Brothers Judd Book Reviews

Review of The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950 (James Lothian)

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:01 EST

We've been reviewing books at BrothersJudd for about 15 years now and I've a confession to make. Over the years we've received a number of submissions from friends, family, and acquaintances, as well as subsequent submissions from folks we've previously reviewed favorably. I dread them. These are not professional reviews, so we've no obligation, other than moral, to being truthful in our assessments. But I'd rather not lie to protect someone's feelings just because I know them. I'd like to be honest. And the possibility that someone I like will hand me a clunker haunts me.

On the flip side of this, there are folks we really like who hand us texts so wonderful that I'm afraid my review won't do them justice. It took me forever to review Peter Augustine Lawler for just that reason, and I still can't bring myself to write my long overdue first review of Mark Steyn. Likewise, it's taken me several years to finally address this magnificent book by James Lothian

Now Jim and I aren't friends in the classical sense, but in that archetypal 21st century sense, which is to say that we bicker on the Internet. He has the triune misfortune of being a Catholic, a Yankee fan and Manchester United rooter, so there's ample grist for the mill. But our arguments have always been cordial and I'd consider him a friend. Thus I approached his book with trepidation. Then I read it and was so stunned by its quality that I kept putting off reviewing it because I can't give all of it the consideration it warrants. But I realize that's silly and selfish and I really want to encourage people to read it, so let me give it a late and inadequate, but loving, treatment.

As the title suggests, the book represents a perhaps unique attempt to assess English Catholic thought of the, mainly, inter and intra war years as a coherent whole. To this end, it posits Hilaire Belloc as the founder of a distinct intellectual tradition that included such specific ideas as Distributism, but might best be thought of as resistance to the prevailing ideas of the Anglosphere: democracy, capitalism and protestantism. Belloc, joined especially by G. K. Chesterton in the early years, and by other leading figures such as Eric Gill, Vincent McNabb, Frank Sheed, Maisie Ward and Christopher Dawson sustained a Catholic counter-culture for a period of decades, but one that came a cropper immediately after the Second World War. In religion they were, of course, defenders of the Church, and critics of Anglo-American Protestantism, In economics they were opponents of capitalism, in favor of the property-based agrarian ideals of Distributism. And in politics they were Monarchist, nostalgic for the time when kings were reliably Catholic, and even willing to flirt with fascism, more comfortable with a righteous despotism than with the vicissitudes of mass democracy.

Mr. Lothian provides both mini-biographies of the various figures in this community and sophisticated reading of their philosophies, making it an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the writers or their thought. In the process, he may also impose more discipline and coherence upon a wide cast of thinkers than other analysts would. A judgment on that possibility is beyond my knowledge of their work. But in grouping them so closely and pulling together these unifying threads in their thought he makes it easy for us to understand why the intellectual community failed so quickly after WWII. In essence, we could consider them to have been a natural but doomed rearguard action against the End of History. Natural, because they were Catholics at the heart of the Anglosphere. Doomed because, as WWI and WWII demonstrated, the various ways of organizing human affairs in ways that were not democratic/capitalist/protestant simply couldn't compete with the Anglo-American system, neither on the battlefield, nor in elevating the quality of life (economic and spiritual) of the average citizen. The USSR made it impossible to embrace socialism, even of the most mildly redistributionist sort, as Hitler and company made it impossible to keep advocating for the idea of benign despotism. The post-war affluence of America, in particular, made it difficult to sustain the critique of capitalism. And the very fact that Catholicism and Catholic thought were so successful in the English-speaking world--were they were by now the protestant party--demonstrated the value of religious tolerance. In coming years the Church would accept democracy and capitalism, even if uneasily, under Pope John Paul II and the current Pope has consistently written and spoken favorably about the American separation of Church and State. There's just not much room for a Catholic counter-culture within the English-speaking world when the Pope himself is a Tocquevillian. Catholics are part and parcel of the culture. In the long run, Orestes Brownson was right and Belloc was wrong.

Friend Lothian does not present his argument precisely as I've presented it here. I'm sure we'll argue many of my points. But I can not encourage you forcefully enough to get the book and read it for yourself. It is one of the best and most thought-provoking books I've read in the past several years.

