The History of Chess in Fifty Moves / Bill Price -- Buffalo, N.Y.: Firefly Books, 2015

There are numerous books outlining the history of Chess.  Some are short and simple and others are more extensive, particularly Murray's magisterial The History of Chess.  Published in 1913, it is a comprehensive tome.  Bill Price's contribution to this literature is not particularly remarkable, but certainly serviceable.  Anyone looking for an initial, readable tour through the history could do worse.  Perhaps the most useful aspect of the work is its short chapters -- 50 in all, not counting the introduction. As the entire work is only 217 pages, the chapters are necessarily very short.  Furthermore, the work is packed with attractive color illustrations.  Consequently, Price has given us a fairly orthodox, thumbnail history.

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen / Christopher McDougall -- N.Y.: Vantage Books, 2011

Christopher McDougall has given us an amazing and charming book in Born to Run.  McDougall, a runner himself, has been a war correspondent, an editor for Men's Health, and a writer for numerous magazines. On assignment in Mexico, he came upon a magazine article about the Tarahumara Indians, who have made running the centerpiece of their culture.  Members of their tribe routinely run scores, even hundreds of miles at a time over the rough landscape of the Copper Canyons in Mexico.  As a writer for Runner's World, McDougall set out to meet the Tarahumara runners along with a mysterious American runner, Caballo Blanco, who was said to live among them.  After a difficult journey through territory controlled by drug lords, McDougall makes contact with the Tarahumara and Caballo.  From there he begins to explore the history of the Tarahumara's encounters with American ultra-runners, athletes who also run grueling 100 mile races over forbidding cross-country trails.  In this early section of the book, we read about amazing athletes and their dedication to a sport that resides on the periphery of the sports world.

Born to Run is his account of the people and races that he encountered in his research.  In this early section of the book, we read about amazing athletes and their dedication to a sport that resides on the periphery of the sports world.  It is easy to simply dismiss these athletes as lunatics.  Who in their right mind, after all, would run 100 miles non-stop?  But as we read about them, one gains a sincere respect for people who have developed the discipline to accomplish such a task without major injury and in a manner that they clearly find rewarding and even spiritually uplifting.  Along the way McDougall tells us not only of the remarkable spirit of these long distance runners, but of how we humans have lost touch with an ability that, according to McDougall, gave us the evolutionary edge to survive in an otherwise deadly environment:  the ability to run great distances.  While slower and weaker than other animals, our ability to patiently track prey, allowed our ancestors to chase them for great distances until they collapsed from exhaustion.  McDougall also presents the case that our feet have been well-adapted to run these great distances without causing injury.  Ironically, the sports running shoes that are designed to protect feet are causing more injuries than would occur to barefoot runners.  His book is part anthropology and part evolutionary biology.

The most interesting aspect of the book is, however, his account of the race that is organized by Caballo, bringing several American ultra-runners to the Copper Canyons to race against the Tarahumara.  In this final portion of the narrative, we get engaging accounts of the various and free-spirited personalities of the ultra-runners as they make their way to the Copper Canyons and interact with the Tarahumara and it is the Tarahumara who are the real stars of the story, even while we learn less of them than we learn of the American runners.  This is due undoubtedly to the access McDougall had to the characters and to the cultural reticence of the Tarahumara.

The tale is eminently exciting and entertaining.  Whether or not you are a runner, you are bound to find the protagonists in McDougall's story admirable and inspiring.

Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball / John Feinstein -- N.Y.: Doubleday, 2014

Beneath the tip of the iceberg of Major League Baseball lies the minor leagues.  For every major league team there are at least six professional teams in a hierarchy of minor leagues:  Triple-A, Double-A, three A-level leagues (high, low, and short season), and Rookie.  Additionally, there are leagues outside the U.S. that feed the major league teams, most significantly the Mexican League.  John Feinstein's book, Where Nobody Knows Your Name, relates the experiences of a number of players (six in particular) who have spent years -- even decades -- in these leagues.  Their stories are engaging and revealing.

