Reviews by Chris Kane
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
By Michael Lewis
No one writes more insightfully about people and money than Michael Lewis. In
books like Liar’s Poker (which focused on the bond markets) and The New,
New Thing (the Internet), Lewis has profiled a succession of brilliant, outsized
personalities who have transformed the way "value" is calculated in
their respective fields. Here, Lewis turns his gaze to baseball, building his
story around Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane. Following Beane through
the 2002 Major League Baseball draft and season, Lewis documents how a new generation
of executives, inspired by baseball writer Bill James, is using statistical analysis
to challenge many of the game’s most smug and cherished assumptions. These
range from the unexamined notion that bunting and stealing improve a team’s
chances of winning (they don’t) to the claim that "he who has the
most money wins" ("he" doesn’t…always). Writing with
intelligence, humor, and insight, Lewis dissects how the second-poorest team
in baseball put James’ theories into practice, winning far more games per
dollar than any other club, including the spendthrift Yankees. Diehard Red Sox
fans can hope that Bill James’ version of moneyball will trump George Steinbrenner’s:
Sox General Manager Theo Epstein is a proponent of James’ theories, team
manager Terry Francona is an alumnus of the Athletics organization, and James
himself is a consultant to the team.
The Guns of August
By Barbara W. Tuchman
With a diamond-cutter’s sharp vision and deft touch, Barbara Tuchman crafted
a small but nearly perfect gem of twentieth-century history. Starting with the
state funeral of England’s King Edward VII in May 1910 – attended
by many who would play a pivotal role in the coming disaster – Tuchman
chronicles the historical forces and outsized personalities that would converge,
in the summer of 1914, to drag a dozen countries and millions of fighting men
into the First World War…and lay the seeds for the Second. Forty years
after its publication, The Guns of August is as gripping as any thriller, its
characters as real and compelling as those in a truly great novel. At the start
of a new century, in a world plagued by seething regional conflicts, this book
reminds us how easy it is to slip, without ever intending to, into the abyss
of war.
©Copyright 2008 Libretto,
Inc. |
