The Bronx Zoo

 

The Bronx Zoo: The Astonishing Inside Story of the 1978 World Champion New York Yankees by Sparky Lyle and Peter Goldenbock

A diary of the 1978 New York Yankees baseball season told by 1977 Cy Young Winner Sparky Lyle. Such baseball books are not that uncommon.  I read Jim Bouton’s “Ball Four” about the 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Keith Hernandez’s “If At First” about the 1985 (not 1986) New York Mets. Bouton’s book, when released, caused an awful lot of controversy due to its supposed realistic off-color portrayal of the Major Leagues. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was so upset about it, he tried to coax Bouton into claiming the whole thing was fiction. Bouton refused. It seems a bit silly when read now.  THIS was controversial?? It’s definitely mild by today’s standards.  Hernandez’s tale of 1985 was a lot more colorful, yet even that one was probably heavily censored.

Sparky Lyle’s account of the 1978 Yankees is PG rated at best (or worst) so don’t expect much dirt and gossip. It’s a pretty straightforward tale of a year in baseball.  There’s a few four-letter words scattered about, and some angry name calling against some of the lesser desired personalities, but it’s mostly baseball. Like a 162-season itself, this can wear on one a bit. We read a lot of the same things over and over again. There’s only so much that goes on during a baseball season that makes a reader want to sit on the edge of their seat and keep turning pages.

Some highlights: Lyle starts the season as the reigning Cy Young champion, yet overlord owner George Steinbrenner signs Rich “Goose” Gossage to the team during the off-season.  Huh?  Lyle is obviously frustrated, and remains so the entire year, but he mostly handles the situation with a shrug-of-the-shoulders mentality.  He accepts his new “bullpen role” better than most.  Then we read about the back-and-forth between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.  The Sox had what seemed to be an insurmountable lead in the division as late as August, yet the Yankees manage to climb their way into the top spot and manage to win the division on the last day of the season.

We then have poor Billy Martin who is let go mid-season and replaced by Bob Lemon.  Lyle and the team seem to like Billy Martin ok, and seem to think he takes too much unnecessary heat from meddling owner George Steinbrenner. For those that followed the Yankees during the Steinbrenner era know that you need a mainframe computer to keep track of all of the managerial changes that would happen.  I honestly lost track how many times Billy Martin was hired and fired during this time. Anyway, George Steinbrenner is definitely NOT liked by the team. Neither is Reggie Jackson.  Reggie Jackson comes across as an egotistical hot dog who only cares about getting acknowledged by the press, and if that means doing detrimental things to the team (both on and off the field), such is the price for stardom.

Most of the other personalities on the team blend in the pages, and other than guys like pitcher Ron Guidry who went 25-3 that year, it’s easy to get names confused unless you were a fan of the team 40+ years ago.  Recommendation to all jocks who want a write a book such as this: Include a “cast of characters” at the beginning or end of the book. Most of your readers, especially several years in the future, will have hard time juggling all of names other than the superstars. It doesn’t help when Lyle is always mixing in the players’ nick names as well;  Cat, Dirt, Gid, Count, and several others  I don’t even remember.

My only main frustration with this book is that once the regular season ends, Lyle basically gives up his narrative. He should have also included the post-season, yet he just throws in the championship and world series details as a quick afterthought. It’s a bit like when the teacher tells the students that time has run out during a test and they have to turn in their paper, so the remaining students quickly scribble one or two more hastily written sentences.  Other than a quick postscript of Lyle getting traded to the Texas Rangers at the end of the season, there’s no reflection, or summary included here. Since the season was so colorful and memorable, the post season deserved a bit more attention than what Lyle gave it.

To be truthful, 45 years later, I really don’t care THAT much, but had I been a diehard Yankee fan, I would have wanted more at the end. A lot more.  Anyway, it’s fun to read a bit about what the professionals endure during a season.  There have been better books.  Again, I would recommend Keith Hernandez’s “If At First” for a similar retrospective. Even though the Mets didn’t make the post-season in 1985, it’s still a much better tale.

 

The Lincoln Highway

 

The Lincoln Highway – by Amor Towles

I imagine it’s awfully difficult to follow up such a brilliant novel as “A Gentleman in Moscow”. Especially since that book was only the second one on the author’s resume.  It’s best not to compare this one with that one.  This was a very good book. Had I not been the wiser, I doubt if I would have ever made the connection that these two books were written by the same author.  Writing this book for the author must have been how Michael Jackson felt every time he tried to release an album after “Thriller”.  Never mind.

This book takes place in 1954, and it simply couldn’t have been the same tale had it been told in the current day. We meet 17-year-old Emmet Watson. He’s being released from a juvenile detention facility somewhere in Kansas a bit early because his father in neighboring Nebraska has just passed away. There’s also no mom. She left years ago.  When Emmet arrives home, he discovers that the bank is also about to foreclose on the family home, so he and his 8-year-old brother Billy decide to take a small inheritance that their father secretly left him (can’t let the bank know) along with Emmet’s Studebaker, and head to San Francisco via the Lincoln Highway to try to find mom.

Out of the blue appears two of Emmet’s chums from the detention facility. It seems they “escaped” to see Emmet but have every intention of going back. They just need a ride to the train station to go back, so they pile into the Studebaker with Emmet and Billy.

