While I stopped writing here on a regular basis quite a while ago, I have continued to compile thumbnails of some of the books I have read over the past year.
So . . . with Christmas on the horizon, the annual three-part Book Shelf feature is appearing here this week.
I hope you enjoy it, even though it’s far from featuring all sports-related books — and perhaps it will help with your Christmas shopping.
Enjoy!
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If you haven’t already read it and are only going to read one book in the next while, you should make it author John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast.
I re-read it as June was turning into July, finishing it while we were under a heat warning and waiting for the thermometer to hit 40C. This was the best book I read in 2023 and it’s at the top of the list again this year.
This is an accounting of the 2016 fire that swept through Fort McMurray, Alta., but it really is a whole lot more than that, including more than ample evidence that big oil is complicit in the climate change that we now are experiencing.
Fire Weather is right out of Stephen King country, only it isn’t fiction. It’s frightening; it’s glorious; it’s devastating. It’s all of that and so much more. It also was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
From the nomination: Fire Weather is “an unsparing account of the rapacious Alberta (oil sands) fire, fuelled by an overheated atmosphere, dry forest and omnipresent petroleum products, that consumed the town of Fort McMurray at the heart of Canada’s oil industry, which brings the global crisis of carbon emissions and climate change into urgent relief.”
Vaillant supplies all the scientific evidence needed in explaining to where we earthlings are headed. He also explains that what we don’t know is this — is it too late?
At one point he writes:
“There have been five major extinctions in Earth’s history, but only the end-Permian has been called ‘the Great Dying.’
“It is to this terminal catastrophe — caused, not by meteorites, or by shifts in Earth’s orbit, but by unrelenting combustion — that geoscientists are comparing our own Petrocene Age. Our fire-powered civilization is now in the early stages of replicating that ‘one-in-a-lifetime’ extinction event. It is widely understood in the scientific community that a sixth major extinction is under way, and that it is wholly due to human activity. As confronting as this idea may be, it shouldn’t come as a surprise: never in Earth’s history has there been a disruption like us: billions of large, industrious primates whose evolving behaviour is almost entirely dependent on the universal burning of hydrocarbons. Nor has Earth ever had to carry (at the same time, no less), billions of methane-emitting livestock the size of pigs and cattle.
“There is a terribly symmetry in this. What we are allowing to happen now with carbon dioxide and methane is what cyanobacteria did with photosynthesized oxygen billions of years ago: gassing the planet to death.”
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OK. Enough of that kind of talk. On to Part 1 (of 3) of The Bookshelf, a look at most of the books that I read in 2024. . . .
Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels — Paul Pringle, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times, has stumbled on a drug-riddled scandal involving the head of USC’s prestigious medical school. Write the story. Print the story. Right? Not so fast. It seems there were people at the Times with ties to USC and they threw up one roadblock after another. After more than a year, the story got printed, and this book, which brings to mind Spotlight and All the President’s Men, tells the story of all that went into the investigative reporting, which uncovered two other USC scandals before it was done, and all that went into getting it into print.
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Billy the Kid: The War for Lincoln County — As someone whose early reading habit was fuelled by Louis L’Amour, I have long had a weak spot for good westerns. And make no mistake — this is a really good one. In this novel, author Ryan C. Coleman explores how a young man came to be William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, one of the wild west’s most-notorious gunfighters.
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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee — In this best-seller that was published in 1970, author Dee Brown tells the story of the settling of the American West, and he does it from the side of the numerous Indian tribes, many of which ended up being wiped from the planet. From Time magazine’s review: “Compiled from old but rarely exploited sources plus a fresh look at dusty Government documents, (it) tallies the broken promises and treaties, the provocations, massacres, discriminatory policies and condescending diplomacy.” This is a thoroughly engrossing read, but, oh my, is it painful!
One quotation from Sitting Bull really stayed with me:
“And so, in the summer of 1885, Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, travelling throughout the United States and into Canada. He drew tremendous crowds. Boos and catcalls sometimes sounded for the ‘Killer of Custer,’ but after each show these same people pressed coins upon him for copies of his signed photograph. Sitting Bull gave most of the money away to the band of ragged, hungry boys who seemed to surround him wherever he went. He once told Annie Oakley, another one of the Wild West Show’s stars, that he could not understand how white men could be so unmindful of their own poor. ‘The white man knows how to make everything,’ he said, ‘but he does not know how to distribute it.’ ”
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Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post — Author Martin Baron was the executive editor of the Washington Post when Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos purchased the newspaper. Baron was in that office through Donald Trump’s first four-year presidency. Those four years included all kinds of verbal attacks by Trump on Bezos and the Post. All of that, and more, is chronicled in great detail here, as is the impact of social media on young people entering newsrooms, something that ultimately led to Baron’s retirement.
