Gay Talese

Although I check the sports pages of my local paper for baseball scores, I don't read much sports-writing that is not about baseball. The title piece is a profile of Joe DiMaggio fifteen years after his retirement, so technically it is about baseball, but most of these pieces, long or short, are about sports I have little or no interest in. They are fascinating reading, however, because Talese never wrote for sports aficionados. All of these pieces tell stories about people, people as show more obscure as a boxing timekeeper and as famous as DiMaggio, Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali. Each person is fascinating and each piece is compelling. show less

I'm going to have another shot at this review because I believe I missed the real essence of the book in my earlier critique (below). The author, the esteemed Gay Talese, is showing us what it is really like to be immersed in the writer's world. The day to day struggle, the challenges of writing into the unknown since a writer never really knows where the project is heading. The limitations, the frustrations, the victories and the defeats. In that way it is a trailblazer, at least it is for show more me. It's okay to wander, to seek, to fall back and start again. Thanks for that, Mr. Talese. It gives me hope that maybe someday I will finish my writing projects.

I really like reading what Gay Talese has written, and this book is not an exception, but the subject matter is at times a bit tedious. This is a memoir, mostly, and in part a confession of sorts. But the author has also incorporated some significant sections of notes and starts from books that he wanted to write but never really found a way to write. Personally, I was fascinated by this, but a couple of times (i.e., the Bobbitt saga) things got a little too detailed perhaps. It was rewarding to spend some time in the mind of a very creative and prolific researcher and writer, to see the pitfalls and the peaks of his chosen profession. I may have to revise this review a bit because I don't think I am conveying what I want to here. I'd give it a 4.5 for the writing, a 3.5 overall for the amount of detail included. Stay tuned for the update. show less

This just fed my persistently nosy mentality. Part of me is horrified by this -- horrified that I slurped this book up in less than 3 hours of reading, horrified that this went on and he never got caught, horrified for all those people who never had any idea that someone was violating one of their fundamental human rights.

But it's like a bad car accident, or a crime scene -- you just can't look away. I have a hard time believing that Talese would publish this book if he didn't feel show more confident about 99% of what this guy was saying. His credibility and all previous works would be just like Lehrer's fall from grace. Too risky. He's been in the game too long to do something stupid. That said, I don't know if I believe everything Foos transcribed in his journal.

But yo -- what an egotistical, misogynistic asshole he is. And his wives are just as culpable for facilitating his hobby. show less

When it comes to collections of essays or short stories, I’ve always struggled to get through them quickly—or even at a normal pace. No matter how great one story or essay might have been, jumping straight into a new one with completely different settings and characters left me feeling less engaged. That said, these essays might have just changed how I think about reading them more often.

The book has nine essays, a third of which focus on heavyweight champions: Joe Louis, Floyd show more Patterson, and Muhammad Ali. Each essay takes a different angle. With Louis, it reads like a fast-paced sports article—sharp and direct. With Patterson, it digs deeper, almost into the soul of a fighter. And with Ali, it shifts focus, becoming less about the man himself and more about the world surrounding him.

Just when I thought nothing could top the heated exchange between Frank Sinatra and Harlan Ellison, I hit the essay Ali in Havana 1996. It was a fascinating contrast to the former—an unusual encounter between Castro and Ali that included a magic trick. show less