Happy birthday to the man who is, and will always remain, my favorite ballplayer.
Willie Mays holding 4 baseballs signifying his 4 home run game against the Braves, April 30, 1961. pic.twitter.com/DGVHmeikqA
— Baseball In Pics (@baseballinpix) April 30, 2022
"I'm not sure what the hell charisma is, but I get the feeling it's Willie Mays." —Former Cincinnati Reds star Ted Kluszewski
I'd seen Shaquille O'Neal give this talk about those who helped him become one of the top players in NBA history but had forgotten about it until running across this today. It occurred during the NBA All-Star Break when the NBA named the top 75 players in its history. Shaq is always fun to listen to and quite an interesting guy.
In fact, the entire NBA on TNT show is a hoot to watch. Ernie Johnson tries to keep Shaquille O'Neal and Charles Barkley under a semblance of order while Kenny Smith provides informed commentary and it's evident they are all having as much fun as the viewers. Barkley is also a fascinating character. This is a video of when he showed unexpectedly at the funeral of his friend Lin Wang in Iowa City and gave an impromptu eulogy and here is the touching story behind it, as told by Lin's daughter.
I ❤️ @SHAQ pic.twitter.com/V9dpZOs40O
— Anish Koka (@anish_koka) May 5, 2022
Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945) recorded in 1927, several years before other blues pioneers like Skip James and Robert Johnson. Blind Willie's Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground is one of 27 songs selected to be on a music sampler aboard the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 and which is now somewhere in interstellar space.
This is Trouble Will Soon Be Over. The information on the video does not indicate any details, but the person playing guitar and singing is not Blind Willie Johnson. It is the original recording, synced with a 21st century film recreation designed to look like it is one hundred years old. I believe the individual portraying Johnson is actually Chris Thomas King, the talented guitarist featured in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, where he played a haunting version of Skip James' Hard Time Killing Floor Blues..
As I've grown older the ratio of my rereading to reading books for the first time has increased, partially due to the fact I've already read a lot of books, and partially from the realization I usually get great joy (and only occasional disappointments) from rereading. Because I've usually read other related materials since my original read, rereading tends to give me more insight and see more connections, and sometimes reveals flaws I had not recognized the first time around. The passage of time can also result in the rereading having a different impact. I first read the Lords Of The Rings trilogy as a teenager and then reread it at the age of 50 when the movies were released. Both times I recognized it as a monumental achievement, but the sections that emotionally resonated with me the most at 50 were often different from those when I was much younger.
Here's some of the rereading I've been up to more recently.
Fiction
During the first year of Covid, I decided to read for a second time the twenty volume series by Patrick O'Brian, the Aubrey-Maturin novels, of which the first is Master and Commander (also the title of the splendid movie adaptation of the novels and main characters; Russell Crowe is the embodiment of Lucky Jack Aubrey, Paul Bettany less so as Dr Stephen Maturin). Introduced to the novels thirty years ago by a friend, I quickly read the first 10 or 12 and then waited each year for the next volume up until the time of O'Brian's death in 2000. This time I read the entire series within six months which gave me a different perspective and better sense of the flow of the story. This is simply the best set of historical novels I've ever read. It is as though O'Brian is writing them in the early 1800s; his treatment is consistent, not giving an inch to modern ideas or thoughts. These characters exist fully in their time. I plan on a third go round in 2030.
Nero Wolfe, the massive, sedentary detective, who rarely left his Manhattan brownstone in the course of solving crimes with the assistance of his mobile staff, including Archie Goodwin, who narrates the tales created by author Rex Stout, was a favorite of mine as a teenager. This time I picked up The Black Mountain, an anomaly in the series, as Wolfe reluctantly leaves home to return to his native Montenegro to bring a miscreant to justice.
In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Bruce Chatwin wrote a series of sometimes fact-based but semi-hallucinatory books including The Songlines, about aboriginal Australians, and The Viceroy of Ouidh, about Brazilian slave traders in Dahomey (both of which I recommend). On The Black Hill is the complete opposite; set in one place in the English borderlands of Wales, it tells of the life of two farming brothers and not a lot happens, at least on the surface. A beautifully written tale about harsh lives relieved by rare transcendent moments.
A while ago I also reread six Philip Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler, written between 1939 and 1953, the first of which is The Big Sleep, a great read though I still don't understand the plot. Doesn't make a difference as you read Chandler for his writing and Marlowe's dialogue, which inspired this THC post.
I'm currently making my way through The Rumpole Omnibus. Horace Rumpole, or Rumple of the Bailey, was the creation of English barrister John Mortimer, who followed his adventures, love of poetry, puns, and the law, and the encounters with his wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed, through several books in the 1970s and 80s. It's like revisiting an old friend. Immortalized by Leo McKern in the BBC adaptation.
