Twelve Black Code Monkeys

We were given Time and Again, by Jack Finnie, as our first summer reading assignment in the summer between 9^th and 10^th grade, I believe. As was typical, I got about ¼ through the book before putting it down. At the time, my attention span was much more suited to comic books or stuff of similar length. I held onto the book, though, and it is still on my bookshelf over 20 years later. Of course it remained one of those books that simply sat there waiting to be read all this time, along with the hundreds of others! I am not only easily distracted, but a slow reader. I like to buy books that sound fascinating, but often don’t read them or if I do, I will start them but never finish.

This is why Audible.com has saved me in many ways. The company manages downloadable audio books via a subscription setup that is very reasonable compared to how much it costs to actually buy tapes or CD’s of these items. Of course borrowing it from the library would be far cheaper, but not nearly as convenient, and one would only have temporary access to them. With Audible I can download my books, play them on my computer at home, or transfer them to my iPod and listen to them on my commute to work, while out walking, etc. Because I can listen to them at other times, I feel like I am getting in extra time to read things when I normally would not be able to. Over the last several years by doing this I’ve been able to read over 100 books I think.

So, I was delighted when I found out that Audible had replaced their previous abridged version of Time and Again with a new unabridged one. Audible has tons of unabridged titles, but some of the publishers it deals with I suppose only put out abridged versions of their titles. Yet, as unabridged titles become available, Audible often replaces the abridged versions and even sometimes arranges for audio versions to be made of books that otherwise don’t have them.

Time and Again is one of those books that innately appeals to me because of my background and interests. So it seems odd that I would have waited so long to read it, but there you have it. First off, it takes place in New York City, Manhattan, where I grew up. Second of all, it deals with time travel, a subject that fascinates me endlessly (my favorite movie is 12 Monkeys). Thirdly, it deals with the New York City of the 1800’s, and illustrates these at least partly through old sepia photographs that have always fascinated me, especially considering my love of photography. And finally, of course, the fact that this was a book I was supposed to have read 20 odd years ago.

The book, as I’ve mentioned is about time travel. Simon Morley is a 28-year-old art director in an advertising agency (another link since my father was both an art director as well as a photographer) not very happy with his life or career. He’s been seeing a woman and thinks one day they may get married but doesn’t seem very excited about the prospect. His job of drawing insipid adds for soap and other products does not exactly fill him with excitement. He is then seemingly randomly approached by a stranger. This amiable man convinces Simon to come to a meeting where he is given some tests and let in on a secret government project involving time travel. Simon, in the beginning anyway, sees himself agree to joining the project almost as if he’s watching someone else and not actively making the decision himself.

What ensues is Simon’s adventures in the past and the common theme of whether one can affect the past (and thus the present), and more to the point whether one should. These themes always get me thinking and continue to occupy my mind way after seeing a movie or reading a book that uses them. Like I’m sure almost everyone else, I sometimes imagine how life would be different for me if I could go back in time and tell myself or my parents something that would affect the way they raised me or what I did with my life early on. Actually, the fantasy of simply waking up one morning in my childhood bed a the age of, say, 7, but with my current memories, is sometimes even more compelling, but I suppose not as often shared by others as simply going back in time to give forewarnings. Of course what I always come to realize about these things is that while alleviating some issues, they would also mean that most of my current friends, even my wife, would not know me. Sure I could somehow look these people up and try to establish relationships with them, but it would be artificial. They would be wholly different relationships if I could even establish them at all. Knowing that I would be losing those current valued relationships is enough to stop me and decide that maybe the devil I know is much better than the devil I don’t!

Getting back to the book, I had a curious experience with it. The book deals with Simon’s own “cultural immersion” but into a different time rather than place. He was constantly having to adjust his thinking about what he previously took for granted, let go of some stereotypes of the past, etc. In an ironic way, though, I had the same difficulty adjusting to the cultural differences simply between my current time in the 21^st century, and the time that Finnie wrote this book, around 1970, or almost 35 years ago! While many of the modernisms that Simon goes on about in his comparisons between his current day and the past that he is visiting are still here today, many are long gone. The most noticeable difference is his attitude towards women. Apparently all the government people heading the project have “girls” and Simon often speaks of them in a way that while not blatently condescending, certainly indicates that he is still of a time where women are seen as having predefined roles different from men and can be neatly all pigeonholed in this way and others. The appearance of women is also a main focal point of their characters, although he certainly does finally break through that to explore the innerworkings of some of the more central female characters. The other very noticeable difference is that instead of using the term “Blacks” or “African Americans” he uses the pretty antiquated term of “Negroes” which really makes him sound from another time! There are other issues like this, but in all, it almost seemed like I was looking back on an old recounting of someone who was then recounting something from a yet more distant time. Did this double filter distort things? Perhaps. It was at least to some extent distracting. But the overall story was entriguing enough that I was able to get past this issue.

