Reading Reviews
I fell away from the movies recently (although started back again this past weekend). But I am still reading as much as ever. Thought I would catch up with some comments and thoughts on a few of the books either finished recently or still open and in process..

Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.
The brain is downright fascinating. The mysteries of our thought processes, relationships and for that matter everything that we do within our three pounds of matter are nothing short of awe-inspiring. Daniel Goleman, author of previous bestseller Emotional Intelligence has gone even deeper into the working of the brain. In what amounts to a great summary of the latest brain reserch on social interactions and their physiological bases, Goleman covers the field from sex and love to nururing children to psychopathology. It is nothing short of an amazing book that opens many new avenues of discussion and further research.

Two baseball books have been on my list. First was The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz.
Baseball is a game of statistics as much as it is of runs. Since the earliest days of the game people have been designing new ways to parse these stats to make sense of baseball. Schwarz takes on the truly interesting task of writing a history of baseball stats. And no, it is not dull (if you are a baseball lover!) I learned the background of one of my favorite baseball games- Strat-O-Matic. I learned that the statistics we have are far from exact. I learned that there's big (BIG) money in providing statistics. It is a fun read.

The second baseball book is The Echoing Green by Joshua Prager. It is the bottom of the 9th. The Brooklyn Dodgers lead the New York Giants by two runs with one out and two on. Ralph Branca is brought to the mound in relief for the Dodgers. Bobby Thomson is coming to the plate. It is about to become a moment frozen in Baseball history. Prager does a remarkable job retelling the story of those few minutes from the moment Charlie Dressen walks to the mound to pull starter Don Newcombe till the ball from Thomson's bat sails out in the paradigm of a walk-off home run. A walk-off homer is such a rarity that it is the pinnacle of baseball excitement. Prager is amazing in his detail and appropriately purple prose. He spends chapters on the hours before and immediately after the home run. It is a wonderful read that gets bogged down from time to time in personal stories, but never flags in its ability to capture the greatness of one of the great baseball moments.

Finally for this post there's American Gospel by John Meacham. It would appear that Meacham's main task was to give a much-needed corrective to the overly narrow view of the religious and spiritual side of American history and to, I think, point out that the current religious discussions and disagreements are far from new. He does an excellent job in laying out the underlying religious (and often far from modern, right-wing Christian) views of the Founding Fathers. He gets tedious from time to time as he seems to cover the same ground over and over and make the same observations multiple times. Perhaps he needed to do so in order to get it through our think American skulls that history is often far different from the way we view it. Our American civil religion is as good an example as anything of that truth. While based on Christian (and Jewish) backgrounds, American Christianity and American religion are uniquely American and look like nothing else around the world. A book worth the time to see some different perspectives on who we are as a people.