“Past Page Turner Stomach Turner”

Here’s an idea that resulted in a Past Page Turner. Sign a contract with a major New York publisher to deliver a book called Pen Men “Baseball’s Greatest Bullpen Stories Told by the Men Who Brought the Game Relief.” 

“Past Page Turner Stomach Turner”

Here’s an idea that resulted in a Past Page Turner. Sign a contract with a major New York publisher to deliver a book called Pen Men “Baseball’s Greatest Bullpen Stories Told by the Men Who Brought the Game Relief.” 

“Past Page Turner Stomach Turner”

Here’s an idea that resulted in a Past Page Turner. Sign a contract with a major New York publisher to deliver a book called Pen Men “Baseball’s Greatest Bullpen Stories Told by the Men Who Brought the Game Relief.” 

Richard Ben Cramer
Simon and Schuster

2000

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you
Woo, woo, woo
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Jolting Joe has left and gone away
Hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey

The answer to Simon and Garfunkel’s question—Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio---can be found in Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of this heroic yet flawed hero.

That said, in number, the DiMaggio biographies almost match Joe’s hitting streak of 56.

by Herman Raucher
P. Putnam’s Sons (1971)

Okay, one of the all-time great beach reads for a beautiful summer’s day. That’s a given. But as winter comes whistling around your windows if you’re looking for something to cuddle up with—try Summer of ’42—it will make you laugh, make you cry, take you back to a day when the world wasn’t as complicated.

’42 will warm your heart.

Simple story—three adolescent boys in 1942 are stuck with their families on a New England beach for the summer. They’re too young to fight in the war and yet waging a horrible battle of their own against the Number 1 enemy of youth—-puberty!

Fan of film?

The next time you stand at the end of a film you’ve enjoyed to watch the credits roll, go straight to your nearest library or rare/old book store and ask them to show you to (or order) The Name Above The Title: An Autobiography by Frank Capra.

There is no better primer of the history of Hollywood than this engaging, anecdotal, masterpiece told by the man who was there not only to see it all---but to do it all.

by Ben Bradlee, Jr.
Little Brown (2013)

Everything we wanted to know about Ted Williams and more?

At first blush yes, hell yes! After all this is the umpteenth book written about Williams, a 775 page tome that if dropped on the scales would outweigh one of The Kid’s Louisville Sluggers, the lumber that the Splendid Splinter spent a career baking, boning, primping, until they—in the hands of that incredible swing of his—made him the greatest left-handed power hitter to ever play the game.

But thanks to this Ben Bradlee, Jr. biography, what we have is: EVERYTHING we wanted to know about Ted Williams.

Ted Williams was half Mexican. Ted Williams made a career of not only knocking down American league fences he carried a lifelong chip on his broad shoulders the size of one of those satin Pedro’s South of the Border pillows. And, says Bradlee, this can be traced back to the kid’s shame of his Mexican background and his upbringing by a single mother who spent more time on the streets of San Diego banging a tambourine for the Salvation Army than she did at home raising Ted and his younger brother.

Once we’ve learned that his mother was Mexican and how it impacted Williams’ personality, did Bradlee need to shake the kid’s family tree until reprobate uncles and alcoholic aunts came tumbling out? Perhaps not. Are there a few too many graphic details about the cryptogenics and where the man’s head hangs today? For this reader, yes.

by Pat Conroy
Houghton Mifflin (1976)

There are characters we love and there are characters we love to hate.

The Great Santini, i.e., Bull Meecham, a Marine Fighter pilot, may be the perfect hardnosed, brave, single-minded man to have in the air over an enemy country, shooting down rival planes, dropping bombs on evil empires. But there’s a problem. World War II and Korea are behind him now, the fighting’s over and when he lands the plane he has to come home.

Home to a family he rules with an iron fist. Lillian, his beautiful Atlanta bred wife loves him, but lives to protect their kids from the oft violent, crude, rude, racist and socially unacceptable bull of a father.

When Lieutenant Colonel Meecham returns from that one-year tour in Europe the family—having lived comfortably with Lillian’s mother in Atlanta—is relocated to yet another marine base (they’ve lived in so many) and find themselves in Ravenel, South Carolina, where many adjustments must be made.

Newspapering and Other Adventures

by Ben Bradlee (1995)

Good Life, Great Read!

Miss the days when, coffee in hand and in slippers and robe, you’d wait for the sound of the morning paper to hit the front porch?