The main other thing that bugged me about this was how the actual time travel worked. I remember back in high school when first trying to read it being very excited because the method was very accessible to me. Now I just find it hokey and incredibly unscientific and improbable. Not that time travel is probable to begin with, but the way it is explained in this book, it’s almost as if a significant chunk of the population could do it in their living room if they new the “secret code.” I won’t tell you the actual method in case you want to read it yourself, but suffice it to say, it’s a bit silly.

The book was narrated by Paul Hecht, and while not terrible, I thought him pretty mediocre as a narrator. Up until the last third of the book, I thought he really only had one voice. He might sound a bit rougher for some characters, but otherwise there wasn’t much difference in intonation, accent, etc. Finally there were some characters who had irish or other ethnic accents which he simply couldn’t ignore because these accents were referenced in the text. Luckily they were only a few lines so he could not butcher them too much. There were also some words that he simply pronounced wrong. One in particular I just couldn’t understand because it’s not an uncommon word by any means: grimace. Instead of putting the accent on the first syllable and pronouncing it like “grim-iss,” he pronounced it with the accent on the second syllable as “grim-ais.” Perhaps that is an alternate pronunciation of the word, but I’d never heard it, so it sounded as if he simply didn’t know how to pronounce a fairly common word.

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Middlesex, for those who’ve been living in a cave (or just watching tv and playing video games), won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year. Penned by Jeffery Eugenides, author of the widely acclaimed Virgin Suicides, the book covers the 80-90 years worth of family history, the family of the protagonist, Caliope Stephanides, or Cal, or Callie. And the history here is not just for history’s sake, but also due to the fact that Cal is a hermaphrodite, and this genetic disorder is traced back through his ancestors as unwitting carriers, some of whom bear a certain “guilt” for contributing to it’s likelihood, despite their not understanding such consequences.

Eugenides writing style makes for addictive reading. Cal ostensibly is narrating, but she narrates details of her grandparents past that infers omniscience. In this sense it’s almost Oracular. Of course, the Stephanides family is Greek in origin like Eugenides, and so one can draw parallels to Greek tragedy or even to epic prose of Homer. I have heard others compare his style at least in Middlesex to that of Nabokov, but I cannot vouch for this, not having read any myself yet.

They story begins with his paternal grandparents who live on the mountainside town in what is now Turkey. His grandmother, Desdemona, inherits the silkworm trade of her parents at an early age and cares for her younger brother Lefty. They eventually must flee as the Ottoman army retakes the territory from the Greeks, and end up in roaring 1920’s Detroit. The rest of the book is much of a history of post World War I America as a family saga. We get a close-up picture of Fords factories, the beginnings of the black empowerment movement, World War II, Detroit race riots of 1967, and more.

Interspersed in his family and eventually personal history, Cal’s present-day persona, at 41, is still trying to come to terms with his sexuality, which still rules him and his relationships, or lack thereof. He his living in Germany and meets a woman whom he is interested in. So while we learn about Cal’s coming of age and family history, at the same time we get a present-tense story of how his current self is developing (or not) a relationship. This allows one to piece together the motives, methods, and eccentricities of present day cal as we learn about what made him what he is. This is a very effective device.

I actually listened to this book, an unabridged version from Audible.com. The narrator, Kristoffer Tabori, was as excellent as the book itself. He manages to believably encapsulate so many different characters from the 20’s to the present day, with a myriad of accents and dialects impeccably.

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Bang! Getting Your Message Heard in A Noisy World, is a book by the CEO and vie president of the New York advertising firm KTG, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, plus a third author, Delia Marshal, who was not identified so I assume she was a “ghost writer” of sorts. The book is billed as a manual of sorts for advertising agencies to be affective at creating memorable ads that actually increase business.

