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Brad Snyder’s 2003 book Beyond the Shadow of the Senators is, quite simply, the best book I’ve ever read about Negro League baseball. Since this is the stuff I think about most lately, Beyond the Shadow has slightly blown my world apart. Snyder chronicles the parallel stories of the Homestead Grays and the Washington Senators. For several years in the 1940s the Grays, a Negro League team based near Pittsburgh, played occasional weekend “home” games at the Senators’ Griffith Stadium, at times completely outclassing the park’s more regular inhabitants. Snyder’s tale is a behind-the-scenes look at the integration of Major League Baseball, with absolutely stunning, fleshed-out portrayals of some of the major players in that struggle other than Jackie Robinson. Snyder’s ability to bring to life black journalist and integration crusader Sam Lacy, or lifetime Negro Leaguer Buck Leonard (who ultimately declined Bill Veeck’s invitation to join the Major League St. Louis Browns when Leonard was 45 with wrecked knees), or slyly segregationist Senators owner and co-founder of the American League Clark Griffith stems from the fact that he (Snyder) has seemingly consulted and internalized every relevant source in the world. Normally a book whose every chapter had more than 100 footnotes would not speak to me in this way, but Snyder’s footnotes are almost as interesting as the body of his text, and just imagining the hours he must have spent crouched by microfilm readers examining old pages of the Pittsburgh Courier or the Washington Afro fills me with awe. In a genre (historical books about the Negro Leagues – if that is indeed a genre) in which the same quotations and anecdotes recur and are reprinted with regularity, there was an astounding percentage of fresh material here. And Snyder’s principal characters emerge as deeply nuanced human beings, not caricatures. Snyder tackles some of the thorniest aspects of integration – including the fate of the Negro Leagues post-Jackie Robinson, and Branch Rickey’s (the savior who signed Jackie Robinson) exploitative rading of Negro League rosters. Some of the larger insights that Snyder had to offer I have to keep to myself – as they are actually central to the theme of my opera. On that note, on page 246 of the book is a photo of Josh Gibson that I’d never seen before. Taken in 1946, when Gibson was already fading into alcoholism and frequent psychotic breaks, it captures a seemingly gaunt Josh, assuming a dramatic, kneeling pose with a bat. His body still seems to contain some power, but his face is all worry and unease, and he looks literally as though he is fading into history. Taken by Ernest Withers, it purports to be the last extant picture of the great man, and like the book that contains it, it seared me to my core. It still sends chills up and down my person as I stare at it and type this, and fills me with a renewed sense of purpose. So read this book (and look at the pictures). But please don’t then write an opera about what you’ve read. ‘k?

I was lucky enough to get a copy of Laurel Canyon from my friend Charlotte, who was its art designer. But an even better surprise was to discover how truly excellent is Michael Walker's chronicle of that legendary L.A. neighborhood, from its mid- to late-60s heyday into its late-70s decline. This is the best account of sex, drugs and r&r I've read in a long, long time. It's beautifully written, insightful, and rings true with all the research I've done on related topics (newbies to this space may be unaware that I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Joni Mitchell, so this counts as research for me (as I work on a book proposal)). Walker has accounts of the sudden and shocking rise to prominence of artists like the Byrds, CSN(&Y), Joni, Jackson Browne, Frank Zappa, and many others who traipsed through the Lookout Mountain area when it was a bastion of Bohemian living and The Music. Most poignant, for me, is his account of the transformation both L.A. and the music industry in general underwent when Cocaine supplanted pot and LSD as the drug of choice:

Whenever cocaine actually arrived, there is universal agreement that it leeched whatever charm and innocence, real or imagined, the canyon scene still possessed. Whereas pot and acid were seen as tools of enlightenment, encouraging collaboration and damping, as much as was possible, the egos raging beneath the tie-dye and buckskin, coke magnified and amplified the worst qualities of nearly everyone who became heavily involved with it.

Walker's many interviews with major players from the eras in question load the book with fresh insights and previously unpublished anecdotes (like the time Joni Mitchell called Graham Nash, in 2005, to ask if he wanted to get together one last time and have a look at her old Laurel Canyon home, which she had been renting out for decades, before she sold it. He declined the offer.) And his take on the subject matter is deeply human and musically smart. For anyone hoping to get a handle on L.A.'s role in the rise of folk rock, the singer-songwriter movement, and the rise to American prominence of British acts like Led Zeppelin and Elton John, this little volume is invaluable. It also has a great chapter on groupies (with many lurid and captivating anecdotes from Morgana Welch) and - and you know how I feel about this - a very good glossy photo section, where all of the book's protagonists and several of its events may be studied. Only downside: if you've ever been a singer-songwriter, you'll lament having come of age in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