Ben Bradlee’s autobiography takes us back to the day when, of a morning, you’d open a Post, Times, Gazette or Herald and read earth shattering news, banner headlines not only announcing but making history—KENNEDY ASSASSINATED, BREAK IN AT DEMOCRATIC HEADQUARTERS, PENTAGON PAPERS RELEASED, WATERGATE HEARINGS BEGIN, VIETNAM RAGES, NIXON RESIGNS.

And Ben Bradlee may not have set the type but he sure as hell helped set the standard. No newspaperman in recent history made a greater impact on the future of U.S. journalism than the Washington Post’s managing editor.

Perfect, made all the right calls? No not even close. But it’s hard to imagine a more candid, accurate and generous account (he heaps praise on this fellow editors and writers) from the eye of the storm than Bradlee’s.

The early days—his growing up in Boston—have their moments. And Bradlee’s years as a slack-off—drinking, carousing, card player—at Harvard comes equipped with self-deprecating humor. His stint in the Pacific—zipping up and down in harm’s way on a Navy destroyer chasing Japanese subs, covering landing operations and firing deck guns at point blank range into enemy aircraft—makes riveting reading. . . while serving as a great reminder of what Bradlee and the Great Generation were thrown into during that “second war to end all wars.”

No need for a show of hands here, but how many of us have heard ourselves say, “I wish I’d have done that?”

Right to the point here.

None of us are getting any younger and the older members of our families have our history between their ears. While these memories are still functioning our job is to record these recollections.

It’s our last shot at our family’s history, the story about our past to be passed on to future generations.

by Nelson DeMille
Grand Central Publishing (1990)

What do you get when two dying breeds—old blueblood money and the mafia—clash in one of America’s great novels?

The Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille.

Hey, I’ve read the novel three times but since the publisher captured the story with such clarity I’ll humbly bow to this succinct and spot-on dust jacket summary.

Welcome to the fabled Gold Coast, that stretch on the North Shore of Long Island that once held the greatest concentration of wealth and power in America. Here two men are destined for an explosive collision: John Sutter, Wall Street lawyer, holding fast to a fading aristocratic legacy; and Frank Bellarosa, the Mafia don who seizes his piece of the staid and unprepared Gold Coast like a latter-day barbarian chief and draws Sutter and his regally beautiful wife, Susan, into his violent world. Told from Sutter’s sardonic and often hilarious point of view, and laced with sexual passion and suspense, The Gold Coast is Nelson DeMille’s captivating story of friendship and seduction, love and betrayal.

f adult readers dig deep enough into their past they’ll find a writer to whom they owe a debt of gratitude.

A bit overdue but I’m here today to say, “Thank you, John R. Tunis!”

A lousy little grade school student, I loved lunch, recess, and hated everything else, especially fifth period, which we called library.

Hey, for forty minutes a day you had to be quiet and read.

There have been many misconceptions in my life. High school for instance, sitting there on the bench during basketball games thinking that if I could just drop about 30 pounds that our head cheerleader would come crawling to me like a lonely reptile!

Numerous others come to mind but the in-store book signing experience might just top my list.

At best it’s that 15-minutes of fame Andy Warhol promised us. At worst, well, at least it will be fun.

Not so fast my published or soon-to-be published friends!

Now, I have to be clear about this experience because it applies, in my case, to a published author whose name wouldn’t turn a head if I tossed one of my books in a passing car’s open window.

Okay, even those whose daily reading is limited to road signs and that annoying “Crawl” that runs along the bottom of our TV screens have probably (at least) seen the DVD of the movie “You’ve Got Mail!” Hell, it starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan so thanks to these two great actors and a reasonably good (somewhat touching) script we have a nice introduction to the subject of this blog.

The small independent booksellers are getting screwed to their shelves by BIG BOX booksellers, those corporate giants who’ve all but priced (volume, volume, volume) the smaller booksellers out of the marketplace.

So, for the sake of the Tom Hanks character (Mr. Big Bookseller Pants’ viewpoint in the flick) we thought it might be helpful to readers to go to a quintessential independent seller (the Meg Ryan-like store) to remind us what (if anything) makes little “bookers” a viable—-in today’s economic environment—place to shop.

by Bill Bryson
Broadway Books (1998)

Okay, before you run for your walking sticks and take a vicarious, hilarious, and educational stroll up the Appalachian Trail with Bill Bryson, you should know that this rave has nothing to do with the fact that the author mentions me early in the second chapter.

Well, not by name but certainly by category.