The pay is not good.  Only in the Triple-A could it be said to compete with what a player might get in another profession and the rigors of travel make life in the minors even less appealing.  Instead of flying from game to game, minor league players travel by bus, sometimes several hours after a night game, arriving at the town hosting their next game just after sunrise.  Clearly, the players are looking (and working) for something better -- at very least, just a shot at a short stint in the majors where the minimum pay is an order of magnitude better along with everything else: the stadiums, the locker rooms, the hotel rooms, the transportation, the medical and coaching support, and even the food; but though all of this is certainly an attraction, Feinstein's interviews with the players clearly show that their ambition is driven mostly by a desire to excel in the sport they love.

The players that Feinstein focuses on have seen both the majors and the minors, spending most of their careers in the minors, but periodically getting called up to play on a major league team, sometimes for a season or two, sometimes for a handful of days.  Nearly all of them have been traded from one team to another a dizzying number of times.  Usually too often to establish any strong connection to the team or its players.  Indeed, they appear to be playing entirely for themselves, constantly trying to prove their worth to their major league sponsor or to another major league team that might choose to buy their contract or pick them up on waivers.

Feinstein relates story after story of players being invited to a major league team's spring training, sparking hopes that they will be signed for the season.  Those who do not are of course disappointed, but often take consolation that they might be selected to join the major league team after the roster is expanded in August.  Still, the likelihood of this happening is only high for a few players -- "prospects" as they are termed.  The remainder of the players seem mostly there to fill out a roster to make games possible that will keep the prospects sharp.

Along with stories of the players, Feinstein tells us about the coaches, the managers, the umpires, and even the grounds keepers.  All of them are laboring in the purgatory of the minor leagues in hopes of "going up" to the majors.  The life of umpires is especially poignant.  Unlike the players who can play for a major league team, get sent back to the minors, and then later return to the majors, the umpire is promoted through the minor league ranks, until they are finally selected for major league games.  Their opportunities are generally limited to replacing umpires who have decided to retire, often in their sixties.  If a minor league umpire is deemed not to be major league-caliber, he is likely to be let go to make room for the umpiring equivalent of a player "prospect."  It's "up or out" for umpires.

While Feinstein's writing is indeed engaging, it is sometimes repetitious.  This in part is due to the similarity of the players' experiences, but the reader frequently encounters sentences that are all-but identical to ones read before.  The similarity in the stories makes it difficult -- dare I say impossible -- to keep the particular career of the players straight.  This is complicated by the structure of the narrative.  Six people are the subjects of the book and their stories are not told complete and in sequence.  Instead, a player's career is told in vignettes interspersed with other players' vignettes.  It's not clear if this was Feinstein's intent, but the resultant impression is of an archetypal minor leaguer, precariously living on the cusp of success.  While the stories of the nearly-successful are certainly engrossing, one is struck by what must be the great majority of minor league players who don't find even the modicum of success of Feinstein's subjects.  Surely, many of them, particularly those in Double-A leagues or less must understand that they are never destined to play in the majors.  Feinstein's book would have benefited from their stories as well.

In the end, though, one feels a great appreciation for the minor league player.  Despite laboring outside the spotlight, these players are among the very best players on the planet, working hard to prove to the world and themselves that they are such and hoping to stay in the game as long as possible.  Toward the end of the book, Feinstein describes two players, John Suomi and Scott Elarton, sitting alone in a dugout watching the rain fall.  Elarton is hoping that the game will not be cancelled because he is scheduled to pitch.  It is the last game of the season and it is that season that he will play.  He wants to end his decade-long career on a high note.  "John and I had a long talk about what your last day in baseball might feel like," Elarton said.  "We agreed we didn't want it to feel like this, but maybe this was just reality."  Reality is was: the game was called, the season was over as was Elarton's career.



 

Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants / Douglas W. Tallamy -- Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2007

I've known more than a few wags who have remarked slyly that a weed is simply a plant that you don't want, and while that initially seems generous and open minded with respect to the natural world, it misses the critical role that some plants play in their ecosystem and the role that others don't play. From the perspective of a healthy, diverse, and functioning ecosystem, some plants (weeds) simply don't pull their weight, while others are citizens in good standing. In the first half of Bringing Nature Home, Douglas Tallamy brilliantly argues that plants in good standing are, generally speaking, native to the region, while non-natives tend in almost every case to be either unhelpful or positive threats to the diversity of life. What Tallamy hopes the reader will take home from this is that converting your garden to a native plant preserve is one of the easiest ways a gardener can help recover the ecosystem that is most beneficial to his or her locale.

