Book Review: Factory Girls

 By Michelle Gallen

• Pub Date: 2022

• Where I bought this book: The Strand, New York 

• Why I bought this book: I am always on the lookout for contemporary Irish fiction, especially focusing on Northern Ireland

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    Northern Ireland circa 1994, to lift a phrase from an English author of note, was the best of times and the worst of times.

    Serious discussions were taking place about possible talks that could lead to a ceasefire by the warring paramilitaries, the leaving of the British Army patrols, and true efforts at self government. But The Troubles went on, with the corruption, bombings, separations, discrimination, and revenge killings a daily fact of life for the two communities. In some ways, it intensified. As one character says,

 "a ceasefire has tae be in the works the way your lot are settling old scores before they have tae lay their guns down."

    Into this steps Maeve Murray, a brash, intelligent, yet insecure Catholic woman, waiting for the results of her GCSE tests, which will determine whether she goes to college in London for her desired journalism degree or gets stuck in the miserably small border town where she lives. For the summer though, she takes a job in a factory pressing shirts. It's a deliberately integrated working place -- meaning Catholics and Protestants work side-by-side -- with a government grant from Invest Northern Ireland and an English manager named Andy Sturbridge, who likes to get friendly with the girls working in his shop.

    Gallen uses to setting to explain The Troubles through Maeve and her friends, Caroline and Aoife, also with summer jobs in the factory while awaiting their test results. Maeve explains to an Englishman who claims Irish heritage about the dilemma of her living in a land that's both Irish and British, but not being accepted by the Republic of Ireland or Great  Britain.

What you don't get is I'm not even Irish -- not proper Irish. I just want tae be. But all I am to the Free Staters is a dirty Northerner. I'm as pathetic as the Prods trying to be British when your lot think they're just a pack of Paddies. You don't want them. Them down south don't want us. Everyone just wants us to crawl away and die some place dark where they don't have to listen to us squealing for attention.

    The language is stark and real. Maeve's voice is real. Caroline is the quintessential teenager trying to find herself. Fidelma, a long-suffering factory hand who takes shit from no one, provides the exasperated feminist voice. Aoife is the daughter of wealth and privilege  from Dublin, stuck in a world she doesn't understand.

    Others show the Protestant perspective, or the outsider looking to take advantage, and those who are hoping to change things.

    It's Northern Ireland as it was before peace. It cries out for a sequel.

Book Review: Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life

 

•  Author: Bill Madden
• Pub Date: 2020

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth, Norwood, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: Tom Seaver was my boyhood idol 

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    I cheered when Tom Seaver won the 1969 Cy Young Award the same year the Miracle Mets won their first World Series. I cringed when the Mets spitefully traded Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds in 1977. And I cried when Seaver died at his California home on Aug. 31, 2020.

    All that I knew. As a result, much of this biography -- Seaver's early days in Fresno, the Mets being able to sign him because the team's name was picked from a hat, and his glorious early career as "The Franchise," the player who led the Mets through their Amazin' days -- was a trip down memory lane. 

    I even knew about some of his later days in baseball -- his only no-hitter with the Cincinnati Reds, his 300th win with the Chicago White Sox, and his being on the field in a Boston Red Sox uniform when the Mets won their second World Series in 1986. After all, as a youngster I grew up reading every story I could find about his life, and I stayed enamored of him even after he was no longer a Met, even after I was no longer living in New York.

    Still, I was surprised by what I did not know: How Seaver was sometimes considered arrogant and distant by some teammates in his later years, how some of his best friends were his catchers, how he idolized Gil Hodges and later Tony La Russa, and how he considered quitting after the Mets let him go to Chicago in 1983 because of sheer incompetence.

    He had a falling out with the Mets over that fiasco, and the author notes that the Mets did little to alleviate the situation. The owners from the late '80 to 2020 often ignored the Mets' history and former players. When Shea Stadium was demolished in favor of Citi Field in 2009, Seaver and others lamented that it looked more like a shrine to the old Brooklyn Dodgers than the Mets. No memorials then existed for the franchise's star players.

    So, while it's a positive history, this is no hagiography. Still, it's a great read, with the workman-like sports writing and compelling insights of a newspaperman. Of course, because Madden's an older newspaper guy writing about an old player, some of the analysis isn't exactly modern.

