Talking About Literature and Love through Memoir and...Baseball? [Recent Reads]
The heat of August’s final days comes arguably from two sources of energy - from the sun, most obviously, and for those who know what’s up, from the enduring game of baseball. The sport has been played all summer long to bring us to the hottest part of the season, when each game has implications about what team is closer to playoffs and division titles (there’s still time, Rangers). But even without the added heat, the season - and each game - of baseball has a dramatic arch that can quickly curve toward heartbreak or happiness, which is why closely following the sport is such an emotional investment.
As a celebration of the sport and to summertime itself, The Southern Review’s Spring 2010 issue compiled stories involving the theme of baseball in one way or another. Sticking close by their strong and mainly traditional selections, the Southern Review’s baseball edition includes some of writing’s best players, including Steve Almond, Don Lee and Ron Currie, Jr. The topics range from a dramatic breakdown of what it means to have a hole in your swing to the significance of wearing a baseball cap. “Is that a Hollywood director thing, or a political thing, or a bald thing?” one character asks in Lee’s “Late in the Day.” Whatever thing it is to wear the hat of baseball, the Southern Review wears it well.
-Sarah Wambold
Noted intellectual and writer Christopher Hitchens's career has been dogged by the “you either love him or hate him” cliché, and now’s a good a time as any to dispel that tiresome turn of phrase - Hitchens is complicated, nuanced, and a good deal more ironic and humorous than his detractors would like to admit. The author's new memoir Hitch-22 is a stimulating read, though not an easy one. The amount of ground covered here is enough that commentators who either find themselves “loving or hating” Hitchens after exploring its pages must willfully not be paying attention.
Subjects of Hitch-22 include, of course, the Hitchens family, with a great emphasis on Hitchens’s mother, Yvonne, an English Jew who never revealed her family’s roots to her children before her unfortunate death. Hitchens discusses this revelation (which he didn’t learn until the late ‘80s), and also saves room for some unfortunate coming of age stories from his boarding school. But even with anecdotes and a family history, Hitch-22 is concerned primarily with ideas - his, and those of the writers, tyrants, and politicians he encounters. Early on in the book, Hitchens warns the reader against the expression “The Personal is Political,” (and, by extension, confusing his beliefs with his biology) saying, “At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was - cliché is arguably forgivable here - very bad news.”
Hitch-22 is personal in its own way, but its concern is fixedly on Hitchens’s favorite subjects - literature, politics, and philosophy. In fact, although Hitchens’s naughty reputation far precedes the general public’s knowledge of his scholarship on Orwell, say, it’s almost as if Hitchens has to be reminded to let the reader in on anything scandalous. With chapters like “Mesopotamia from Both Sides,” “Havana versus Prague” and “Decline, Mutation or Metamorphosis,” the reader should be advised that this is not a sexy tell-all. When Hitchens does explore lust or his decades of hard living, it’s with a restraint and humor that is unmistakably British and totally Hitchens. In “A Short Footnote on the Grape and the Grain,” he reminds us that alcohol “makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing.” Good god, Hitchens, get your mind in the gutter already - you’re disappointing the haters!
Hitch-22 is highly recommended to anyone with a passion for all things intellectual. You’ll not agree with Hitchens at every point, but that’s the idea. Hitch-22 is a complicated tale bristling with big names and bigger ideas - ultimately engaging, often sad, and always very, very funny.
- Adam Schragin