The key element in the overall picture is the insect population. Gardeners often treat insects as the enemy and in some cases they can be; however, in a well-functioning ecosystem herbivorous insects are a critical link in the food chain linking plants to larger, more charismatic animals, like birds, frogs, rabbits, and turtles. Non-native plants have become best-sellers in nurseries all over the country in large part because they are "insect resistant," meaning, they aren't food for anything in the ecosystem. Planting such species is comparable to laying down astroturf, planting plastic flowers, and erecting artificial trees. They may look nice and be generally whole and intact, but they serve no other purpose but to decorate one's garden. Worse, they have a tendency to spread out of control and take up an enormous amount of space, crowding out ecologically valuable species. Of course, the loss of habitat for insects results in a loss of habitat for larger animals. After reading Tallamy's arguments, one comes to appreciate the beauty of the ragged shape of an insect-eaten leaf. One's heart goes out to noble native plants that has given up some portion of their foliage for the greater good of the ecosystem.

One of the most significant environmental problems we face today is the loss of habitat. Urban sprawl and mono-cultural fence-to-fence agribusiness farming has left less and less room for inhabitants of the natural world and is drastically reducing the size of numerous species' populations. Tallamy argues that urban and suburban gardeners can do quite a lot to mitigate this problem simply by choosing to plant natives in their gardens. One small suburban lot may not seem like a significant contribution to the solution, but if gardening with natives becomes as popular as gardening with non-natives, the problem will be cut in half.

A yet stronger response to the urban-suburban desert-scape that we have created would be to organize whole neighborhood or cities to plant native plants. Recent ecological research shows that the size of a contiguous ecosystem is important to maintaining a native wildlife population. This runs counter to the belief that many small fragments of an ecosystem can effectively support the population. Obviously, fragments suitably close and with no significant barriers can be helpful, but organizing large swaths of natural habitat is preferable. Still, to get to this stage, pioneer native gardeners are critical. Happily, Tallamy provides tips on "making it happen."

The second half of Bringing Nature Home is essentially a reference guide to useful native plants and insects, a.k.a., "bird food." Tallamy also provides a valuable chapter entitled "Answers to Tough Questions," like "If birds eat the berries of alien plants..., why shouldn't I plant those species?" (The short answer is that those berries do not provide adequate nutrients required to make eggs, to feed the parent birds while they are feeding the young, and to feed the young themselves. Too many such plants means there will be fewer insects to provide the nutrition needed for reproduction.)

Finally, there are three excellent indexes listing native plants across the U.S., host plants for specific butterflies, and results from experiments comparing the value of native and non-native plants. Also there are numerous beautiful color photographs and a superb bibliography.

No gardener interested in native plants should be without this book!

Slow Reading / John Miedema -- Duluth, Minn.: Litwin Books, 2009

In 1986 Carlo Petrini formed an organization in Rome called "Slow Food" in reaction to the opening of a MacDonald's restaurant. He hoped to promote the pleasures that come from the consumption of fresh, locally grown food, produced from sustainable farming practices. His organization quickly turned into a world-wide movement as there were people everywhere who were fed up with the food-like products being churned out by multinational agribusiness companies and served up as "convenience foods." These foods are lacking in both nutrition and flavor, unless, of course, you include such flavorings as sugar, salt, and oil. The toll these food-like products are taking on our health and well being is incalculable. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other ailments of over consumption plague us as never before.

John Miedema's book Slow Reading transfers the sentiment behind the slow food movement to our reading practices. The parallels are striking. One merely needs to substitute digital technology and the computer industry for agribusiness and one can see that the rush to make money from our consumption of information is doing to our mental lives what junk food is doing to our bodies; and just as the slow food movement seeks to recover the benefits of pre-industrial food production, a potential slow reading movement might recover the benefits of our pre-internet reading habits.