    Statistics, for example. Whenever the author wants to show how Seaver was facing the best of the best players, he gives the hitters' stats from the old days -- BA-HRs-RBIs. No slashlines, no OBP, no WAR needed. He does the same with the pitching stats -- Seaver's prominence is always proved with wins, strikeouts, and ERA. Again, no WAR, no BABIP, no ERA+.

     And both Seaver and the author scoff at pitch counts. Seaver was appalled that starting pitchers today seldom go more than six innings. And while he acknowledges pitch counts are a legitimate measure, he says they were much higher in the good old days. Today, pitchers top out at 80 or 90 pitches per game. Seaver says he often threw 140 pitches a game. Teammate Nolan Ryan often threw 150 or more.

    Still, it's a fun book, and Seaver is overall a likeable guy who led a good life.

Book Review: Going the Distance

Going the Distance: The Life and Works of W.P. Kinsella, by William Steele

Kinsella's life was successful, yet uneven. The same can be said for this biography.

For starters, it was filled with too much minutia. I do not need to know about every date Kinsella went on in high school, nor every address where he lived.

Instead, I would have liked more information about the reviews and responses to Kinsella's works, especially the debate about the fiction he wrote in the voice of indigenous people. The view that Kinsella was guilty of cultural appropriation grew throughout his life -- particularly as he became more popular for his other works -- but was treated as an afterthought in the book, spread out amidst the pages, rather than as an idea that should have been evaluated as a specific criticism of a portion of his work.

Perhaps the structure of the biography dictated how it was handled. Instead of categorical breakdown, it was written in a strict chronological order.

Still, the book presented a wealth of information about Kinsella's life and writings. He set his goal on being a writer at an early age, and despite feeling hampered and discouraged throughout those early years, made good on his goal. The book also showed how incidents in Kinsella's upbringing on an isolated farm outside of Edmonton, Canada, affected his prose. He used other experiences in his life in his stories and novels, but denied his works were biographical. Again, this issue could have been explored in a chapter, instead of interspersed in the book.

Kinsella, who died of assisted suicide in 2016, also had a disjointed private life. He hated most of his early government jobs, because he hated government and bureaucracy. He became a university professor for a span, but for the most part, he hated teaching. He hated all forms of religion, but his description of religious people could mirror a description of himself.

"... (T)here is a smugness about every one of them, a condescending sense of superiority, which the more they try to hide it, the more it shows."

The book is at its best when it explores Kinsella's growth as a writer. That may be because the growth went along Kinsella's timeline -- for the most part, he got better as he grew older and more experienced.

He was a prolific writer, often having five or more stories and books in process. He often would expand his short stories into novels -- a criticism by people who thought he was unduly padding out his stories -- but one that I would argue produced some of his best work. Shoeless Joe, for instance, started out as a short short, then a novel, and later became the movie Field of Dreams.

Steele spends a lot of time describing how the book traveled its path and grew into a cultural touchstone. He also discussed the impact it had on Kinsella and his life as a writer.

Kinsella's death in 2016 came as a shock, but his health had long been poor, and he went out as he wanted. He spurned life-extending measures that would have caused much pain and suffering, and choose to end his own life.

Book Review: Girl in the Picture

The Girl in the Picture, by Denise Chong

For many of us of a certain age, it is the defining picture of the Vietnam War: several children, followed by soldiers, fleeing down a road. In the middle, a young girl, naked, her arms held out from her body, crying, with a look of absolute fear and pain on her face, running with them.

Her name was Kim Phuc, and we now know that she and her family were running from a napalm attack on her village in South Vietnam. Soldiers from South Vietnam, at the behest of the United States, had dropped napalm during an attack meant to clear out Viet Cong guerrillas. But the napalm missed its target in the nearby woods, and instead landed directly on the village full of women and children.

This is the story of the aftermath: How the war affected people in Kim's village, and in greater Vietnam. How the war -- and specifically the attack on Kim's body -- affected her life.

Kim and her family suffered. She suffered from the injuries of the burning, from the literal and metaphorical scars it left. (As described in the book, napalm is a horrible tool of war. It's a burning gel that sticks to the body, and attempts to pull it off just spread it around.) Meanwhile, her family's successful eating establishment was destroyed by taxes and fees the new communist regime in Hanoi enacted, and by the incompetence and greed of corrupt local officials who demand more and more.

