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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Assuming you’re the, ahem, type who scoffs at default fonts and found yourself enthralled at every minute of the documentary HELVETICA, then Simon Garfield’s JUST MY TYPE: A BOOK ABOUT FONTS is for you. Consider it a biography of sorts for several fonts, from the loved (Calibir) to the loathed (Comic Sans).
Heavily illustrated — and not just with photos, but the discussed (and disgust) fonts aplenty (some 219) — JUST MY TYPE is a breezy, lively, humorous and heavily readable nonfiction work for graphic-design nerds, whether by trade or simply vicariously. You’ll get the skinny on several fonts (both skinny and fat, serif and sans serif), a rundown of the worst fonts in existence and an überenjoyable picto-introduction by Chip Kidd that alone is almost worth the cover price.
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The title THE HILLIKER CURSE immediately conjured visions that the author, James Ellroy, known primarily for his period crime fiction, had tried his hand at Gothic suspense. I sat back and prepared myself for an interesting read … or at least an interesting failure. Then I saw the subtitle, MY PURSUIT OF WOMEN. It’s “a memoir.” Oy vey.
Needless to say (although I’ll say it anyway), my anticipation quickly took a nosedive. It’s like the time when I was a teenager and my mom told me she bought me a Harley. The imagery of me roaring down the highway with the wind whipping past was obliterated when she handed me a toy motorcycle. Nice joke, Mom, but it was still a severe disappointment. As was this paperback drivel.
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