Grade: A+

Review of The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag (Kang Chol-Hwan)

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 00:00:01 EST

Bush Meets Privately With Noted N. Korean Defector (Peter Baker and Glenn Kessler, June 14, 2005, Washington Post)

President Bush met privately yesterday with a well-known North Korean defector who spent 10 years in a prison camp and has since become an outspoken critic of his homeland's government, a move that could provoke Pyongyang just as it was reviving stalled nuclear talks.

Bush invited Kang Chol Hwan, a journalist and director of the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag, to visit with him in the Oval Office and recount his tale of suffering in North Korea, where he was arrested in 1977 at age 9 and had to eat rats, cockroaches and snakes to survive. The White House did not list the meeting on the president's public schedule, but a spokesman later confirmed it.

According to aides, Bush has been fascinated with Kang's story ever since he began reading the former prisoner's book, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag," published in English in 2001. Bush has recommended the book to senior White House and Bush administration officials, who have been poring through it lately as well.

"He found the book compelling and wanted to talk to the author," said spokesman Frederick L. Jones II. "These are issues that are of great interest to the president -- freedom and democracy."

Anyone who still doesn't grasp why the President is so determined to make this Liberty's Century they ought to follow his lead and read this horrifying book. Kang Chol-Hwan's reasonably wealthy family actually moved voluntarily to North Korea, from Japan, because his grandmother in particular believed in the efficacy of socialism and the promise of Kim il-Sung's supposed utopia. Once there they found not just an economic train-wreck, but a vicious police state where they were automatically viewed with suspicion for having lived in Japan. Though it took the grandmother some time to admit it, the rest quickly realized they'd made a terrible mistake and the grandfather soon ran afoul of authorities. Practically the entire family--though not his mother--ended up being sent to the Yodok concentration camp in 1977 and spent the next ten years there.

Mr. Chol-Hwan's descriptions of life at Yodok, which served as a work and re-education camp for individuals and families, is harrowing. Beatings, starvation, debilitating disease, mine accidents, and the like were the staples of daily life. Here's just one extended passage to give some flavor of the horrors he recounts:

In the spring of 1981, I was assigned to help bury the bodies of prisoners who had perished during the previous winter, when the frost-hardened earth had made timely interment difficult. As with any detail, the work was carried out after school; but since it was considered somewhat unusual, we were rewarded with a few noodles to supplement our ration of corn. This would have sufficed to make interring bodies a desirable detail, but the work offered another very practical advantage. The burial team could strip the corpse of its last remaining clothes and either reuse them or barter them for other essentials. But the fringe benefits came at a price. Since Korean tradition requires that people be buried on a height, we had to carry the bodies up a mountain or to the top of a hill. We naturally preferred the hills at the center of camp to the steep mountain slopes near Yodok's perimeter. Their proximity allowed us to follow tradition without traversing tens of kilometers. But the neighboring hills eventually became overcrowded with corpses, and one day the authorities announced we would no longer be allowed to bury our dead there.

We thought the order had been given for health reasons, but we soon found out how wrong we were. I was walking back to the village with my team one evening after a day of gathering herbs up in the mountains, when we were overtaken by a terrible stench. As we walked on, the odor grew stronger and stronger until we finally came upon the cause. There were the guards, bulldozing the top of the hill where we'd buried so many of our dead. They actually dared to set upon our corpses! They didn't even fear disturbing the souls of the dead. An act of sacrilege held no weight for them compared to the possibility of growing a little more corn. As the machines tore up the soil, scraps of human flesh reemerged from the final resting place; arms and legs and feet, some still stockinged, rolled in waves before the bulldozer. I was terrified. One of my friends vomited. Then we ran away, our noses tucked in our sleeves, trying to avoid the ghastly scent of flesh and putrefaction. The guards then hollowed out a ditch and ordered a few detainees to toss in all the corpses and body parts that were visible on the surface. Three or four days later the freshly plowed field lay ready for a new crop of corn. I knew several people from my village who were assigned to plant and weed it. Apparently, it was horrific work. Since only the larger remains had been disposed of during the initial cleanup, the field-workers were constantly coming upon various body parts. Oddly enough, the corn grew well on the plot for several years running.