That category being idiot!

You see, before Bryson makes this magnificent trek—with his hefty friend Katz puffing along at his heels—to prepare for the 2,100 mile hike (give a step or three) he grabs a few books just for reference, one being Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, wherein he learns that the black bear, that furry “friend” might feed on any passerby stupid enough to fail to realize that these Yogis and Smokeys aren’t cartoons but dangerous man-eating (under the right/wrong circumstances) animals.

by A. Scott Berg

How could I, someone who can limbo under the IQ score of 160 with the greatest of ease, possibly relate to a page turner with genius in the title?

Well, A. Scott Berg’s Max Perkins Editor of Genius, a 1978 National Book Award Winner, may be the finest, most readable book ever written about publishing—publishing when the book business was a very different industry indeed.

This is the biography of one of those once-in-a-lifetime (eye shade wearing) editors from the past, the man who steadied the quill holding hands of some of America’s iconic writers—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe and Jones—until they’d all produced literary classics.

by Dick Cavett and Christopher Porterfield
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (1974)

News flash, we’re about to lose Letterman!

Late Night TV talk show addicts know that sinking feeling. Hell, we’ve been through it all before—Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Dick Cavett, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and now Dave.

We watched them come, watched them nightly and then, sadly. . .watched them go.

But hey, on that May 2015 morning when Dave blows us his good-by kiss, odds are our bedmate isn’t going to roll over and say “Dear, sorry for your loss!”

But sleep tight my friends, Page Turners from the Past is here with a recent find, a little walk down memory lane with our old Late Night friend Dick Cavett.

by John Kennedy Toole, Grove Press (1980)

How to publish the Pulitzer Prize winning novel!

Create an incredible protagonist like Ignatius J. Reilly. Simply come up with a 300-plus-pound Don Quixote, a physically and mentally objectionable middle-aged character, a stumbling, bumbling malcontent,a comedic genius of sorts, whose skewed psyche drives him to war with every living, breathing faction of society. An “equal opportunity employer,” Ignatius hates everyone and everything — the middle class, the upper class, the lower class, rednecks, blacks, homosexuals, heterosexuals, movies, television, corporate America.

Drop this protagonist into New Orleans, a carnival-like setting where street life, rivers, docks and wharves beg the description of the written word. Take your readers to the French Quarter’s dives and topless bars and introduce them to genuine characters—drug dealers, porn pushers, bartenders, whores, and undercover cops—locals who speak the dialect of the city in pitch-perfect Yat.

By Dan Jenkins

Golfers whose reading isn’t limited to eye-balling three or four putt greens might want to give Dan Jenkins’ Dead Solid Perfect a read.

The 1974 laugh-out-loud novel is better than an 8-foot, “Ah, hell, pick it up!” gimme putt!

But golfers be warned!

This one’s a spoiler, so loaded with original one liners and characters that it will make you REALLY want to take a Big Bertha to that guy in your foursome who cranks out the game’s clichés —“Uh, does your husband play?” and “Nice putt, Alice!”

What we have here in this one-of-a-kind novel is the compelling story of Kenny Lee Puckett, a journeyman touring Pro who finds himself saddled by the three women in his life (two ex-wives and a current) while right smack in the middle of his first pressure packed hunt to win a US. Open Golf Championship.

So if making birdies while fighting Donnie Smitherton, his “best friend,” for the lead of a PGA Major isn’t enough stress, there’s the weight of the “wives”—Old Number One’s a blackmailing, money grubbing, “whore-lady”; Old Number Two’s fighting cancer (which is emotionally killing Kenny); Old Number Three, well she’s enjoying pro golf’s fast lane, riding her partner (his game, fame and “friends”) like a 15-handicapper two down in a double-press Nassau.

And the story? Well, it’s told by Kenny Lee Puckett, our struggling pro. But the voice is pure Jenkins “his own self” and “stronger than rent.”

PC readers be warned!

You may want to stay well behind the ropes on this novel’s perspective of life on the PGA tour.

By Guy Owen

Any wanna-be conmen out there, grifters who’d like to put a bit of spit and polish on their scams?

Give The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man a read.

This hilarious primer for the con follows the trail of the larcenous Mordecai Jones, the man who wrote the book on scamming.

And what an incredible teaching opportunity the novel affords Mordecai—coaching the art of tat, punchboarding, three-card monte, the Slick Box, the pocketbook, Medicine Man, smack, and finally, the granddaddy of them all, the pay off.