Well, let’s just say things get a bit sidetracked. The four boys manage to go on quite a journey, but not the one we expected.  During the journey, the author alternates every chapter with a different character providing the first-person narrative.  So we learn about what’s going on in the heads of all of these boys (the two friends from the detention center are named Duchess and Wooley).  We learn about their pasts, their desires, their personalities, and what exactly it was that put them in such a place as a juvenile detention center.  We end up believing that these three are all “good boys” essentially, but circumstances dealt them fates that most kids don’t have to deal with, so they end up in less than pleasant environments for much of their lives.

In many ways, little Billy is the “center” of this story.  He seems wide-eyed an innocent, and he came across as a tad too smart for an 8-year-old.  He carries around an adventure book that has 26 stories of famous people. The book is for 8-year-olds, of course. One story for each letter in the alphabet. There’s even a blank chapter for the reader to include their own adventure.  Do you see where this is going?

There was a time, around 60-75% of the way into the book, where much of the adventures and predicaments in this book became a tad too unbelievable, unrealistic, and even unnecessary.  I almost felt as though the author was trying to pad his novel by an additional 100-pages or so.  Yet I thought the book had a satisfying ending, even though there were still an awful lot of unanswered questions, and a lot of events that I thought we would get to read about that never made it into the story.

I would highly recommend this book. I’ll point out again, though, that I didn’t see any similarities between this book and “Moscow” however.  I’m sure the story isn’t for everybody, but I felt it was very enjoyable and loved reading about the characters as they progressed through their journey.

Jesus and John Wayne

 

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Shattered a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Jesus and John Wayne isn’t so much a book as it is a rant. The author is mightily ticked off at the state of affairs with both Christianity and politics in the 21^st century and this book serves as an outlet for her frustrations.  You get the feeling that if she had been verbally dictating this book, she would have been pointing and shaking her finger and screaming into the microphone.  If she was typing notes, you get the feeling that she had the CAPS lock key on the entire time.

It's not that her sentiments are incorrect nor faulty. In fact, her observations are spot on. The premise of this book is that sometime in the middle of the 20^th century, evangelical Christians stopped worshipping the true Jesus, and instead started worshipping John Wayne – or a Jesus with traits of John Wayne. This was initially very subtle, of course. If we’re completely honest, it’s hard to follow the advice of someone who tells us to turn the cheek when what we really want to do is whack them over the head with a baseball bat.  So evangelical leaders (and their devoted flock) have taken their Bible, performed some massive hermeneutical gymnastics, and turned a humble Galilean into to an assault weapon yielding action hero.  It’s amazing how far people who claim to identify as a Christian will go to justify such behavior.

Here's an example: I confronted an individual claiming to be a Christian because of his abusive, nasty alienating behavior.  I told him that our Bible tells us that God is love, and his behavior is a far cry from “love”.  His response?  Being nasty and screaming insults at people causes them to see the error in their ways, and if you’re “kind” instead, that gives them the impression that their behavior is acceptable.  When I heard this, I replied with eyebrows raised, that this kind of behavior doesn’t normally work with rational, levelheaded people.  He then barked back at me “That’s the Holy Spirit’s job!”

O-KAYYYYY

So, yes, there’s a problem with a lot of these type of individuals and they are the focus of Du Mez’s book. Her book is essentially a linear history lesson of all of the times evangelicals and politicians have emanated this behavior with no positive results other that a bizarre testosterone rush that these individuals get when “worshipping” in multi-million dollar buildings while speaking (screaming actually) in tongues.  She goes from one event to the next. One corrupt evangelical to the next. One “masculine” church movement to the next.  She doesn’t ever come up to breathe.  We hear of all the accolades every time a conservative figure is elected to office, and we hear all of the “we’re definitely now in the end times!” moaning every time a Democrat is elected. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

What I would have preferred the author do, is slow down her manic paced frustrations a bit, and maybe articulate about just why this behavior is, in fact, Un-Christ-like.  There are plenty of good examples and arguments that she could use from scripture, but being a history major, the author might not actually know that much about such things.  This is a shame. One almost wishes she could have co-written this with a reputable theologian so we can see just how damaging this “American Christian” movement has become, and perhaps look at alternative behaviors that the Christian church should be emanating.

I should point out that she wrote the book after Donald Trump’s election to the office of President after 2016, yet before his failed maniacal coup of 2020.  My guess is she watched the horrific events as they transpired on January 6^th and wanted to shout “I told you so!”.  (Side note: I remember when that event occurred and thinking that it just might wake people up to realize how deranged  and dangerous Donald Trump was.  Whereas some came to their senses, there are still people (including highly visible church leaders) who are stupid enough to follow and believe him.)  One almost gets the impression that had she tacked this project a few years later, she may have called the book “Jesus and Donald Trump” instead.

This isn’t an easy book to read due to what is known as “trigger levels”.  When you read about the behavior of so many white evangelicals throughout the years, your tendency is to hurl this book across the room.  It’s hard to stomach.  It’s even harder to understand how so many can still be so blind to the lies and dangers of the movement. Related note: America is not, nor has it EVER been, a “Christian” nation. If we could stop thinking it was, that just might fix a lot of issues right away.

I would also re-emphasize that the author seems to go against EVERYONE who is a White Christian; even the Veggie Tales creator.  I thought that was a bit farfetched at times, but she does acknowledge that there were some good results and platitudes behind things such as The Promise Keepers Movement of the 1990s.  Again, what the author says needed to be said, I just wished she could have toned it down a bit and not sound quite so angry.  Of course, it’s awfully hard NOT to be angry when you see what so many facets of evangelism have done do Jesus and his teachings.