Of course, that corn rising on a tide of bones is one of the keys to crushing the humanity out of the inmates in a gulag, turning hunger and desperation into weapons against the human spirit:

I attended some fifteen executions during my time in Yodok. With the exception of the man who was caught stealing 650 pounds of corn, they were all for attempted escape. No matter how many executions I saw, I was never able to get used to them, was never calm enough to gather herbs while waiting for the show to begin. I don't blame the prisoners who unaffectedly went about their business. People who are hungry don't have the heart to think about others. Sometimes they can't even care for their own family. Hunger quashes ma's will to help his fellow man. I've seen fathers steal food from their own children's lunchboxes. As they scarf down the corn, they have only one overpowering desire: to placate, if even for just one moment, that feeling of insufferable need.

Ceding to hunger, acting like an animal: these are things anyone is capable of, professor, worker, and peasant alike. I saw for myself how little these distinctions mattered, how thoroughly hunger alters one's reason. A person dying of hunger will grab a rat and eat it without hesitation. Yet as soon as he begins to regain his strength, his dignity returns. and he thinks to himself, I'm a human being. How could I have descended so low? This high-mindedness never lasts long. The hunger inevitably comes back to gnaw at him again, and he's off to set another trap. [...]

At Yodok...pity and compassion rarely extended beyond the family circle into that world peopled with vicious guards and snitches intent on betrayal. When my work team was ordered to bury the body of a widely despised informant, we all began to curse under our breath. Carry that son of a bitch? No way! As far as we were concerned, he could rot right where he was. But the guards threatened punishment, and we had no choice but to haul him up the mountain. With each step we became more enraged at the thought of giving this man a decent burial. Intent on getting it over with as quickly as possible, we dug an undersized hole, then folded the cadaver and stomped it with our feet to make it fit. What a picture we must have made, five gleeful kids kicking a cadaver into its grave. He had comported himself like a dog, and he deserved to be buried like a filthy beast. Yet what about us? What had become of us?

The death of compassion was responsible for worse acts than this. I saw fathers, released from the camps with their bodies broken and depleted, turned out of their children's homes, hungry mouths with nothing left to give. Sometimes the fathers were left by the side of the road to die of hunger. Only their demise could bring any good, by clearing the way for the family's possible rehabilitation. The system seemed specifically designed to stamp out the last vestiges of generosity.

Mr. Chol-Hwan's family was eventually released and when he began to get in trouble with the authorities again he fled to China rather than risk being sent back to the camps. Today he's become an accidental political activist, trying to get the help of America and others for the people of North Korea he left behind. This memoir, though not a great work of literature like those of Solzhenitsyn or Wiesel, is every bit as compelling and cries out for action and rebukes our moral lassitude. The President is right to hand it around like samizdata, but should be giving regular speeches about the conditions in North Korea and demanding change, as Ronald Reagan did of the Soviet Union, and we should be prepared to forcibly change the regime if necessary. Meanwhile, as Mr. Chol-Hwan's co-author, Pierre Rigoulot -- who also helped compile the Black Book of Communism and would appear to be responsible for helping to place the experiences related here into a wider context -- writes in his introduction:

"[T]he regime is ubuesque. Which is to say grotesque and bloody.

Reading this book is a first step toward making the repression in North Korea a major concern for human rights defenders around the world.

It comes decades late but not too late for us to do something.

Grade: A

Review of Once More Around the Park : A Baseball Reader (Roger Angell)

Sat, 31 Mar 2001 00:00:01 EST

I have been fortunate enough to share a love of baseball and a particular interest in the Mets and the Red Sox with Roger Angell, though I've not followed him into his current infatuation with the Yankees. As a result, I've not only read all of his books, his name is also one of the few whose appearance in The New Yorker's Table of Contents suffices by itself to get me to buy the magazine.

Since 1962, which was fortuitously the inaugural year of the Mets, Mr. Angell has written several baseball essays a year for The New Yorker. There's always one on Spring Training and one on the World Series, then a couple of mid-season updates. The earliest pieces, covering the years 1962 to 1972, were collected in The Summer Game (1973). Subsequent five year chunks appeared in Five Seasons (1978), Late Innings (1982), and Season Ticket (1988), then came Once More Around the Park (1991), which mostly reprinted selections from those prior volumes, all of which are, disgracefully, out of print.

