Books, by Pablo

Whether you’re a major league couch potato, life-long season ticket-holder, or teaching game to a beginner, Watching Baseball Smarter leaves no territory uncovered. In this smart and funny fan’s guide Hample explains the ins and outs of pitching, hitting, running, and fielding, while offering insider trivia and anecdotes that will surprise even the most informed viewers of our national pastime. ⇐

What is the difference between a slider and a curveball?
At which stadium did “The Wave” first make an appearance?
How do some hitters use iPods to improve their skills?
Which positions are never played by lefties?
Why do some players urinate on their hands?

Combining the narrative voice and attitude of Michael Lewis with the compulsive brilliance of Schott’s Miscellany, Watching Baseball Smarter will increase your understanding and enjoyment of the sport–no matter what your level of expertise.

Zack Hample is an obsessed fan and a regular writer for minorleaguebaseball.com. He’s collected nearly 3,000 baseballs from major league games and has appeared on dozens of TV and radio shows. His first book, How to Snag Major League Baseballs, was published in 1999.

Zack Hample has caught roughly 3,000 baseballs from 41 Major League stadiums. His first book, How to Snag Major League Baseballs, was published in 1999. Since then, he has been interviewed hundreds of times for print, radio, and television. He currently writes for minorleaguebaseball, and has a popular blog, The Baseball Collector, chronicling his obsession.

A dark-haired, olive-skinned boy is forced to fend for himself during the war and wander alone from one Slav village to another, sometimes hounded and tortured, sometimes sheltered and taught. This is a portrayal of the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, seen through the eyes of a boy.

Why is it that after more than twenty-five years I still remember the “glass-shard-meatball” scene from this novel? Of all things! Anyways… it curious to note that Kosinski is being partially autobiographical in this book. He was, in real life, a gold-digger and an extreme opportunist.

While a plague rages through 14th-century Florence, 10 nobles seek refuge in the countryside for 10 days. Each tells a story every day, resulting in the 100 tales that form The Decameron. Boccaccio’s celebration of passion and disdain for hypocritical clerics serves as a nice foil to Dante’s strict moralism.

One of the most influential literary works of our time, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women — brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul — this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia in 1928. His many books include The Autumn of the Patriarch; No One Writes to the Colonel; Love in the Time of Cholera; a memoir, Living to Tell the Tale; and, most recently, a novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was translated into English by the renowned translator Gregory Rabassa. García Márquez waited three years for Rabassa’s schedule to become open so that he could translate One Hundred Years of Solitude. He later declared Rabassa’s translation to be superior to his own Spanish original.

Scout and Jem Finch are growing up in the tired old Alabama town of Maycomb. Their father, Atticus, is the local lawyer and as a single parent tries to raise his children with honor and respect to their individualism. With the Depression on times are hard, and there is no money to be found anywhere in town.

To amuse themselves Scout, Jem, and their best friend Dill begin a relentless campaign during their summertimes to get Boo Radley, their reclusive, legendary neighbor, to come out of his house. They concoct endless schemes and even go so far as to create a play that details Boo’s life. Atticus forbids them to have anything to do with Mr. Radley, urging them to let the poor man be.

Atticus is a good man, and one day takes on a case that affects him personally. A black man, Tom Robinson, is accused of beating and raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. Most of the county is convinced immediately that Tom is guilty of the crime, and begin to look at Atticus in a very negative way for actually defending him and trying to do right by him. Scout and Jem begin to get tormented over their father at school, and Atticus begs them not to get riled up over the town’s prejudice.

As the trial begins it becomes apparent to Scout and Jem that there is no way that Tom Robinson could have beaten and raped Mayelle Ewell, as he’??s a cripple. Atticus proves that to the jury, and Scout and Jem are astonished when Tom is slapped with a guilty verdict anyway. They begin to realize that many people in town are very prejudiced against blacks, and their hearts are saddened by it. It’?s hard for them to understand how people can be so mean to each other, and they both begin to see that, even in court where things are supposed to be unbiased, men’s hearts bring in their own hatreds.

It isn’t much longer that Tom is shot and killed for trying to escape while in prison. Jem especially takes the whole affair hard, and it takes him a long time to come to grips with the jury’s decision, and Tom’s death.

After the trial has died down Bob Ewell, Mayelle’s father, begins threatening Atticus for embarrassing him in court, and resolves that he’ll get him back one way or another. Atticus is convinced that he’s all talk, and passes it off as such.

Time crawls past, and finally Bob Ewell is good to his word and attacks the children Halloween night with a knife. He breaks Jem’s arm and almost kills Scout, but Boo Radley, of all people, comes to their rescue and saves them. The sheriff, Heck Tate, hushes the whole thing over so Boo Radley will not be dragged into the spotlight, and Scout is thrilled to finally get to meet the man they for so long fantasized about. As she walks him back home, she realizes that all this time he was watching them from his front porch windows, and just for a little while she is able to stand in his shoes.