I listened to this book as audio via Audible.com, but by the language, and conversational tone, I feel like it would have been a very quick read on paper. The authors throw a lot of humorous analogies at the reader, although some of them are a bit trite and so fall a bit flat. It was a fun read, listening to all the war stories behind different famous ad campaigns (KTG did the AFLAK commercials and one of the authors worked on other very famous ones like Kodak moments, Toys are Us Kids, Herbal Essences Totally organic experience, etc.), how they got from initial ideas to the final product.

Although there was some good general advice in the book, I felt a lot of it was fairly common sense. Take risks, be nice, make ads that are different enough to be noticed but not so out there as to only be understood by a small group of elitist ad connoisseurs, etc. I suppose they are good things to hear about as reminders, but it would have been interesting to learn about somewhat less obvious and more “insider” details. For example, my mother used to be an award-winning advertising copywriter, working at some large New York ad agencies in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, including Bill Bernbach, Leber Kats, Footcone Belding, and more. However, by the mid 80’s when she was in her mid-50’s, she was pushed out of her job and could not land another one no matter where she went. The reason? She was too old. Ageism is one of those things that is rampant in advertising even more so than many other professions – at least for the creative people. It is assumed that if you are older than 35, you are not in touch with the youth culture, and we all know how companies and advertisers faun over the young. Yes, there are products geared towards older people, primarily drugs and other health remedies, and perhaps with the baby boom generation getting older this will mean more advertising firms keeping their creative staffs longer. My mother was actually lucky, looking 5 or 10 years younger than her 55 years.

Perhaps such things were beyond the scope of this book, meant as more of a general treatise on advertising for those who have little or no knowledge or experience with the field. Even with the somewhat general approach, as I mentioned, it was interesting to hear about the stories behind the ads and even stories behind ads that never came to be for one reason or another. So definitely some light, entertaining reading which might be useful to some extent for some, but not any significant resource for all but the most beginning uninitiated.

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Michael Ruhlman, a journalist, decided he wanted to write about what it was like to become a chef. So he went and enrolled himself in the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). The Making of a Chef is about his experience going through the institutes classes, working at it’s restaurants, and not only learning the skills one needs to cook, but actually the mentality that is required to become a successful one.

We first go through basic skills classes with Ruhlman and learn many basics with him. What is roux? What is Béchamel? How do you make a perfect consume from scratch? We then go onto to classes on bread-making, “garde manger” and many others. We pick up a few tidbits here and there about what these classes are about, what it’s like to actually be in them, and a few of the skills and information that is actually taught. Ruhlman also does a great job simply narrating his own experience not only learning the skills, but relating to the varied teacher chefs and fellow students. We get to know some of his fellow students quite well.

Ruhlman went through these classes in 1996, so I sometimes wonder how things have changed since with the advent of the internet. Listening to the book (I bought it through Audible.com), one can’t help to get excited about the CIA. Here you can go in a complete novice cook and within weeks you should have a mastery of at least many of the basics of cooking. In less than two years, you are ready to actually be on the line in a respectable restaurant. This is definitely boot camp for cooks, and from someone who has a very uneven knowledge of cooking it is enticing to think you could just go there and become a master… or at least proficient.

As tempting as this is, you also learn in this book (as I’ve heard elsewhere) how hard a job it is to be a chef. It is long hours of very physical work, on your feet most of this time. You work every holiday – in fact holidays are the only days you can’t take off – unless you are in the rare restaurant that doesn’t serve. You also have to keep up a relentless pace in order to keep customers from leaving due to impatience, and you have to do this and still put out a product that is basically perfect or very close to it in quality. The CIA, as Ruhlman describes it, prepares its students for this by the intensity of its classes, which give time limits for preparing everything and deducts points for the smallest imperfections. To want to become a chef, Ruhlman suggests (and I would tend to agree with him), one has to have it in ones bones. A dilettante like myself who gets excited by the IDEA of being a chef would probably very quickly end up bowing out due to these overwhelming pressures involved.

One word of caution about the Audio version of this book. It originally comes from Blackstone Audio Books, so they are most likely at fault, but I have complained to Audible who provide the book to its subscribers as well. There are some pretty bad problems with the audio. Nothing that makes in unlistenable, but still distracting enough to be annoying. The main issue one notes almost immediately is that somehow there is a lot of repeating of a sentence or part of a sentence. When I say a lot I don’t mean it’s constant, but it might be enough, if edited to knock 10-20 minutes off of the 12+ hour audio book. The narrator’s voice, which is not bad, keeps getting clipped off, only to start again after a pause. It’s almost as if they took a steady tape of the guy and chopped it at various points and inserted pauses intentionally. This also ads more time to it, and while distracting, also doesn’t make it unlistenable. Finally, it almost seems as if they recorded each few chapters with different equipment. The narrators voice gets louder and then softer and then higher and the lower, and then less treble, and then more treble. It’s pretty uneven, and yet another distraction. Hopefully Blackstone and Audible will clean up this recording and make it a much more polished product. Even given these inadequacies, though, I would still recommend it to any foodie, gourmand, or gourmet out there, or just someone who likes a good story and a look into a subculture that one would normally never get to see.