Non-Fiction
In 1828, young Crauford Tait Ramage, then tutor of the sons of the British Consul in Naples, set off on a solo two month walking tour of southern Italy. His account, published forty years later as The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy was edited and reissued in 1987 as Ramage In South Italy, which I first read in the 90s and reread last year. The Italy Ramage toured was little-known, even to many on the peninsula, the towns and villages desperately poor and isolated, many still perched on hills back from the coast because a mere thirty years had passed since the thousand year threat from Saracen slave raiders had finally abated. I love travel literature like this, which I quoted from in a 2013 post on Paestum, and that written by the likes of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Negley Farson, and Eric Newby.
A recent conversation with a friend about the truth and myth surrounding the Alamo led me to reread a slim volume by North Carolina State history prof and Texan native James Crisp, Sleuthing The Alamo. What I wrote about the book in 2014 in Part 2 of my Remember (My Visit To) The Alamo series still holds:
Sleuthing The Alamo is an outstanding way to learn about how historians do their job. Crisp takes the controversy around Crockett's death along with an alleged racist speech by Sam Houston and brings you along for the ride as he traces the origins of various stories and documents, going back to the primary sources to get to the truth. It's a short, but very illuminating book written in an engaging personal and non-academic style.
Crisp also draws on his personal history to illuminate the role race and ethnicity play in how the Alamo is remembered in different ways since 1836.
A brief passage in Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American Southwest inspired my investigation into, and long post on, Henry Lafayette Dodge. Now that I've spent a few years living in the Southwest a rereading seemed timely and I drew even more from the book the second time around. My original reading and move to Arizona prompted me to other read works which have enriched my understanding of the region, its history, and its peoples, including The Spanish Frontier in North America and The Mexican Frontier 1821-46, both by David Weber, No Settlement No Conquest by Richard Flint, the story of Coronado's expedition of 1540-42, and The Apache Wars by Paul Hutton.
In 1938, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued what became known as the Short Course, a history of communism and the Bolshevik Party, for use in the Soviet educational system. The editor in chief of the Short Course was Josef Stalin. In that regard Martin Amis' 2001 book, Koba the Dread (Koba was Stalin's nickname back in his Georgian youth), can be read as his Short Course history on the rule of Lenin and Stalin from 1917 to 1953. Lengthier books like The Gulag Archipelago and the novel Life and Fate provide much more detail and insight into that regime, but my recent rereading of Koba leads me to believe it is not a bad starting place; it's like reading Lenin and Stalin's Greatest Hits, except it's recounting a horror show. Along the way, Amis wrestles with his father's earlier infatuation with communism and his good friend Christopher Hitchen's remaining faith in Trotsky and Lenin (which he eventually backed away from).
Koba, along with two other relatively short books, can be used to describe why the Soviet Union failed. Koba covers the mass murder phase from the Bolshevik counter-revolution in 1917 to Stalin's death in 1953. Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, one of the oddest and memorable books I've ever read, explains how the post-Stalin era with its optimism that a completely planned economy could succeed, came crashing down in failure by 1970, while Russia and the Idea of the West by Robert English explains how a new generation of communists, including Mikhail Gorbachev, realized how desperately behind the Soviet Union was compared to the West, and how their own country was responsible for starting the Cold War.
Notes on books I've read and enjoyed over the past few months and which have not been previously mentioned on THC.
Non-Fiction
Roman republic and empire history is one of my favorite subjects and The War The Made The Roman Empire by Barry Strauss was a good read. The story of the rivalry and then war between Octavian (Augustus) and Antony and Cleopatra is well told.
It was during the time of the empire that Christianity arose and in Dominion, Tom Holland explains why the viewpoint of the new religion was so fundamentally different from the mindset of Classical times and how, even today, even for those of different religions or no religion, the ethos of Christianity still has such an impact. Fascinating read and fodder for good discussion.
The fourth century saw the triumph of Christianity in the empire. In The Final Pagan Generation by Edward J Watt, we learn from the perspective of four leading pagan politicians, authors, and philosophers born near the beginning of the century and dying near its end what it was like. We know what happened during that century, but it was not evident to those living then what would happen and none of them seem to have foreseen the course of events. It is a reminder to all of us, that it is only looking back that things appear to arrange themselves in a pattern (see the sidebar to this blog for some wisdom from Joe Walsh on this subject). It also prompts the reader to wonder whether we are in a similar situation in this century.
The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance and Forty Years That Shook the World (1490-1530) by Patrick Wyman tells the story of the pivotal figures in the ending of the medieval era and of setting us on the path to the modern world. Very insightful. It also fits with the three part THC series, Ten Years After (1519-29) on six important events during that decade and which you can read here, here, and here.
Not covered in Wyman's book, but occurring during the same period is The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee, the story of Christopher Columbus and his illegitimate, but recognized son, Hernando Colon, who accompanied him on his last voyage to the Americas, and created the greatest collection of books in the world at this time. A story I'd had no clue about until stumbling across an article about it recently (see Book of Lost Books).
