Book Review - Short stories from Neil Gaiman and Bill Veeck

How to Talk to Girls at Parties (with an excerpt from "The Ocean at the End of the Lane") by Neil Gaiman -  This is a short story by the acclaimed author with an excerpt of a novel.  In it two English lads in the 1970s go to a party and discover what most of us discovered back then.  Girls are different.  As the night goes on they discover that these girls are a lot more different than most.  Nominated for a Hugo for Best Story it also won a Locust award in 2007.

I haven't read a lot of Gaiman (an oversight that appalls my daughter, just appalls her) but I do know enough to look for his puckish sense of humor.  This is a quick fun read.

The excerpt from the novel is interesting in a completely different way.  Gaiman takes us to that fantasy world that exists just at the edge of what we all "know" to be reality.  It looks like someplace normal but it really isn't.  A man re-visits the places of his childhood and ends up wishing he hadn't.  There are memories that should have been left buried and he must rely on the strange girl Lettie Hempstock to find his way through.  Just another item in favor of digging in and exploring Gaiman's output in greater detail.

Rating - **** Recommended

Bill Veeck's Crosstown Classic by Bill Veeck - You can not claim to love this history of baseball if you do not know the name Bill Veeck.  Veeck is one of the great innovators, promotors, personalities and owners in the history of the American Game.  This book is part of a series of short works called "Chicago Shorts".  It covers the time when Veeck was buying the Chicago White Sox from the Comiskey family.  Now the Comiskeys were characters unto themselves so it's a clash of the titans.  It's a fascinating look into one of the most unique careers in American sports.  Sports fans of all kinds should read this.  It's even fun if you're not.

Rating - *** Worth A Look

View From the Phlipside - Ernie Harwell

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the Movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View From the Phlipside.

Time to take a moment to pay homage to one of the last of a dying breed, literally.  Last week marked the passing of Detroit Tiger’s broadcaster Ernie Harwell.  He died very shortly after announcing his retirement last  fall due to an inoperable cancer.  The fans in Detroit lost a familiar voice.  But all of broadcasting may have lost even more.

William Ernest “Ernie” Harwell broadcast baseball games for 55 years.  At the end of his career he was ranked among the top 20 of all time.  To get to that point his career took some interesting twists and turns.  At the very beginning he had the distinction of being the only broadcaster ever traded for player.  The Brooklyn Dodgers needed someone to do their radio broadcasts while the regular announcer Red Barber was in the hospital.  Branch Rickey sent a catcher to the minor league team that held Ernie’s contract.  Harwell is represented in no less than four Halls of Fame including Cooperstown.  Because Tiger’s games were broadcast on on of the old clear channel AM stations his voice was well known all over the country.

The loss of a great announcer is something worthy of note.  The real loss is of a style of broadcaster.  Today’s baseball play by play guys come from a television background.  Their approach to the game is more technical and spare.  Harwell is one of the last of the radio generation,  announcers who were trained to tell the story of the game.  Very often a game that they weren’t even seeing but reconstructing from news wire reports.  They developed a love of language that seems to have faded with the years.  Their broadcasts were distinctive and could even be beautiful.  Harwell wrote poetry and songs about the game he loved.  I can’t imagine the current generation feeling comfortable doing that.  Some of the old timers hung on too long.  By the end of his career in Pittsburgh “The Gunner” Bob Prince was painful to hear.  Ernie kept the story of the game beautiful right to the end.

Ernie Harwell began the first spring training broadcast of the season with a section of Song of Solomon : "For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

For a moment let the birds cease their singing and let the voice of the turtle fall silent.  Ernie Harwell died at his home  in Michigan at the age of 92.

Call that

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010