Baseball has attracted an extravagantly talented assortment of writers but no one has ever written more beautifully about the intricacies and every day charms of the game than Angell, nor captured the idiosyncrasies of individual players in greater detail. It's impossible to match his prose, so let's allow him to speak for himself :

    * Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal in design and utility.
    It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose: it is meant to
    be thrown a considerable distance-thrown hard and with precision. Its feel and heft are the
    beginning of the sport's critical dimensions; if it were a fraction of an inch larger or smaller, a few
    centigrams heavier or lighter, the game of baseball would be utterly different. Hold a baseball in
    your hand ... Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it across the seam or the other way, with
    the seam just to the side of your middle finger. Speculation stirs. You want to get outdoors and
    throw this spare and sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw
    it. The game has begun.
        -"On the Ball", Five Seasons

    * Baseball's clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a
    slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever
    more tightly with each pitcher's windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little
    half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch... Any persistent effort to destroy this
    unique phenomenon, to "use up" baseball's time with planned distractions, will in fact transform the
    sport into another mere entertainment and thus hasten its descent to the status of a boring and
    stylized curiosity.
        -The Summer Game

    * Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting,
    keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.
         -"The Interior Stadium", The Summer Game

    * The box score, being modestly arcane, is a matter of intense indifference, if not irritation, to the
    non-fan. To the baseball-bitten, it is not only informative, pictorial, and gossipy but lovely in
    aesthetic structure. It represents happenstance and physical flight exactly translated into figures and
    history. Its totals - batters' credit vs. pitchers' debit - balance as exactly as those in an accountant's
    ledger. And a box score is more than a capsule archive. It is a precisely etched miniature of the
    sport itself, for baseball, in spite of its grassy spaciousness and apparent unpredictability, is the most
    intensely and satisfyingly mathematical of all our outdoor sports. Every player in every game is
    subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an
    instant responding judgment - ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay - and an ensuing statistic. This
    encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a
    box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that pickles the scalp of a musician when he
    glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds
    and violins.
          -"Box Scores", The Summer Game

     * This is a linear sport. Something happens and then something else happens, and then the next
    man comes up and digs in at the plate. Here's the pitch, and here, after a pause, is the next. There's
    time to write it down in your scorecard or notebook, and then perhaps to look about and reflect on
    what's starting to happen out there now. It's not much like the swirl and blur of hockey and
    basketball, or the highway crashes of the NFL.

    Baseball is the writer's game, and its train of thought, we come to sense, is a shuttle, carrying us
    constantly forward to the next pitch or inning, or the sudden double into the left-field corner, but
    we keep hold of the other half of our ticket, for the return trip on the same line. We anticipate
    happily, and, coming home, reenter an old landscape brightened with fresh colors. Baseball games
    and plays and mannerisms-the angle of a cap-fade stubbornly and come to mind unbidden, putting
    us back in some particular park on that special October afternoon or June evening. The players are
    as young as ever, and we, perhaps not entirely old.
        -Once More Around the Park

    * There are baseball fans, it must be admitted, who don't like Tim McCarver's stuff. After they've
    listened to the celebrated baseball analyst working another World Series game, say, or a Fox
    Saturday Baseball Game of the Week, or a WNYW Yankees game, with Bobby Murcer, or, before
    that for many years, a Mets yawner or triumph with Ralph Kiner as sidekick, certain friends of
    mine have found fault. A few of them sound apologetic about it, as if they have failed Tim
    somehow; others plain can't stand him. Because I don't understand any of this, I have been at pains
    to listen to their whinings, which can be easily summarized: Tim McCarver likes to talk. He laughs
    and enjoys himself at ballgames. He makes jokes -- puns, even. He uses fancy words. He's excitable
    -- he gets carried away by the baseball. He's always going on and on about some little thing. He
    thinks he knows how the game should be played. He knows too much.
        -"The Bard in the Booth", The New Yorker, September 6, 1999

There are of course those philistines who dislike baseball, and even baseball fans who simply dislike this kind of myth-tinged writing about the game. For the rest of us, the essays of Roger Angell are a must.