The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas by David Eltis is a detailed study of the early days of the Atlantic slave trade before the mid-18th century. It covers the economics and logistics of the trade. Eltis includes a lengthy discussion of how and why the coastal African states engaged in the trade and how they were able to keep European powers from gaining footholds in their territories during this period.
Colin Calloway's book, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis & Clark recounts the history of Indians from their entry into North America during the Ice Age until the beginning of the 19th century, focusing on what is now the United States west of the Mississippi. A vast temporal and geographical scope which the author handles well. The book gives the reader an appreciation for the culture, struggles, and conflicts over that timespan.
I had the pleasure of interviewing U of Virginia professor and head of its Civil War Center, Caroline Janney via Zoom for our Civil War Roundtable and we hope to have her back in person. Her recent book, Ends of War, has received glowing reviews and contained a lot that was new to me. The usual tale of Lee's surrender at Appomattox, was his army disbanded and went home. It turns out it was not as simple as that as a large portion of his army was not at Appomattox so how to effect its surrender raised questions as did many other aspects of the surrender even for those there on April 9.
Carrying the story further is Gregory Downs, After Appomattox, the story of the military occupation of the South after the end of the Civil War. Downs recounts the struggle the rapidly shrinking army faced in trying to maintain order, particularly in light of the massive violence unleashed by white southerners against blacks and those whites seen as their allies.
When Michael Collins, who remained alone in the Apollo Command Module, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, passed last year, it reminded me I'd never read his book Carrying the Fire, reputed to be one of the finest astronaut memoirs. I've now read it and concur. Written in the 1970s, after he'd left NASA, Collins provides amazing and interesting detail on what it was like to train as an astronaut, how relatively primitive the technology was, and how astonishing it was that from start to finish the moon landing project took only eight years. Collins also seems to be more self-reflective than many of those early astronauts and his portrayal of himself and his fellow astronauts is fascinating.
San Francisco has always been somewhat offbeat, but in the 1970s it was going completely off the rails. Cult City by Daniel J Flynn is the tale of Jim Jones and his People's Temple that began in the Bay Area and ended with murder and mass suicide in Guyana. Flynn has a chilling story of how a charlatan like Jones succeeded by drawing in vulnerable people with the active assistance of local and state political figures.
San Francisco may not be any better today, at least according to San Fransicko by Michael Shellenberger. Shellenberger, a progressive who recently announced his candidacy for governor, taking on the incumbent Gavin Newsom, writes of the city's, and the state's botched efforts to deal with the mentally ill and addicted overrunning its streets, park, and sidewalks. Constricted by the dictates of ideology enormous amounts of monies have been spent to little effect. This is a sensitive issue for me, due to issues in my own family going back a half-century and it is frustrating and infuriating to see the same false arguments still trotted out by mental health "advocates" decades later. While the problems they created remain unsolved, many of these advocates make a nice living from all the monies flowing in to supposedly solve the problem.
The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski is a feast for fans who love the sport and great writing. Joe can make anything interesting and his ranking of baseball's 100 greatest players provides him great material to work with. I really didn't care about the specific ranking for any player, I just wanted to enjoy the writing and getting there. I did.
Fiction
Ridgeline by Michael Punke (author of The Revenant) is a fictionalized telling of the events leading up to the Fetterman Fight in December 1866, in which Crazy Horse and a tribal alliance wiped out eighty U.S. soldiers. Told from the soldier and Indian perspectives. Excellent.
It starts in Hawaii just before Pearl Harbor and takes us to Hong Kong and Japan during the war. Five Decembers by James Kestrel begins with murders and the investigation by a Honolulu detective. Intrigue on an epic scale over a five year period.
The fate of Jews under German occupation during WW2 varied greatly. In The Invisible Bridge, Julie Orringer describes the little known story of Hungarian Jews, alternately persecuted and protected by their own government, until late in the war when the Nazis occupied the country. A sprawling, moving book.
I love Michael Connelly's books, particularly those featuring detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch. As Harry, a Vietnam War vet, is aging out, Connelly has introduced a new detective, Renee Ballard. I had not found her as interesting but in The Dark Horse, they join forces and the partnership and Ballard's character finally take off.
And in August, we'll get the latest in Martin Walker's Bruno, Chief of Police series, set in the Dordogne region of France. I can't wait.
I'm updating this to include a series of five crime novels I completed reading about a year ago. The unusual setting is Constantinople in the second quarter of the 19th century, and the main character is Yashim, a eunuch and detective, at the service of the Sultan. It's a time of reform, turmoil, and intrigue in the failing Ottoman Empire. Great characters and detail to give the reader a flavor of an unfamiliar world. The first novel in the series is The Janissary Tree. The author is Jason Goodwin, who wrote a fabulous rumination on Ottoman history in Lords Of The Horizon, which I quoted from in Part 2 of The Song Of Jan Sobieski.