Meanwhile, the government began to use Kim's story as propaganda. It forced her to interrupt her studies -- she at one point dreamed of becoming a doctor to help people -- and otherwise exerted control over her life and her decisions. And while the government sent Kim abroad -- to Russia, to East Germany, to Cuba -- it always kept a close eye on her.

Written 10 years ago, this remains is a wonderful, insightful book. It introduces us to another culture, and explains the differences between people from the north and those from the south. It's a great help to Americans, who, says author Chong, all-too-often see Vietnam not as a country, but as a war.

Book Review: Wine in the Sand

Wine in the Sand, by Jim White

I am generally not a fan of stories of wars or memoirs of soldiers. I never served in the military -- too young for Vietnam, too old for anything else -- and quite frankly didn't miss it. I'm not sure I could have survived. I tend to avoid violence and consider myself mostly a pacifist.

So I looked at this book -- a tale of White's time in the Air Force during Desert Storm -- as a kind of adventure, feeling I could read it with an open mind because I know the guy who wrote it.

And you know what? I liked it.

White is kind yet cocky, laid-back but intense (he once finished an unofficial triple Ironman, with the support of many friends, because he wanted to), friendly, generous, and witty. So is his book.

What I expected from a memoir of war was lots of heroics, ramped-up violence, gung-ho feats of daring-do, cynicism of the highest order. It's none of those -- OK, there is just the teensiest bit of sarcasm -- but instead it's chock full of tales of guys just trying to survive the best way they know how, trying to do an impossible job, and looking for the best in themselves and others.

It's a weird little book: Short chapters (I like; it makes for quick reading), no page numbers (didn't like), strong, explosive writing, and black-and-white Polaroid pictures.

See? I do know the guy.
 And Karen Minzner,
who took the cover photo,
is a great photographer.

White writes of his involvement in the lead up to Desert Storm -- his unit of fire fighters was one of the first sent to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. He writes of their survival and new experiences in a strange land. He writes of skirting the edges of military rules and regulations, and of driving hours through the desert to find his true love. The book is mostly one of good times. Even when he gets serious about three-quarters of the way through, he finds the positive.

The absolute fear of dying violently during a SCUD missile attack? Hey, it's just an extended version of the Fourth of July fireworks, with a little homemade wine on the side.

So, about the title. Is it a play on "line in the sand," which President Bush used to defend the initiation of the Gulf War? Or was it used because Wine on the Desert was already taken?

I need to know.

Book Review: The Big Fella

The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, by Jane Leavy

One hundred years ago, Babe Ruth was a star pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. Then he was sold to the New York Yankees, and everything changed.

He moved to the outfield, became one of the most powerful hitters ever to play, and upended both the game of baseball and his place in it. Not only did Ruth lead Major League Baseball away from the dead ball era to its new-found reliance on the three-run homer, but he brought it out of the darkness of the Black Sox scandal and into the thrill of the Roaring '20s. During the decade, Ruth was baseball: its face, its star, its savior.

And according to this wonderful new biography of the Babe, he also changed the face of America. He helped bring in the celebrity-athlete culture. He was the first person to regularly lend his name and his image to endorse products. His lifestyle -- both on and off the field -- was breathlessly reported in the press. His personality helped sell newspapers -- more than a dozen dailies in New York City in those days -- and bring to life radio broadcasting, then in its infancy. His financial planner and adviser, Christy Walsh, was baseball's first agent, and he helped to make Ruth realize his enormous earning potential -- both from his play on the field, and his being the the face of baseball off the field.

Ruth also created myths about himself and his image, with equal parts truth and legend, and nobody seemed to be able to tell the difference -- or even care about it. Truthiness was born, long before Stephen Colbert thought of the word.

Leavy, who has written masterful biographies of baseball legends Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax, is at her best here. Her research is remarkable -- her appendices, notes, and sources section at the end covers more than 100 pages. She delves into some of the myths -- Ruth's early life, his marriages, his children, his racial heritage -- that have never adequately been explored before. And she tells it in an easy, readable style.

That being said, let me add a few caveats. The book's editor could have paid a bit more attention; I found a number of sloppy errors and repetitions throughout, especially in the first few chapters. And the author's writing style in this book was a bit confusing. She chose to jump around in time, writing about Ruth's barnstorming tours with Lou Gehrig, and mixing in Ruth's history, and his seasons with the Yankees. Many times, I found myself confused as to exactly where in time she was talking about.

But those are quibbles.