Bits and pieces, Nov. 9

November 9, 2012

♦  One of my neo-favorites books have been the Freaknomics series. Their blog included this item about the eternal question (well, eternal since 1903, with the occasional break), “Does the best team win the World Series?” By teh way, Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner contributed an essay about everybody’s favorite comeback kid,  Adam Greenberg, in Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame.

♦  Came across a new “meta” book review site recently, idreambooks.com. Like Metacritic.com, which considers movies, TV, video games, and music, idreambooks “averages” the ratings/critiques from other sites to come up with an overall figure. Seems that anything over 70% gets a smiley cloud, while those under get a grey cloud.  Among the baseball titles included within the sports section are, in the order in which they appear on the site, Ozzie’s School of Management, which earned a paltry 40% based on eight reviews; The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game (100%/6 reviews); Lefty: An American Odyssey (100%/6); Starting and Closing: Perseverance, Faith, and One More Year, by John Smoltz (67%/4); the novel Calico Joe (67%/44; I feel somewhat vindicated); Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift (77%/13); Imperfect: An Improbable Life (91%/13); Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team (100%/5); Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball (96%/23); and The Might Have Been: A Novel (88%/9). The site breaks down into x positive/x negative and some of the reviews include my work from either Bookreporter.com or the Bookshelf. Also note the date that the entries were posted; more reviews may have appeared since then.

 

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Tagged as: Adam Greenberg, Freakonomics, Stephen J. Dubner

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