Review of Mac's Boys: Branch McCracken and the Legendary 1953 Hurryin' Hoosiers (Quarry Books) (Paperback)

The book starts by laying an excellent historical foundation prior to the '53 seaon. The GI Bill, growth in big state universities, increased emphasis on college sports and the invention of the point spread all led tocorruption that threatened the legitimacy of college athletics in the early post WWII years. Hiner goes into fascinating details involving Godfather-like characters with names like Sollazzo to illustrate how the great New York City basketball colleges were brought down by gambling scandals.

Game fixing struck not only the east coast but migrated out to the heartland. Hiner discusses the corruption that forced Kentucky to give up its 1953 SEC season.

The next chapters involve the individual players and how they ended up coming to IU.

There was Leonard, the deadend runt from the railroad tracks of Terre Haute who grew from 5'4" as a sophomore to 6'3 in high school. Rangey Charlie Kraak, whom Branch McCracken snagged from Illinois' Harry Combes' backyard. Dick Farley , the poor kid from a huge family in southern Indiana (Winslow). Burke Scott, the gym rat from Tell City who never really quite believed that McCracken wanted him, and had to decommit from Western Kentucky to attend Indiana. And Don Schlundt, the "rich kid" from South Bend. Schlundt was rich because his family could afford to give him a basketball, which was a rare possession in those days. As a young kid Schlundt was so fat, dumpy and lacking in skills that he needed that basketball so that other kids would play with him.

The following chapters deal with Branch McCracken. Starting with him as a boyhood neighbor of John Wooden to Branch's excellent playing career as a high schooler, collegian and pro. Terrific background on the things that shaped McCracken's philosophies on coaching. Through every phase of his playing career, McCracken loved the running game and couldn't wait to implement as a coach.

To use the running game effectively, McCracken was a stickler for conditioning and Hiner does a good job of describing all the things he did to keep his players in shape, including having them spied on if necessary.

The rest of the book effectively weaves the games of the great '53 IU seaon with wonderful personal stories involving players, coaches, family and friends. The details on the games themselves are very thorough and greatly appreciated by an IU basketball historical nut like me. But since I knew a lot of those details, I liked the personal stories even more. I loved reading about what a scoundrel Bobby Leonard was, and it was all McCraken could do to keep him in line. There are a lot of other nice gems, but one that sticks out is how a few college kids, with no money or a plan to speak of, get themselves to the champioship game in Kansas City and end up storming the court in victory.

If you have much interest at all in the tradition of Indiana University basketball, then you'll enjoy this book.


Product Description
This is the story of the 1953 Hoosiers, NCAA champions, coached by Branch McCracken and boldly led by star players Bobby Leonard and Don Schlundt. This legendary Indiana University team from the pre-Bob Knight era has begun to fade from memory, but Mac's Boys brings it vividly back to life.

One of the Hoosier state's most beloved basketball teams, the 1953 Hoosiers was also one of the best in the history of college hoops. It was a squad that had a great coach, a pair of star players, and teammates who accepted their roles and executed them flawlessly. With Leonard and Schlundt sharing the spotlight, there was the versatile forward Dick Farley (who would have been an All-American had he played on any other team), tenacious rebounder Charlie Kraak, and the hustling, ball-hawking guard Burke Scott. They were the heart of a team that put together one of the greatest hot streaks ever seen in Big Ten basketball, and then capped it off with a run through the NCAA tournament.

Mac's Boys recreates the terrific story of Indiana's magical 1952-53 season. For Hoosier fans especially, it will become a treasured tale that illuminates one of the most glorious chapters of Indiana University basketball history.

From the Publisher
2007 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection

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Review of Have Glove, Will Travel: Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond (Paperback)

I was going to rate this book three stars, but the book rallied in the last few chapters.I was not interested in reading about Bill Lee's adventures around the world as it applied to drugs and other hell-raising escapades.He was put on baseball's black list after going AWOL during a game with the Montreal Expos when a friend of his was unfairly, according to Lee, released.There is a wonderful chapter on the conversation he had with Ted Williams.Williams, of course, claims he made a living off of dumb pitchers.However, Lee challenged Teddy Ballgame by saying he could tell him one reason Williams was such a good hitter that Ted wasn't even aware of.The skeptical, but curious, Williams decided to hear what Lee had to say.After having Williams conduct a simple experiment involving his eyes, Lee made a believer of Williams in regard to which of Williams' eyes was the dominant one.Lee genuinely loves the game of baseball as has previous generations in his family.In fact, his aunt, Annabelle Lee, was a professional ballplayer for nine seasons as the ace left-hander for several women's baseball teams during the 1940's.Her uniform hangs in the Baseball Hall of Fame.For Lee to continue playing wherever a ballgame can be found shows he has a genuine love for the game.There are some very funny anecdotes that will be fun to pass on to others.I give the book four stars rather than five, due to a lot of the aforementioned mischief stories involving drugs and alcohol.The last forty pages, however, make this book a worth while read.



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Review of The Paris Review Book: of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, ... and Everything Else in the World Since 1953 (Paperback)

I bought this book mainly for the interviews the magazine has had over the years, and some of them with notoriously reticent figures like Nabokov and Hemingway.But I was disappointed, because what really distinguishes a Paris Review interview from those of other magazines is how well they're edited, and how beautifully and naturally the conversations flow.All we get here is single paragraphs, usually just anecdotes, funny stories, little opinions: sometimes they're profound (see Edmund White's page) or just convey the author's personality well (Faulkner, Hemingway), but all of them just made me upset about not being able to read the rest of the interview.

Of course there's not enough space.But I would have thrown out most of the other material.I doubt there was any way to make this collection totally succesful: if you pick only the famous stuff that the magazine has published over the years, it's sort of a waste, since most people would either have read the selection already or wouldn't want to read just an excerpt.A first chapter is useful to get you excited about an upcoming book, but unnecessary if the book's already been published.If you limit yourself to the more obscure material, well, it'll be good, but there's a reason that some people remain obscure.

Not that I didn't get a lot of pleasure out of this book.Heather McHugh's poem, for example, is beautiful, and I never would have run across it if I hadn't picked this up.There are little wonders sprinkled throughout, but too much of the rest is familiar, just okay, or an unsatisfying little piece of something larger.

I hesitate to put forward this criticism, since I have no idea how I could do it better - but I do know what book I would rather have read.If anyone down at the magazine (which I hope will rebound from the sad loss of Plimpton) can put together a big volume of complete, untruncated interviews, I would pay a princely sum for it.I've seen earlier collections, but nothing that covers the entire Plimpton era, and I think it would be easier to pick just the great interviews than to squeeze thirty plus years of wonderful material into this enjoyable but probably ill-advised collection.



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