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A Cool Breeze on the Underground — I’m a big Don Winslow fan; the man can write, for starters. Also, he has great characters and does a wonderful job of developing them. Such is the case here, in one of his earliest works, the first of five books featuring Neal Carey as the main character that was published in 1991. A pick-pocket as a youngster, Carey now is a private detective of sorts; in this one, he is tasked by a U.S. senator and his wife with bringing back a teenage runaway from London. Lots of grit in this one, too. . . . I also read While Drowning in the Desert, the fifth of Winslow’s Neal Carey books. It also was a fun read.
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The Country and the Game: 30,000 Miles of Hockey Stories — Everyone is well aware that hockey plays a rather large role in the lives of many Canadians. But just how large? And what about in some of the places that are somewhat off the beaten path? Author Ronnie Shuker wanted to find out, so he packed up his car — named Gumpy, after, yes, Gump Worsley — and went coast to coast to coast, taking notes the whole time. The result is an entertaining piece of hockey lore.
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The Daybreakers — When I was a whole lot younger than I am today, I was a huge fan of Louis L’Amour’s western novels. I revisited his work in the heat of July 2024 and I wasn’t at all disappointed. This book, from 1960, is the first of 17 he wrote about the Sackett family, and it’s just really good storytelling. There are a whole lot of L’Amour books out there, and they are quick and entertaining reads. . . . I also revisited another Sackett book, The Quick and the Dead, and it didn’t disappoint, either.
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The Deep Blue Good-by — While I had heard of Travis McGee, for some reason I had never read any of writer John D. MacDonald’s 21 books in which he is featured. Well, this one is the first, published in 1964, and it is terrific. McGee is a salvage consultant, whatever that means, who is a PI when he needs the dough. He lives on a houseboat in Florida. While McGee searches for a fraudster who specializes in feasting on vulnerable females, the reader should be prepared for MacDonald’s delicious habit of pontificating on the woes of society, with many of those thoughts still in play all these years later. . . . (BTW, the first four books in the series all were published in 1964.)
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The Diamond Eye — Author Kate Quinn’s book — it’s historical fiction — tells the story of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who went from aspiring Russian historian/librarian to a sniper known as Lady Death in the early days of the Second World War. An engrossing story that involves a friendship between Lady Death and Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the then-U.S. president. This one was rather different from my usual reading tastes, but I quite enjoyed it. I had it finished before I discovered that it was based on a true story, too.
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Even Dogs in the Wild — Author Ian Rankin’s John Rebus is one of the really good characters in crime fiction. And the Rankin-Rebus connection comes through, as usual, in Even Dogs in the Wild. Rankin also manages to surround Rebus with interesting characters and that certainly helps make his books so readable.
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The Exchange — The prolific John Grisham offers this one up as a sequel to The Firm, which introduced us to Abby and Mitch McDeere. However, this one doesn’t nearly approach The Firm as a tense legal thriller. I really was expecting a twist or two, but . . .
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Fer-de-Lance — This book, written by Rex Stout and published in 1934, introduced the world to Nero Wolfe. It also gave us Wolfe’s assistant, Archie Goodwin, who gets more print time than Wolfe and definitely steals the show. Yes, it’s a mystery novel — there has been a murder on a golf course and Wolfe wants the 50-grand reward being offered by the widow to solve it — and a great one. BTW, before Stout was done, according to Wikipedia, he had Wolfe in 33 books, along with 41 novellas and short stories.
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Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion — “Lifelong Phillies fans closely resemble the victims of a chronic sinus condition; they sometimes feel better but never for long.” That is just one sentence from this gem of a book by Roger Angell, perhaps the No. 1 baseball essayist of our time. Here, he writes about the MLB seasons from 1972 through 1976, and he does it with wit, clarity and a real love for the game. He also takes MLB — especially the owners — to task on more than one occasion for what it has done to a game that now decides its champion on frigid fall nights. Great stuff!
Part 1 of 3
TAKING NOTE 