We've had a particularly tough winter here in New England--as I write, it is March 31st and we just got another foot of snow. But pick up any one of Roger Angell's books, turn to just about any one of his essays (though you might want to avoid a few of those in Late Innings, when he got caught up in the hysteria over rising salaries and free agency), read one of his descriptions of a play or a player and he effortlessly transports you into that Interior Stadium. There are really only two sports that live on in our minds : golf and baseball. In fact, many years ago I learned a trick to help you get to sleep if you're having trouble--as you lay abed, either play eighteen holes at your favorite course or figure out how you would pitch to your favorite team for nine innings. It's no coincidence that these two sports, which have lent themselves to most of the truly great literature of sport, are the two which can be summoned thus in the imagination.

Roger Angell's writing is so evocative, it too seems to tap into your store of memories,--of players, plays, and games--enabling you to visualize most of the scenes he writes about. Writing in general, and sports writing in particular, just doesn't get any better than this.

Grade: A+

Review of No Longer at Ease (Chinua Achebe)

Mon, 06 Nov 2000 00:00:01 EST

Obi Okonkwo, grandson of the protagonist in Things Fall Apart, is the pride of his Nigerian village, Umuofia. The Ibo villagers pooled their money to send one native son off to England to be educated and Obi was chosen. Now he has returned to a prestigious job with the civil service in Lagos--he's the Administrative Assistant to the Inspector of Schools. He bears the burden of his people's expectations but his exposure to Western culture has distanced him from tribal life and though he is now earning a magnificent living by their standards, he has trouble making ends meet as he tries keeping up with the Joneses in the big city. Borrowing money, he ends up "digging a new pit to fill up an old one." Further complicating matters is his love affair with the lovely Clara, an osu, one of the socio-religious outcasts who also figured prominently in Things Fall Apart.

As financial and romantic pressures continue to mount and his beloved mother sickens and dies, Obi must also deal with temptation, offers of money and sex if he will use his position to assist scholarship applicants. For as long as he can, Obi juggles all of these problems, but gradually they come crashing down on him.

More directly than almost any author I'm aware of, Chinua Achebe faces head on the issues which confront the developing nations in a post-Colonial world. In No Longer At Ease, even as he pokes fun at the remaining English bureaucrats and their condescending ways, he honors their tradition of relatively honest civil service. Meanwhile, he questions whether at least this first generation of natives who are replacing the departing Europeans are truly prepared to meet the same standards or whether a slide into corruption is nearly inevitable.

Obi is a decent enough man and he has the best of intentions, but he gets in way over his head, bringing tragedy down upon himself and disgrace to his village. His situation, as portrayed by Achebe--caught between the traditions and expectations of his village on the one hand and the modern ways and legal constraints of the West on the other--puts him in an untenable position, one where something must give. The title of the book comes from T. S. Eliots's The Journey of the Magi :

    We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
    But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
    With an alien people clutching their gods.
    I should be glad of another death.

Achebe offers a fully realized portrait of one of those returned who are "no longer at ease," aliens in their own country. It's a terrific book.

Grade: A

Review of You Know Me, Al: A Busher's Letters (Ring Lardner)

Tue, 07 Mar 2000 00:00:01 EST

Ring Lardner's wonderful epistolary novel is not merely a seminal baseball book, it is one of the funniest, most savage satires ever written. Jack Keefe is a physically gifted but mentally dense pitching prospect for the Chicago White Sox. In his unintentionally revealing letters home to his friend Al, he repeatedly demonstrates that his overweening ego makes him completely immune to sarcasm from coaches and fellow players, time and again mistaking their acid comments for genuine praise. The letters--replete with chaotic syntax and, shall we say, creative spelling--trace Jack's rise from swell headed phenom to stunned bush leaguer, back to the majors and to stardom. Along the way he meets many of the great baseball figures of the day--Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Charlie Comiskey, etc.--attracts and loses several Baseball Annies (his success with the ladies not surprisingly following his fortunes with the team) and all the while remains blissfully unaware of the less than innocent intentions and innuendoes of those around him.

