Who doesn’t enjoy a wee tipple now and then? If whiskey isn’t your thing, then Kate Hopkins’ 99 DRAMS OF WHISKEY certainly won’t be worth your time, but if you enjoy the caramel liquor, or are just beginning to discover what you like in the field of Scotch, whiskey, single malts, blendeds or what have you, then her book is an excellent introduction to the subject.
It’s the kind of work that could have been written 50 years ago, in that it is certainly not comprehensive, it doesn’t have a very definitive structure, and there’s no marketing angle or gimmick or trend associated with it. In today’s world, it feels almost incomplete in that regard. It’s really an idiosyncratic survey of the field written by a passionate enthusiast, a type of nonfiction we saw much more of in the past and which sadly seems much rarer nowadays.
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When American brewing icon Anheuser-Busch was taken over by European/Brazilian beverage giant InBev in the late 2000s, during the height of the financial crisis, there was, of course, a predictable outcry about foreign companies buying American businesses.
But the truth was, as pointed out by Julie MacIntosh in her fascinating nonfiction work, DETHRONING THE KING, that Anheuser-Busch was failing, not growing — weak in its global efforts when globalization was the only way to go for a publicly owned company.
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Doug Glanville is a fairly decent former Major League Baseball player who plied his craft in the outfield for nine MLB seasons with the Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies and Texas Rangers. He’s an interesting man, an engineering graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, a strong and clear writer, and he seems like a rock-solid guy.
I’m just not sure what his intention was in writing THE GAME FROM WHERE I STAND. This really isn’t an autobiography (though we get a few details of his life), and it’s certainly not a controversial tell-all (he has negative words for only one minor-league manager; he addresses steroids only briefly; and his strongest stance seems to be that the players that MLB have identified as steroid users in the infamous 2003 drug testing never be publicly named).
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As the old-school strippers tell a young Rose Louise Hovick in GYPSY, “You gotta have a gimmick.” A catchy name helps, too. Salvatore Lucania? Nope. Charles Luciano? Nuh-uh. Lucky Luciano? “Lucky” because he once took a three-layered ass-kicking from the cops and didn’t die. Alliterative and provocative. That’ll work.
In BOARDWALK GANGSTER: THE REAL LUCKY LUCIANO, you do get a sense from author Tim Newark that Luciano’s posthumous reputation needed some kind of boost. For the first half of his criminal life, he was a smart guy, rising through the mob ranks as a hitman and body guard for Joe Masseria. But by the end of the 1920s and the retirement of Johnny Torrio in Chicago, who handed the Outfit over to Al Capone, Luciano had been wooed from the old way of doing things.
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Is there a pantheon of motorcycle books? Honestly, besides Robert Pirsig’s ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE, is there another book you could point at as being a popular classic? Hunter S. Thompson’s HELL’S ANGELS: A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA comes close, though it’s really just about a tiny subsection of motorcyclists whose image has since tarnished everyone else who rides. And Che Guevara’s THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES wasn’t about motorcycles.