Bought this book for my son Patrick over a year ago and he has yet to read it because I made some reference to a racial them when describing it to him.

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.
Five years, four months and twenty-nine days later, on April 14, 1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were hanged for the crime on a gallows in a warehouse in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas.
In Cold Blood is the story of the lives and deaths of these six people. It has already been hailed as a masterpiece.

Saw Truman Capote on Dick Cavett thiry-years ago. When asked why he was famous Capote answered, “Well… I’m a homosexual… and um… I’m a writer… and um… I’m a good conversationalist.”

Capote and Harper Lee were friends and writing their mutual master-pieces at the same time… In Cold Blood for Capote and To Kill a Mockingbird for Lee.

Julia is the narrator’s aunt. She is 32, he is 18. They fall in love and race around having whacky adventures trying to find someone to marry them, since the marriage isn’t quite legal. In this wonderfully crazy Peruvian novel, that’s the sanest part - and what’s more, it’s true. The author Mario Vargas Llosa, really did marry his aunt.

The recent English translation of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (originally La tia Julia y el escribidor) should win it a place on Western bookshelves beside the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It belongs to the same ‘magic-realism’ genre as 100 Years of Solitude, a way of writing so different to conventional Western literature that it should be read for an experience of the world’s cultural diversity - giving one’s cultural tastebuds a surprise, like eating quick-fried seaweed after a lifetime of soggy baked beans.

The book begins at a radio station. The youthful narrator’s job is to write news bulletins but in his spare moments he painstakingly composes and re-composes ‘literature’: solemn short stories, heavy with half-baked symbolism. In the same building there is quite another kind of writer, Pedro Camacho. He unashamedly writes soapopera. His words flow torrentially and scripts are broadcast uncorrected to an adoring, uneducated audience clamouring for their next piece of melodrama.

But is it really so easy to separate ‘good literature’ from soap? Llosa is playing a gentle joke on his would-be sophisticated readers and the truth slowly dawns as the novel goes on.
The book is constructed so that every alternate chapter tells an instalment in the love story of Aunt Julia. But the interleaving chapters introduce us one by one to the lives of bizarre and fascinating characters, a panoply of Peruvians who lead tantalising lives. For example, we meet a tough policeman on the beat who finds a mysterious black man, his face crisscrossed with a myriad knife-slashes, skeletally thin, wandering naked in the wintry Lima night. What’s his story?

And then there’s the alcoholic aristocrat who became Peru’s foremost football referee. How did that come about? And there’s the doctor, a fine and upright citizen with an aquiline nose and a penetrating gaze, who goes to his beautiful young niece’s s wedding celebrations to find the bride-tobe’s equally beautiful brother in a state of frantic despair - and the bride pregnant. The groom turns out not to be the father of the baby - so who is? The tormented brother confesses his true love and passion for his sister. Shock, horror. What will happen next? Well, sorry, it’s the end of the chapter, time to go back to the story of Aunt Julia. You’ll have to wait for the next thrilling installment.

And that’s the trick. You do wait, cliff-hung, each time for that next thrilling instalment. It takes a good while for the penny to drop that these chapters are Pedro Camacho’s soap-opera. For all our intellectual pretensions, we’ve been had.

The realization only begins to dawn when we are told that Pedro Camacho’s fans have been writing in to complain that he’s getting his characters and plots mixed up - and at just about this time the perplexed reader has also begun to wonder about the plot: the stories seem to be getting more and more fantastic and the names seem to be getting mixed up. Is it the book,or is it one’s memory playing tricks…? A character half-way through the book is described as having ‘an aquiline nose and a penetrating gaze’, and the phrase seems uncomfortably familiar. Wasn’t the doctor described like this before? Yes, he was.

The plots gather up into a vast whirlwind, where bits of debris from one story line collide with fragments from another in glorious chaos. But the author’s tone never changes - everything is told in the same quiet, considered manner. Lunacy with a straight face; like Monty Python mayhem described soothingly in a voice-over by a cricket commentator. By the end one is being introduced to characters with aquiline gazes and penetrating foreheads. Sense dissolves into nonsense as the reader dissolves into laughter.
I won’t give any more away, but leave you with this thought: Llosa is much admired in Peru, not only as a novelist he’s twice been invited to head the government. Imagine Mrs Thatcher or President Reagan writing a novel like this before taking up their appointment. Perhaps it should be obligatory.

On a Latin-American novelist jag, I read many stacks by Llosa, Puig, Garcia-Marquez, Cortezar and others. Native Spanish novelists convey things through their words (even in translation) that English writers do not. However, my distant friend Valeria Rodriguez from Argentia told me that one cannot truly understand any Spanish novel unless it is read in Spanish. You decide for yourself, because if that is the case Garcia-Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude, which astounds me in English, would surely give me eternal bliss in Spanish!