In Lardner's day, the best writers on a newspaper were often to be found on the Sports page (This is no longer the case, particularly since Red Smith--the single most underrated writer in American Literature--passed away.) and Lardner was certainly among the best of this breed. Though he did not really sour on sports until the disillusionment of the Black Sox scandal, this book is deliciously crusty and acerbic. Though writers like Mark Harris (see Orrin's review of Bang the Drum Slowly) and Jim Brosnan and Jim Bouton are often credited with being the first to treat sports realistically, You Know Me, Al offers a clear eyed look at the kind of selfish, egocentric, undereducated, blowhard who remains the norm in sports to this day.

This is a truly funny book and a marvelous corrective to hero worship.

Grade: A

Review of Shoeless Joe (W. Kinsella)

00:00:01 EST

Of course I've read it before, in fact, I read it every Spring. Actually, I'm sure most of you have read it before, or seen the movie (Field of Dreams). So I'm not going to bother with a plot outline or a conventional recommendation. Instead, I ask you to think about the story from an angle which may not have occurred to you before now. I'd like you to consider the possibility that this is of one the most profoundly conservative pieces of literature that you've ever read.

Alright, I hear you, you're saying I'm a kook & a crank and that it's a singularly unpolitical work. Yeah, yeah, yeah... Well guess what? You're wrong.

In the past fifty years or so, a lot of confusion has grown up about what it truly means to be a conservative. Reaganauts believe it means being anti-Communist and anti-Social Welfare State, Christian conservatives think it means that you take the Bible literally, Fiscal conservatives think it means balancing the budget, Democrats think it means being a racist, sexist, homophobe who supports animal experimentation and toxic waste, and so on. Now obviously they can't all be right, but all of the differing views do contain a kernel of truth. True conservatism means that you treasure and try to protect traditional values and institutions.

This is what the conserve in conservative consists of, the belief that there is something worth preserving in the traditions and societal structures that have been bequeathed to us and that we should exercise extraordinary care in making fundamental changes to them. This is not to say that conservatives believe in absolute stasis or do not believe in progress. Rather, conservatives believe that even as society progresses, we must take care to ensure that this progress is consistent with our existing cultural mores and structure to the greatest degree possible.

This stands in stark contrast to the liberal philosophy (exemplified by the New Deal/Great Society) which holds that our values and institutions are fundamentally rotten and need to be replaced. Moreover, they should be destroyed immediately & we'll come up with better ones as we go along. The result, as we've seen, of the Left's experimentation has been the complete breakdown of the family, the Church and the Community and a society where we seem to have less and less in common with one another.

Which brings us to the conservatism of Shoeless Joe...

At heart, Shoeless Joe is a novel about how one family in particular (the Kinsellas) and America in general, must cling to Baseball as one of the last unifying institutions in our lives. Most of us don't go to Church anymore, let alone the same one our parents and grandparents did. We don't belong to political parties anymore, or at least we're not active in them. We don't all read the same books anymore, Dickens & Twain & Shakespeare, etc. We don't go to the same movies. Hell, we don't go to the movies; we rent them & watch them alone. We don't even watch the same TV shows anymore; gone are the days when the whole family gathered to watch The Dick Van Dyke show or the moon walk. Today everyone has a TV in their own room & Junior's watching Pro Wrestling, Missy's watching 90210, Mom's watching Lifetime and Dad's watching CNBC. All that's left is baseball.

Baseball is one of the last cultural strands that intertwines with all our lives. We all remember our Dad's taking us to games. When we go outside to have a catch we still throw baseballs, not footballs or frisbees, unless they're the only things available. The entire country was gripped with McGwire/Sosa fever last summer. Quick who has the NFL record for most TD's in a season? You don't know. You don't care; noone does. It is baseball that retains the power to bridge our vast cultural and familial divides. It binds the Boston blueblood with the Dominican immigrant and the 90 year old grandfather with his 8 year old grandson. Baseball, with it's odd timelessness & it's change resistant rituals, is one of the few remaining unifying constructs in our lives.

So read this one again, and Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wait Till Next Year while you're at it, and see how shared experiences and memories of baseball can be the great cohesive force in our otherwise fragmented lives.

Grade: A+