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I love to read, but I’ve been cursed with this lack of ability to read at any reasonable pace. I’ve tried speed-reading on my own and through a class but without extreme dedication to the program, it’s just not worked. The fact that it takes so long to read for me (generally in the vicinity of 10-20 pages per hour) makes it much harder to pick up a book in the first place. After all, if it takes you forever to read a book, you can spend that time a lot more efficiently elsewhere.

Back in college I got addicted to talk radio. I’m not talking about Howard Stern or Dr. Laura. Rather I was an NPR junky and even listened to short-wave stations from around the world. This was when the USSR was first starting to open up a little with Gorbachev’s Glasnost and listening to the state-run propaganda while they were trying to muddle their way to more open discussion of at least domestic matters was fascinating. Anyway, I began to see that one could listen and learn stuff and not have to be tied to one spot (vis-à-vis a walkman), or even have one’s full attention one thing. After grad school when I got a car and started commuting to work (some of these commutes could be long), I would listen to the radio all the time. Although I still enjoy NPR, especially in the last few years, much of the news has been rather depressing. I would rather glance at Washingtonpost.com or CNN.com when I get to work, then to be drowned in very in depth coverage of a rather depressing issue. So audio books seem to be the best solution. You can pick the topic and it can be a serious look at history, a language lesson, a travel narrative, a mystery, or really anything you’re in the mood for. You’re not at the mercy of others for what you will hear.

Many of you may have read my previous book reviews here, most of which have actually been reviews of books I listened to as opposed to “reading.” I use a service called Audible.com. It’s been around now for several years and they have quite a nice selection of books, a lot of them being unabridged and read by the authors or by skilled narrators. You can buy books ala carte, and even in this way you save a good amount over what you would pay for, say a book on tape or CD in a bookstore. But the real savings comes when you subscribe to one of their “listener” plans. I am on one that gives you two books a month for $20. $10 for a recent best seller in print is a steal, let alone an audio version of it. They also have tons of magazines, radio shows, and newspapers in their catalog that you can either subscribe to or just buy individual editions. Many of these are even on a daily basis like the New York Times digest or various public radio shows.

Because of Audible I’ve probably read 60+ books in the last few years, probably a 10-fold increase in what I was doing before that with standard printed books. This brings me to the part of the blog-entry that is hardest. It’s the one where I grovel for financial support. Actually, not quite that bad, but just a request that if you’ve found my reviews and info about Audible helpful and you happen to then subscribe to them, I would be grateful if when asked you entered my audible id (‘leviwallach’) when asked who referred you. I get a couple of free books when people do this, not cash, and you can in turn recommend them to others and get the same thanks in return. Grovel, grovel.

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Sarah Vowell is a unique voice, in more ways than one. In A Partly Cloudy Patriot, her third book, she mixes astute observations with historical facts and throws in a lot of wry humor and biographical musings that will have you laughing out loud at points. Idiologues will probably be impatient with the contradictions. Although she is unabashedly liberal, she is also unabashedly patriotic and fervent about the documents of the founding fathers. Not that these two are contradictory, but the way things play out liberals are often seen as unpatriotic because they are not flag wavers shouting “America first no matter what.”

If you’ve heard Sarah on This American Life, you know she has a very distinct-sounding voice, which I can only describe as being a little like Lisa Simpson. If you like This American Life, I would highly recommend getting The Partly Cloudy Patriot in the unabridged audiocassette or CD (I listened to it on Audible.com) as it’s a lot like listening to 5 hours of This American Life, although it’s just Sarah with a few cameos (from the likes of Conan Obrian, Paul Begala, and Norman Lear) thrown in narrating quotes from presidents and friends. Of course if you’re a They Might Be Giants fan like myself, you will also get to enjoy their little ditties they apparently created for the audiobook at the start and end of each chapter. Most of these are instrumental but there are a couple of typically helarious ones with lyrics.

