Once again I am behind on these, so let’s get caught up with my last four reads.
The Miracle of St. Anthony – Adrian Wojnarowski
What a book! Future NBA scoops guru Woj spent the 2004–04 season embedded with the basketball team at St. Anthony High School of Jersey City. The program was famously coached by Bob Hurley for 45 years. For much of that time Hurley also worked tirelessly to keep the school open, spending countless hours fundraising and donating the money he made from speaking engagements and clinics to the school. He, and others, kept it afloat until 2017.
That 2003–04 squad was one of his 26 state title teams, finishing the season undefeated and ranked #2 in the country. Unlike his four national championship teams, this one didn’t have a single D1 senior recruit on the roster.
The book is about more than basketball, though. Woj gets to know the kids on the team, the circumstances they came from, the daily challenges they face, and so on. He tracks the Sisters who run the school as they also fight to keep the facility from being closed and kids from dropping out.
Hurley had a lot in common with Bobby Knight, someone he was friendly with. He was fiery. He held players to a high standard. He expected as much from them in class as on the court. You can see where his sons got their (over) intensity. Unlike Knight, though, Hurley seemed like someone you could have a genuine conversation with that wouldn’t involve him spending most of the time proving that he was smarter than you and everything you believed was wrong.
Like any sports book, it was fun to see how much things have changed in the 20 years since this came out, and how players who seemed like can’t miss prospects at the time faded away.
Lazarus Man – Richard Price
I’ve read a couple of Price’s books in the past, and watched movies and TV shows he’s written for. He never disappoints.
Here he writes of the aftermath of a building collapse in New York, and how several people are affected by it, including a man pulled from the rubble alive three days after the collapse. As these folks navigate the days after the collapse, they give us a view of what everyday life is like for people in Harlem in the late 2000s. These glimpses into their lives pull the story along, but there’s never any great conflict or common ending that their stories are leading us towards. There is a rather notable reveal/twist late in the book, but it is hinted at throughout and doesn’t really shock the reader or flip the story in a dramatic way.
Price is such a good writer, especially of dialogue, that this thinness in plot is fine. Not every novel needs to have a great, deeper meaning or statement on life. That lack does keep this from standing next to his earlier, better works, though.
The Gray Man – Mark Greaney
A decent, mindless, assassin kills a bunch of bad guys novel. There’s a whole series of these. I’m not sure I’m going to work through them all – Lord knows I have plenty of other spy series I could jump back into – but Greaney’s 2024 entry landed on a couple Best Of lists so I may selectively pick some that got good reviews and/or focus on topics that interest me.
Notes On A Foreign Country: An American Abroad In A Post-American World – Suzy Hansen
I forget where I heard about this book, but I also read an article Hansen published in a magazine within recent weeks, so something got her into my feed.
I knew that this was all about her observations as an American living overseas over the past decade, but I did not realize it was almost pure analysis. I was hoping for a book that was as much travelogue as extended piece for Foreign Affairs.
That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it. Hansen spends the entire book explaining how pretty much everything about her world view was challenged and changed by the decade she spent living in Turkey. She dove into how little history Americans know and understand about other countries. How even our overseas reporters, who are supposed to learn about and explain other cultures to us, are often woefully ignorant about the lands they are reporting from. She gets deeply into how Americans don’t understand the ramifications of our foreign policy and the direct effects it has on people in other countries. How what is “good for America” is often purely about economics for us and has no regard for anyone crushed along the way. And so on.
I tend to agree with much of her perspective, which shouldn’t be a surprise. Pretty woke, right? Where this is important for all Americans is in explaining the “why do (insert ethnic/religious/cultural/racial group identifier here) hate us?” questions we face all too often. It’s because we’ve routinely crushed, or helped to crush, popular, effective governments in other countries because their interests didn’t align with ours (or more specifically with our biggest corporations who have operations in these countries). It’s because we have a long history of supporting very bad people because we didn’t understand local interests or assumed because their opponents might lean to the left, that meant they were deeply indebted to the Soviets. We would never let another world power come into the US and tell us what we could and could not do inside our own borders. But we’ve been doing that to people all around the world for nearly 150 years now, since we first started building our own empire by taking Cuba and the Philippines from Spain.
Even if you disagree with her contentions, Hansen’s perspective is important, especially in an age when we are equally threatened by small, non-governmental actors as we are by China and Russia. Like so much of the bullshit we face these days, a little interest in and empathy towards others could go a long way towards making the world a safer place.