|
|
1 |
Seth Mnookin Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top
New York Simon & Schuster 2006 0743286812 / 9780743286817 Hardcover New
0743286812 0743286812 From Publishers Weekly The soap opera that is the Boston Red Sox is in full bloom in Mnookin's (Hard Times) tale about how the organization coalesced to finally bring Red Sox Nation its first world championship since 1918. After reviewing the dismal bigoted history of Boston--it was the last team to integrate, in 1959, and somehow managed to snub both Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays--Mnookin, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, explains how the sale of the Sox to a group led by John Henry resulted in changing the direction of the franchise. And like a true soap opera, this one is filled with heroes and villains. There are the ballplayers (Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz and Curt Schilling) and the executives (owner Henry, CEO Larry Lucchino and GM Theo Epstein). There are the intangibles like Fenway Park--to stay or not to stay, that is one of the questions--and the highly opinionated sportswriters of Boston, Peter Gammons, Dan O'Shaughnessy and the late Will McDonough. There is enough inside stuff here to send the average Red Sox fan into baseball ecstasy--and put the rest of the baseball world into a coma. Part Money Ball, part Ball Four and all Red Sox, this title was written for one audience--Red Sox Nation--and they will love it. (July 11) Copyright ? Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The Washington Post Not so many years ago Boston was, or liked to think of itself as, the Athens of America. The people it most venerated, or claimed to venerate, were the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Dean Howells and Isabella Stewart Gardner: men and women of cultural distinction and accomplishment. Across the Charles River from the center city stood two of America's greatest universities, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and on Beacon Hill lived the city's great aristocrats, who so loomed above the common folk that an otherwise deservedly unknown poet named John Collins Bossidy was inspired to declaim these immortal lines at a dinner in 1910: And this is good old Boston, The home of the bean and the cod, Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots And the Cabots talk only to God. That was then. Now, nearly a century later, Boston is a very different place. Its standing in the galaxy of great American cities, once beyond dispute, has changed dramatically. Not merely is it lost in the shadows of New York, Washington and Los Angeles, as Seth Mnookin points out in Feeding the Monster, but other cities to which it once condescended -- Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Tampa -- now wield far greater economic and political influence. Boston remains, as always, a place of great beauty and charm with which it is very easy to fall in love, but its importance is largely limited to New England. Except, that is, in the world of sport. However improbable it may be, this comparatively small city, which for much of the year has absolutely appalling weather and which occupies a relatively remote location, is the sports capital of the United States, or so at least it can be argued. No doubt this is appalling to those superannuated Beacon Hill aristos who retreat behind the walls of their clubs so as to look down on the rest of the world, but that world now knows Boston not for the high-powered eggheads of Harvard and MIT but for Tom Brady of the New England Patriots and David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox. Nowhere in the country -- not even in Texas -- does the passion for spectator sports run so irrationally high as in Boston and its environs. America's Athens is now its Rome, with coliseums to which the multitudes flock. The most famous of those coliseums is Fenway Park. Four and a half decades ago a young writer named John Updike described it to perfection: "Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a park. Everything is painted green and is in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg." That too was then, and this is now: Fenway Park still retains its lyric essence, but it has become a big
Price:
9.76 USD
|