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“Travel narratives” as they are called, are one of my favorite genres of book. They are a kind of autobiographical story or diary that tell the story of visiting a new place. Unlike your standard travel guide, they do not simply contain lists of standard attractions, accommodations, and the like. They are instead, a personal perspective on one person’s experience visiting or even living in a new and foreign (to them) place.

Probably one of the better known ones to come out in the last 15 years is Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence. Mayle and his wife, both English, bought a house and moved to Provence in the late ‘80’s and describes the process of renovating the house, getting to know the local culture, and that of France as a whole. Mayle has a wonderful, wry wit and describes the absurdities of everyday life in Provence with great humor. Mayle is also self-deprecating and although he describes many local eccentrics, they eccentricities as described are just as endearing as they are baffling. Food, as it does throughout France, plays a supporting role in the book. Food is such a central piece of French culture and life that listening to A Year in Provence, I often feel as though living in the United States has deprived me of a key facet of “quality of life.” If the stereotypes are true, one can only imagine how much more a brit might feel comparing his native cuisine to that of France!

The beauty, the wonderful food, and the fascinating people of Provence shine through this wonderful travelogue of Mayle’s and I heartily recommend it for those who like this type of book. I listened to an abridged version through Audible.com, and would have loved to listen to even more via a fully unabridged version, but so it goes. Sometimes you must take what you can get and hope that eventually more will be offered in the future.

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The late veteran newsman came out with his Charles Kuralt’s America a while back about his “perfect year” where he visited twelve of his favorite locations for one month each. They are all in America, and vary wildly in terrain, climate, population, and culture. Kuralt jubilantly describes the unique beauty of each and every one of them. This is kind of a condensed travelogue. Well, I should note that I listened to it as an abridgement. Nevertheless, you still see very clearly through his eyes as if you were there yourself.

Kuralt visits New Orleans, Key West, Charleston, Main, Vermont, Montana, and Alaska, amongst many other places. You don’t get the typical tourist views either, but much more of a native’s view, since Kuralt over the years has built friendships with people in these places and they show him a lot of stuff that is off the beaten path. His commentary is always self-deprecating, charming, and informative. We hear about little historical anecdotes, legends, and obvious tall tales, but Kuralt manages to couch even the tall tales as imaginative creations as opposed to demeaning them as ignorant ruralisms.

My only complaint about this book is that it was too short! As I mentioned, I listened to an abridged version through Audible.com, but if you can read the book or find an unabridged audio version, all the better!

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As a self-professed “fan” of science, I snatched this audio book up from Audible.com. It was very promising, as it concentrated its 8.5 hours on six renowned scientists, most of whom I’d read about before, but not all.

On the one hand it did have some advantages over the other two types of audio books about scientists I’ve read. For example, although A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is amazingly entertaining, because it covers so much, it gives just tiny tidbits about a given scientist – perhaps the largest pieces on one would be the equivalent of a page or two. Certainly less than five. Then on the other side of the spectrum are books such as Galileo or The Seashell on the Mountaintop, which give you in-depth knowledge of one scientist with maybe a few others thrown in but with only cursory attention. Although this might be great in some ways, it can sometimes be a bit too much information if the scientist is not interesting enough or the book isn’t written well. Six Great Scientists doesn’t have these problems because it divides it’s attention between six, but gives each enough attention that you do not feel cheated either.

Another thing that I liked about Six Great Scientists was that one of it’s aims was to talk about the personalities and not just focus on the science and scientific discoveries. Although this luxury is often available with the single-scientist biography, I still learned of things which I don’t remember reading about in the single-scientist biographies I’ve read. For example the fact that Galileo was an accomplished cook, or that he had created an instrument that his workshop made which sold like hot-cakes (of course I can’t remember the name of it now – no it wasn’t the telescope!), or a story about how Einstein had to temporarily leave a movie theater in Princeton once but went to the box office to make sure that they would know he had bought a ticket already (he was afraid they wouldn’t recognize him).

On the other hand, there are a few things that annoyed me about this book. For one, it is written in a somewhat bookish style. The author uses $100 words in places where they just are not necessary and some of these words I’d never heard of. I understood them, but it was almost as if I was reading something that was 100+ years old when certain forms of certain words were still in use that you just never see today. And no, the book wasn’t written that long ago. I can’t seem to find when it was written, but it was obviously at some point after Einstein’s death in 1955 at least.

