the series is downright ominous. You really do care what happens to Harry, Hermione, and Ron, and they are embedded in a fascinating world (though the separation between the world of the mortal Muggles and the wizards seems a tad contrived).

Second, the series of mysteries featuring Dave Robicheaux by James Lee Burke. I shied away from these for the longest time, despite outstanding reviews, because of a blind spot I have: I'm not big on local color or atmosphere. And for these books, set in and around New Orleans, well, I've read too many books set in that town to believe this series wasn't going to be far too long on gumbo and Bourbon Street.

And that's not what the books are about at all. There is local color galore, but it grows organically out of the life of the Robicheaux character. The plots are dense and interesting, and describe an arc of a man's life who is dismayed at the changes in the world around him.

Another thing I find refreshing is that the books don't center on the young. There is not the automatic presumption that a 25-year-old is necessarily more interesting than a 60-year-old, as is true in so many novels. Robicheaux himself starts in the first book at around 48, and gets older realistically.

So I would recommend both series, unless you have no stomach for fantasy, in which case you might be bored with the Potter oeuvre. But definitely get to know Dave Robicheaux.

Michael Crichton has died

And so this year, in which we've lost so many big names (just last week, both Gerald Arpino and Studs Terkel), we can add another. Author Michael Crichton has died at 66.

In April, I wrote a review of a book containing essays on the science found in his books. I praised The Andromeda Strain, while being somewhat dismissive of his later works. But, whatever the flaws in his work, I appreciated the intent, that of bringing science into popular fiction. It was frustrating to see the science distorted, especially when there are authors who are scrupulous in their use of technology who were far less successful, but the intent was worthwhile. Many people who would otherwise have avoided any science were brought in by Crichton's best-sellers, and that's a good thing overall. He will be missed.

A well-deserved award

Congratulations to Joe Posnanski on receiving the Casey Award for the best baseball book of 2007 for The Soul of Baseball. (His post about it is here, and the list of other books that have received this award testify as to its significance.) Just four days ago, I wrote about my respect for Joe's blog and the book, which stands as one of the finest baseball books I have ever read. Whatever your religious beliefs, you have to hope that Buck O'Neil has some consciousness about how much this chronicle of his life has touched people. Great, great book.