Reviews and Comments

Of the tell-all books written by former athletes, this one probably has the most debauchery and chaos per page. It's like Mötley Crüe's book if they'd been Italians from 1950s Brooklyn.

Joe Pepitone earned his lessons in life. Failed marriages, bottomless debt, abandoned children, broken promises, violence. And baseball! And so, so much sex. Plenty of funny anecdotes and celebrity cameos too.

I wish the publisher would reissue this book - which came out in 1975, when his third marriage was still going - BUT with a detailed Afterword about all the dumb self-destructive shit Pepi continued to do until his death 48 years later.

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James Acaster is a (real) comedian in the UK. In this book he tells a story of quitting the Internet c.2020 and then attempting to recreate online experiences in real life. Opening an art gallery to display photos of his lunch. Stalking his ex with night vision goggles. Unfriending people by doing them actual harm. Starting businesses he's totally unqualified to run. Along the way he gains a cultish gang of followers ... but, are they his Friends?

Read this book if you appreciate puns that are so bad they're good.

To a potential reader who hesitates at the length (600 pages) - don't worry about it. It's not dense, and it's almost all personal or community stories. A pleasure to read.

The writer, who is deservedly well-known as a journalist and essayist, is not a historian by training. That is a good thing for the readability and structure of the book. She interviewed about 1,200 people for the project but narrates in rich, dirty detail the lives of only three. Between the chapters of their individual stories are contextual chapters about the South, North, and West in different eras.

The analysis of an academic historian would have made the scope of this book impossible.

Julia Meitov Hersey translation, 2018?

It's not elegantly written, but straightforward with a neutral tone. I already knew bits and pieces about the Revolutionary era - Porfiro Diaz, Zapatistas, resentment of foreign privilege, and ultimately President Cárdenas. But this book put it all together.

Almost every chapter - which are chronological, proceeding from about 1900 through 1940 - gives updates on the issues that sparked the revolution: land reform, political centralization, church-state relations, and economic nationalism.

Worth reading!

The author would be the first to agree that European sources are almost all we have to chronicle the thousands of native American individuals who ended up in Europe between 1492 and the 19th century. Even those sources are quite thin when it comes to the intentions, ideas, and feelings of the Americans. That's one of her main points, in fact.

As a result, the bulk of this book is the historian doing her best to weave the fragments with ideas from modern native writers, anthropological and contextual information, and a very correct anti-colonial perspective.

I think I've read all 15 books in the Night Soldiers series. This one has some really distracting flaws:

• not just similar, but identical sentences from when characters are introduced and then reintroduced later (which happens often in spy novels)

• the hero is known by name to the Gestapo, and wanted for arrest, yet he lives in the same apartment the whole time and is even LISTED IN THE TELEPHONE BOOK. Nevertheless the bad guys tell a bounty hunter they will pay $ for the hero's capture, "if you can find him"

• no twists or surprise betrayals

• unlike the other Furst books, no honest acknowledgement of the ultimately small, almost negligible effect that local spies and resistors had on the outcome of the war

I don't know. Furst seems to have mailed this one in. He even made the protagonist a professional spy novelist.