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Upping the BRBA
I love to choose books at the library. But it sometimes gets me into trouble, as I end up taking home books that I have only the slimmest intention of reading. For instance, just before our library closed for the pandemic, I came home with a copy of The Senior’s Guide to Garden Gnomes (updated and with a new foreword by Norbert Jugworthy). Needless to say, it sat unopened until it was unceremoniously sent back to the library. A wiser man than me would have decided it was unnecessary to bring it home in the first place.
As a consequence of my less than rigorous selection criteria, I find that I only read, cover to cover, about half of the books that pass through my hands, and that I find that only about half of those were memorable reads. My BRBA, or Book Reading Batting Average, therefore stands at a miserable .250—not enough to keep me in the major leagues.
When the pandemic struck and the library shuttered its doors, I had no time to stock up, Local bookstores were closing as well. So I was going to have to look to other people to provide me with my reading material. Either that, or reread some of my personal inventory. But Winnie the Pooh didn’t appeal to me as appropriate COVID-19 era reading material.
So I followed the ‘borrow from others’ technique and to my pleasant surprise have had four books passed on to me, and had a four-ina- row streak of very good reads. Viewed through this prism, my BRBA could be said to have shot up to .999, although this recent run of success isn’t enough to increase my career BRBA in a statistically significant way.
However, my personal stats, fascinating though they may be, aren’t what matters: I’d rather share my enthusiasm for these four books with you.
The first was The Spy and the Traitor: the Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, a 2018 book by Ben Macintyre. Its subject is Oleg Gordievsky, a spy for the Russians who offered himself up to the British as a double agent. While he operated in Britain and Europe and gave away a huge amount of Russian intelligence, he was identified as a British double agent by the American Russian double agent Aldrich Ames, and recalled to Moscow. Unbelievably, he brazened out his cover story while under interrogation and was spirited out of Russia by British intelligence services. None of his activity was known to his wife and children, whom he left behind in Moscow, although they were eventually allowed to join him. Gordievsky still lives in seclusion in England and has not yet been poisoned by his former Russian colleagues.
The second was Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir by the American presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, published in 1997. It’s a pitch perfect remembrance of growing up in 1950s New York City with a family obsessed with a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team that always seemed to lose out to the New York Yankees (hence the title). Fans never gave up on them, and were rewarded in 1955 by a 4-3 series victory over the Yankees. Then the Dodgers left town, her mother passed away, she grew up, and the magic of 1950s optimism diminished. It’s a bittersweet but perfect tale.
The third was Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, a 2020 book by Robert Kolker. It tells the unbelievable tale of the Galvins, a Colorado family comprising 12 children (10 boys, two girls) of whom six (all boys) developed schizophrenia as young adults.Tragically, all 12 children were born before the oldest was diagnosed. The book weaves a narrative of the family’s endurance with a history of the science of schizophrenia. Science values the subject of siblings both with and without the illness, as it struggles to evaluate the balance of nature and nurture as causes. But, science aside, the heroic struggles of Mrs. Galvin to cope with the cards she was dealt form a compelling story.
The fourth book I enjoyed was The Splendid and the Vile, a 2020 book by popular non-fiction writer Erik Larson, who also wrote The Devil in the White City, a story of murder and the Chicago World Fair. This book chronicles Winston Churchill’s first year as British Prime Minister during the Second World War. You may be forgiven for asking whether there is any need for another book about Churchill, but the book is engrossing particularly because it relies on accounts from people (such as his daughter Mary, through her diaries) who spent a lot of time with him during the period. Larson said he got interested in the subject of the London blitz after wondering how it compared to New York during 9/11—except that the blitz went on for months. But the hero of the tale is Churchill, who willed himself to will a people to believe that they could and would prevail. The contrast to certain present day world leaders, who seem to know only how to diminish and divide, is left unstated.
If I am ever going to increase my career BRBA, I had better stop hauling home books I’m never going to read or enjoy, and instead listen more to other people’s suggestions. There’s a thought: listening attentively to others may be a useful life skill. Who knew?
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