The other main thing I struggled with was the narration. After about two or three hours I finally got used to the narrator enough to where I was able to fully concentrate on the content, but in those first two or three hours I was constantly wondering whether I should simply scrap the idea of listening to it and move onto something else. The narrator for my edition was Patrick Cullen, which is not the same as the narrator for the audiocassette version or CD. Cullen was not so much monotone as he was for the most part just uninteresting, or uninterested in the material. There was no life in his reading except in the rare occasions where he was quoting a letter that was obviously animated. Part of this may have to do with how the book was written in that a lot of it is written in short sentences, listing one fact after another. But still, Cullen seemed at times like we was reading a grocery list or something equally unexciting.

As mentioned, the author, J.G. Crowther, tried to include a lot of personal details and this helped to make the book a lot more enjoyable. I think without this and with the bad narration and the bookish style, it would have been deadly, but the personal accounts saved it. Still, at time these personal touches went a little far. Really, there was no reason to know what a typical shopping list for Newton was or a detailed listing of the furnishings in the Curies apartment. Fortunately there was not too much of this, but when it was included, it was a bit annoying.

All in all, I would recommend this book if you are interested in the scientists it covers – Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Madame Curie, and Einstein. Just consider getting the audio cassette or CD before the Audible.com version, and if you must get the Audible.com version, just note that you may have to struggle through the first quarter of the book before the narrator is no longer a distraction…

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Although I haven’t followed baseball much in the last 10-15 year, growing up in NYC with the Yankees dominance in the late ’70′s, I was obsessed. I must have seen at least half a dozen games a year for a while. They were often planned as part of birthday celebrations or just for fun. During one of these outings Roy White even gave me a bat as we watched him practice. The bat was slightly cracked, but I didn’t care, and I still have it today! Then the Yankees traded my favorite player, Willie Randolph, and that kind of broke the magic spell for me. I still would check out games now and then, but it was less and less. Just this last Spring a friend invited me to participate in a fantasy league for the first time. I would have loved to do this (I had decided to get into a fantasy football league a couple of years ago because I felt that although I knew the basics of the game I really didn’t know the players and didn’t really have a favorite team and so the fantasy league would help me with this, and it did), but since I knew how much time even fantasy football could take and I knew that fantasy baseball was much more demanding due to the much greater number of games, and the fact that I’m getting married in October, well, I didn’t think it would be a wise choice at least this year.

Moneyball is a book about Billie Bean, the general manager for the Oakland A’s and about how he has helped to take a scientific analysis of the game and use that to make choices regarding who to draft and who to play. The author, Michael Lewis (of Liar’s Poker fame), takes us back through baseball history and the personal histories of Bean and others on the A’s. He also highlights the originator of the concept, Bill James. For someone with even a marginal (or sentimental) interest in the game, like myself, this book will be fascinating. For anyone who likes numbers, statistics, or science, it’s also a great read. Lewis mixes these personal bios, layman analyses, and occasional play-by-play narrative into a delightful and riveting account of a central issue that could change how players are looked at and payed in the big legues.

The arguement in a nutshell is that up until this new method (termed sabermetrics), was developed – and really still now with all teams aside from the A’s, since no one has been bold enough to utilize the method in practice – players have been valued generally in a very subjective way by most of baseball, fans, and commentators. Scouts, for example, have a prejudice that works against anyone who is overweight, who looks funny, who doesn’t pitch fast or run fast. For hitters most people concentrate on their batting average. However, given the overall goal of baseball being to get one’s team into the playoffs, the main goal is really just to win games. Games are won by scoring runs (and not letting the opposing team score more than you). Given this, it is argued, the most important statistic for a hitter is the ability to get on base, but this isn’t always reflected in the batting average since walks can get you on base as well. Another quality which is not given the credit due is the simple ability to take lots of pitches from the pitcher (whether one eventually gets out or gets on base). In other words, knowing when to take balls or even strikes, how to foul balls off that one knows they can’t hit effectively, etc. What this does is wear down the pitcher to the point that they will eventually start making mistakes – not necessarily at the given at bat but even later in the game. Other statistics that are given way more credit than they are due (and seemingly don’t correlate with anything that helps the team consistantly) are home runs, stolen bases, and earned run average.

I actually listened to an abridged version of this book narrated by Michael Lewis himself and definitely recommend that version. You can listen to it via a subscription to Audible.com, or just by getting the audiotape or CD.

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