Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey

Reflections on life at the edge of the wilderness and making sense of civilization's encroachment.

The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy

Reread, repost: As a person comes of age their own story takes center stage. When we are younger we inhabit the orbit of adults; our parents and elder family members. The world is defined by and in relation to them. As we grow and chart an independent course our actions increasingly become our own. Yet we are never freed entirely from our ties to others. McCarthy's novel is, among many other things, about the tension between ties that bind and independence. Billy Parnham's story becomes about himself, but as time goes by and he remains disconnected, it is increasingly populated by the lives of others. Yet, these are mere episodes. Parnham passes-by and passes-through. Finally, alone on the border plains, Parnham is unable, or unwilling, to let others into his life fully. He seems truly alone.

All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy

Reread, repost: The arid lands along the Texas-Mexico borderlands were, and remain, a vast space of dust, mesquite, and sun. Cormac McCarthy's spare style somewhat mimics the spare landscape. The country, the people, and the relationship between them come alive in prose embodying distance and space. As they traverse the rangelands the lives of John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins take shape. They grow and change in response to a land, the bones of which are laid before us. The country is hard on people.

John Grady Cole starts as a young man, moving gradually toward adulthood. There are no plans to speak of. He takes what is allowed to him, but is not swallowed by circumstance. Both he and Lacey seem content in the knowledge that most things don't have a suitable explanation. There are human powers which move our lives and we can choose how to meet these powers, but most people will have little say in their actions. The world is alternately bright as the open plains and dark as a jail cell. Only at certain, fleeting times is there balance between the two. Nevertheless, life pulses with blood and there is no horizon beyond death.

Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy

Third of the Border Trilogy and the end of the story of John Grady Cole and Billy Parnham.

Worst. President. Ever. - Robert Strauss

The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer

Sandy Koufax - Jane Leavy

Reread, repost: More than just a biography of arguably the greatest pitcher of all time, Jane Leavy's work chronicles baseball as it moved into the modern game we have come to recognize. Koufax, because of his contract holdout with fellow Dodger Don Drysdale, may have played no small part in the coming age of free agency baseball, but what seems more pertinent to Koufax's career, particularly in contrast to the manner in which players are handled today, is how he was brought into the Dodger organization and how he was used early in his career. In essence, Koufax, like many other players, was left to develop and fend for himself. When revisiting his career it is important to note that Koufax was absolutely dominant for five years, but prior to that he was considered erratic at best.

And then he was gone. Inextricable from the Koufax myth is the manner in which he walked away from the game, at the peak of his powers, something virtually unprecedented at the time. Stripping away the myth, Leavy reveals the increasing levels of pain Koufax was dealing with in his left elbow and his almost super-human efforts to make every start the last two years of his career. That he was able to do so while compiling perhaps the two greatest years ever put together by a pitcher is a feat that, simply given the care with which multi-million dollar athletes are no handled, will probably not be replicated in our lifetime.

That Koufax was a great is unassailable, that his peak was all-too-short seems a bit tragic (in the classical sense of the word), that his legend continues to grow only redounds to the place of baseball, and indeed sports in general in the American psyche. Famous before sports and celebrity became entirely intertwined, Koufax was among the first generation of athletic superstars. Yet he continues to shrink away from the spotlight. One gets the sense from Leavy's book that Koufax would have been much happier to go about his work and let his on-the-field efforts have the last word. This is not to intimate that he was taciturn or closed-off, rather he remains unwilling to play the role of public commodity, and indeed sees little reason why it should be expected of him. At a time when many athletes strive to become "global brands" Koufax remains, largely because of his seeming elusiveness, to grow in our mythology. By refusing to submit himself to public ownership he has become something much bigger, a living legend.