How to Do a Hook Slide, and Other Improbable Things I've Learned from Books

When I was younger it used to be a source of great mirth in my family that I would turn to books not just for entertainment, but for instruction on all sorts of things that other kids would just, well, go and ask somebody about. When I was trying out for Little League, I went to the library and took out a volume I can still see in my mind's eye, Sports Illustrated's guide to Baseball the Winning Way. My mother laughed for the rest of her life that her son was the only boy who would try to learn baseball from a book.

But when tryouts started, I was the only kid who knew how to do a hook slide. (Alas, this skill would have been much more useful if I had ever got on base. Hook sliding into first is rarely effective.)

I still have the habit. I am a sucker for instructional books, on anything from sports to XML coding. (OK, I haven't tried that one yet. But the day may be coming.) But here, off the top of my head, are just a few of the things I have learned from books since my Little League days.

How to putt. (In truth, I learned this from my wife. But she didn't teach me, as the little volume in the pro shop did, How To Putt in Two. Results not guaranteed.)

How to make a Sazerac cocktail (puh-leez, not with bourbon)

How to manage files in Mac OS X (and many other Mac things--thank you, David Pogue.)

How to paint watercolors (I actually took a class on this but could never master laying a wash until I practiced with the instructions right next to me.)

How to blog. Actually I'm lying. I bought a book on this but then I lost it and I finally realized the six months I spent "looking for it" were really just an excuse not to sit down and do it.  Maybe this blog would be better if I had found it, but at least it's getting written.

Probably the coolest instructional book I've ever read was The Great International Paper Airplane book. Not only did it show you how to make scores of different paper airplanes, but it showed how to make an awesome rocket from a paper match, tinfoil and a paper clip. You haven't lived until you've launched one of these.

I still have a great fondness for books of practical advice and I find it very satisfying to edit them, as I occasionally do. A forthcoming one by Chris Farrell of public radio's Marketplace Money seems well suited to the present moment: The New Frugality: How to Consume Less, Save More, and Live Better.  Is there a practical book that has made a difference in your life? I'd be glad to have a list from readers of this page--just post a comment below.

Which Section of the New York Times D'You Read?

I haven't seen one recently, but the New Yorker often used to run newsbreaks under the heading "Which Paper Do You Read?" where two newspapers had laughably contrasting accounts of the same event. I thought of this yesterday when the New York Times reviewed a new Bloomsbury Press book: Peter Clarke's short, crisp biography of the brilliant economist John Maynard Keynes. It's subtitled The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist.


The Times reviewed Keynes twice in the same issue--once in the Book Review, once in the Business section. For a publisher, this is like getting the Daily Double on Jeopardy--at least when they're two good reviews. These were very favorable, but as sometimes happens the two reviewers seem to have read two different books. Devin Leonard calls Clarke's "the liveliest" of three new works on Keynes, and says his prose "sparkles." But Leonard thinks Clarke's "gossipy" account of Keynes's life is "the place to begin if you want to understand the economist’s personality and charisma." He thinks other authors are stronger at explaining the economic ideas that helped pull Britain and (even more so) America out of the Great Depression. 


Over in the Book Review, Justin Fox thinks Keynes's life is too interesting for Clarke to do it justice! He says, by contrast, Keynes "takes off" only when it gets to the economist's work. "Clarke lays out the development of Keynes’s economics from the mid-1920s to his General Theory, and it’s a gripping journey," says Fox. 


I'd have been happy with either one of these reviews. Together they go to show once again that much of any book review is in the eye of the beholder. And I hope they suggest that whether you're interested in Keynes's life or his ideas, Keynes is a little book with a lot to offer. 

How I Met Someone Way Ahead of the Curve

Back in the early 1990s I was an editor at Crown and I got a really smart proposal from a new author/packager for a book with a novel idea: it would show how to find a job using the internet. This was way before Monster.com or Hotjobs came into being--in fact as I recall it was before most people even had web browsers. You used clunky services like AOL or Pipeline to access the net (in my case, on a Mac SE with a screen the size of a coaster).

I thought this was a terrific, ahead-of-the-curve idea. But it was too far ahead. We finally turned down the proposal because a) for the reason just mentioned, very few jobs were actually listed on the internet back then and b) it was going to be too much of a hassle to package the required 3.5 inch floppy disk with the book.

The really smart guy

How Ordinary People Can Change the World

I've promised not just to flack my titles on this page, but I did say I was going to tell you about them now and again. That's what makes you publish a book--the urge to share it with other readers.

The one that's on my mind today is The Union of Their Dreams by Miriam Pawel. The Los Angeles Times reviews it this coming Sunday and calls it a "masterpiece." I agree. It reminds me of classics like Anthony Lukas’s COMMON GROUND, or Randy Shilts’ AND THE BAND PLAYED ON in the way it weaves a narrative from the stories of ordinary people that you come to care about intensely.

The story of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers is one of the great American struggles for social justice, an astonishingly successful movement built from scratch. Miriam tells it through the experience of eight people who became key players in the UFW, from workers who learned organizing in the fields, to idealistic lawyers, ministers, and college kids. They found meaning and passion in "The Cause," and did incredible things, including leading the most effective consumer boycotts in history.