Many of Miedema's observations about reading digital texts versus books are obvious and uncontroversial. Any text that cannot be displayed in a few computer screens is unlikely to be read by anyone. Reading longer texts virtually requires a print copy. Print allows for a degree of concentration and reading comprehension that is nearly unobtainable from electronic texts. This may be due in part to the fact that reading a book involves more of one's body than reading a computer screen. One's hands, arms, and posture are involved in a way that they normally are not when reading a computer screen. Looking directly into the light of a computer screen is far more tiring than reading print on a page.

Then there are the intentional efforts to distract the reader that are built into most Web pages. Advertisement tempt us to abandon our reading and hyperlinks encourage us to follow tangent upon tangent until we lose track of what we originally set out to read. Even electronic texts that take up the full computer screen without hyperlinks are normally embedded in a browser that has scroll bars, "favorites" links, tabs, a clock, date, a search box, and sundry other icons that have nothing to do with the text. All of these distractions are absent from a printed book.

On the other hand, the very disadvantages of a digital text are its advantages. Digital texts are easily searched by computer algorithms and can be connected easily to any number of related texts. They often can be quickly copied and pasted into a new document, enlarged, reduced, tagged, annotated without damage to the original text. The benefits of electronic texts go on and on. Whether the printed text or the electronic text is superior depends on one's needs and intentions, but one important fact stands out: print encourages us to read slowly and carefully, allowing us to find more meaning in the text. That is, we are able to better understand what the author intended by writing the text in the first place. This leads to an important question that Miedema raises about how meaning is related to a text. Do we find meaning or create meaning when reading a text?

Slow Reading offers only sketchy answers to this question, but it does provide an admirable starting point. Finding meaning in a text can be contrasted with creating the meaning of the text, though certainly both are involved in any act of reading. Printed books guide us through the author's train of thought in the order and pace that the author intended. Each paragraph is present in the context of the book as a whole and this context refines and helps to disambiguate the meaning of any individual paragraph. We mostly are finding the meaning in the text. In contrast, an electronic text allow us to create meaning in a way that printed texts do not. This is a function of the ambiguous character of the snippets of electronic texts often displayed without significant context. We are free to draw our own original insight from an author's words, even to reverse the author's meaning completely. We can read the texts in any number of contexts which we create by navigating away from the text to other Web sites that strike us as related to the meaning we are constructing.

These two different reading activities are paradoxically both individual and communitarian. Reading a printed text to understand the author's meaning places the reader in a relatively solitary situation. One is usually reading alone in a room and is directly connected to a single text. At the same time, the print book reader is deeply engaged with a specific contribution by an author who is normally making a contribution to a larger and longer conversation of a community of authors. This links the reader to the larger, longer conversation. Any response the reader might have will be bounded to a great extent by the logic of that conversation. The reader becomes part of the community engaged in the conversation.

In contrast, the reader of an e-text is, of course, more immediately connected to an almost unlimited community of Web authors through sophisticated search tools that browse billions of texts, but the reader of an e-text is not deeply connected to anyone in this community. Search tools encourage the reader pick and choose short passages and construct an entirely new text that is built out of often unrelated or idiosyncratically related texts. The context of what one is reading may be an amalgam of statements in numerous unrelated conversations. The reader is not engaged in discovering the meaning of ideas in a specific on-going conversation within a community. The reader is acting more like a scientific investigator, searching the natural world (or in this case the world of Web texts) for observations that will allow the creation of a novel theory of the reader's own. In an important sense, reading on the Web often involves not engaging with others in a conversation, not listening to the author's full expression of an idea, but listening for what one wants to hear and appropriating the snippet of text for one's own solitary purposes.

Miedema notes numerous advantages that come from "slow," "deep," or "close" reading, including educational and psychological benefits, but Slow Reading is most of all a paean to the pleasures of settling into a comfortable chair and losing oneself in a book. In this age of ubiquitous data smog, that's a very fine thing.

The Immortal Game: A History of Chess / David Shenk -- NY: Doubleday, 2006.

This is a nice little introduction to the history of Chess, stressing its significance as a metaphor for war and politics. It also emphasizes Chess's significance in learning and psychology. Interspersed through the text is a commentary on a game played by Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky in 1851, known in the Chess world as "the immortal game." For a more serious history of Chess read the classic work entitled History of Chess by H.J.R. Murray.