Working throughout my life with numbers and statistics I was aware that at times how they are analyzed can be misleading but until a few years ago I was not aware of Simpson's Paradox.
Simpson’s Paradox is not the same as Homer Simpson’s Paradox* (which may, however, may explain other issues in America). Simpson’s Paradox occurs when a correlation present in different groups is reversed when the groups are combined. That happens when the ratios between the individual groups are different in the comparisons being made.
While aware of it in the pure numerical sense, I first encountered it in a political sense in 2011. At the time Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was being denounced as a Nazi for making changes in the collective bargaining power of unions, specifically for teachers, that would have reduced the costs of medical insurance**. At the time, Wisconsin's existing law required school districts to obtain health insurance through the teachers union captive insurer.
One of the common talking points in opposition was that Walker's initiative was an assault on the quality of education in Wisconsin, and frequent comparisons were made to academic performance in Texas, where K-12 achievement scores were not as high. The rhetorical question was always, "Do you want to make Wisconsin schools like Texas?".
The assertion about test scores was correct; students in Wisconsin scored higher than Texas.
However, if you looked at the data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which administers the annual standardized test given to 4th and 8th graders to measure math, science and breaks down results by black, white and Hispanic the picture looks different. (NAEP does not test after 8th grade). In every case (with the exception of Hispanics for 4th grade science), black, Hispanic and white students in Texas scored higher than Wisconsin students of the same demographic. That’s in 17 out of 18 comparisons. In other words, black students in Texas outperformed black students in Wisconsin in math, science, and reading in both 4th and 8th grades. And, in all 18 categories, Texas students scored above the national average. Moreover, the gap between White and Hispanic/Black scores was less in Texas than in Wisconsin. Wisconsin looked better overall because it had a much higher percentage of white students. Put another way, Texas student results were actually better and more equitable than Wisconsin.
While researching this issue I came across another claim by those disputing claims of Texan prosperity - that its hourly wages were actually lower than the U.S. average. This was true at the time – the US average median hourly wage was $12.50, while Texas was $11.20.
However, what was ignored and was also true, is that if you separately compared average median hourly wages of whites, blacks and Hispanics in the United States to those of each of those groups Texas, they were higher for each group in Texas.
In both cases the difference between the measurement of the groups individually and collective was because of the diversity of the Texas workforce and school population, which has lower percentages of whites and higher of blacks and Hispanics than Wisconsin and the U.S. as a whole, so that when combined the data led to a misleading conclusion.
Once aware of the paradox I began looking at such comparisons more deeply. For instance, we have frequent claims that Scandinavian countries are better in material and health outcomes than the U.S.
Yet repeated studies comparing both life expectancy and wealth between the populations of those countries and of their descendants in the U.S., show those living in the U.S. do better. Here’s an example, focusing on economics:
Danish-Americans have a measured living standard about 55 percent higher than the Danes in Denmark. Swedish-Americans have a living standard 53 percent higher than the Swedes, and Finnish-Americans have a living standard 59 percent higher than those back in Finland. Only for Norway is the gap a small one, because of the extreme oil wealth of Norway, but even there the living standard of American Norwegians measures as 3 percent higher than in Norway.
The same holds true for every other comparison I’ve found between countries of origin, including in Latin America and Africa, and descendants in the U.S. The U.S. often shows up lower because of the very diversity of the American population, so that when combined you get a different result than if you look at the components.***
Once you start looking for Simpson’s Paradox, it shows up everywhere.
There are, of course, other statistical tricks used in political arguments. Covid-19 has seen an eruption of these, from those switching back and forth between mortality and case incidence data depending on the point they want to make or failing to look at results for others in similar situations. In the latter case, what springs to mind is the claim that Uttar Pradesh state in India successfully controlled Covid by distributing ivermection. While it was true that cases declined 99% after the state took this action, cases declined by the same amount in the adjoining states which did not follow Uttar Pradesh's direction.
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* From the episode “Lard of the Grease:”
Homer: Okay, boy. This is where all the hard work, sacrifice and painful scaldings pay off.
Clerk: Four pounds of grease. That comes to . . . sixty-three cents.
Homer: Woo-hoo!
Bart: Dad, all that bacon cost twenty-seven dollars.
Homer: Yeah, but your mom paid for that.
Bart: But, doesn’t she get her money from you?
Homer: And I get my money from grease. What’s the problem?
** Which, after the legislation was enacted, it did. Some school districts took the savings and hired additional teachers.
*** There is another aspect to be aware of, beyond the comparisons. American rates for serious lifestyle health issues like diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure etc, are increasing across the board. Regardless of international comparisons this is a serious problem.