At last I am freed from the yoke of this 600 page tome. It's actually quite a page turner, and an interesting corollary to the other longish book I've read this summer, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At the end of his "Note on Sources," Robert Greenfield, the author, mentions that someone told him "those who love Timothy Leary will hate your book. And those who hated him will never read it." So good thing I came in neutral. The author's opinion of the man, to be sure, is none too high, and Leary comes across as a fairly vacant party fiend whose greatest loves were celebrity and himself. In 1960, British psychologist Humphrey Osmond and author and psychedelic pioneer Aldous Huxley visited Tim Leary at the outset of his work with psychedelics at Harvard. Greenfield writes: "Osmond and Huxley...could have shut down the Harvard Psychedelic Project before it began. Instead, even as the torch of government in America was being passed to a new generation, they handed the future of psychedelic research to the wrong man." This sentence stuck with me through much of the rest of the book. Of course the implication is that there may have been, somewhere out there, a right man. It's a tantalizing idea. Who was the right man? It turned out, I think, not to have been Ken Kesey either, and these two acid pioneers had an almost unparalleled hand in steering the 1960s to its Day-Glo climax and beyond, into chaos and ultimately dissolution. Mightn't the sixties have gone differently, and certainly the history of psychedelics, if the pioneers had not been such hedonists? Judging by this book, almost from the start, any notion of serious experimentation and research on the part of Leary and his team was superseded by frivolity, tripped out proselytizing and vanity. Certainly dissipation of seriousness was a potential byproduct of the drug. These two brilliant men can hardly be said to have lived up to expectations they established with early work - at least by our conventional standards. And what's the value of getting in touch - seeing the other side - if it isn't manifested in tangible contributions to society? Art. Science. Something. The whole trip seems so selfish in retrospect. And because the scene spiraled so ridiculously out of control, any serious research on the effects and usefulness of these chemicals was entirely curtailed, which might actually be a shame. Oh well. Not much of a book review here, I suppose. It's a good read - well written, well researched. I wish there had been some glossy photos, which you sort of feel you've earned after turning so many damn leaves. Still, I'd read the Acid Test before this one - it's so deservedly a classic. That might put you in the mood to drop a tab or two. Then this book will cure that desire.

At present, Philip Roth is the only writer whose every new work I await with baited breath, and for whom I'll run to the store to grab a full price hardcover on release day. Okay, maybe also J.K. Rowling, but I'm not admitting that here. Upon counting I realize I have not read 8 of his 27 books, mostly early ones (before my breath was baited, or even extant), so I'm not ready to dissertate, but I've done that already anyway (for a singer, about 8 of whose albums I don't own, but that's not admitted either - this entry will self destruct). I think what interests me most about Roth is his ability to render complex and at times unpleasant emotional landscapes with razor sharp prose and formal daring. His his best book (unless that's one of the 8 I haven't read), is The Counterlife - and it also may be his most unconventional. Other edgy masterpieces include Operation Shylock, American Pastoral, and Sabbath's Theatre, which begins with the great line: "Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over." He can also be good by being outright hilarious, and probably the best examples of this are the ultra-famous Portnoy's Complaint, and the less well-known The Great American Novel (in which a pathetic, homeless minor league baseball team plays against the team of an insane asylum, and the kleptomaniac shortstop continually disrupts play by stealing second base). Most of his books concern Jewishness, and he has been charged w/ self-hatred (the Jewish kind), perhaps because some of his characterizations seem to have their foundation in Jewish cliche. I don't think it's a fair charge. His Jews may often share his own personal weaknesses, but I believe these are presented in the sprit of empathy, rather than mockery (which may make you wonder just what the author considers normal). And if these Jews are at times over-sensitive to anti-semitism to the point of caricature, he has also portrayed the genuine article with searing accuracy (again, see The Counterlife). Charges of misogyny probably hold up better, and this is a trait I fear that, by all accounts, he may share with many of his hyper-flawed protagonists. Roth doesn't write women with much sympathy or understanding. His strength is the unexpurgated male perspective, in all its ugliness, and the shock of recognition men such as myself feel in turning Roth's pages comes invariably with a tinge of embarrassment and even shame. And yet I urged my big and more literate sister to stick with The Counterlife (faithful readers will recall I suggested it for her book group) and to accept its misogynist elements as a significant tarnish on an otherwise brilliant work - I'll let you know her verdict.
Lately Roth has been inconsistent. American Pastoral (1997) won the pulitzer and is generally regarded as a heavyweight - critically lauded far and wide, and rightly so. It's a great and debilitatingly upsetting novel. Then came I Married A Communist, which was okay (in some ways a work of revenge fiction, payback for Claire Bloom's tell-all memoir Leaving a Doll's House), and The Human Stain, which is the worst book of his I've read - cartoonish, shallow, even somehow poorly written (good story, but even that stolen from the real life of the critic, Anotole Broyard). The Plot Against America, his 2004 entry about what if Charles Lindbergh had beaten Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940, is frightening and vivid, and breathed cachet into a genre (historical fiction) that is generally not taken very seriously. But only for the first half does it maintain power. Roth runs out of steam and cops out, unable to live up to the epic scope of his tale, or to really project the potential long-term consequences of his central premise.
Alongside the epics and the Americana have come two thinner, slighter volumes, dealing unquestionably with Roth's own contemplations on mortality. The Dying Animal (2001) was the last of the David Kepish books, a short and moving account of a dirty-old-man professor's affair with an amply endowed female student (the endowment is a central part of the story, actually - if ever a woman was objectified, it is this one). Now comes Everyman, similar in size and shape to the earlier book, it works quite well as a companion volume. It begins with a funeral, proceeds with a life, and ends with a death, so that it is wonderfully circular in its construction. The events on page 1 follow immediately the events at the end of the book, and one can go round and round infinitely. I stopped at about page 15 of the second go (and the second pass makes a lot more sense).

I've gone on long, and don't want to make this a huge book review, of which I'm sure there are hundreds already. What happens is that we see a snapshot of Roth's nameless Everyman's life through the filters of his love affairs and hospital stays, each of which are fraught with suspense and uncertainty, and each of which plays a role in his gradual undoing. In the end, there is no recovery from the final hospital stay, and the last significant affair turns out, in retrospect, to have been the great mistake of our hero's life. Everyman's themes are the peril, even the terror, of old age, and the long-range consequences that actions born of our human frailty have on those in our orbit. The main character - irresistibly encountered, as almost always, as a Roth stand-in, is sympathetic and intentionally normal, at times petty, but always unexceptional. His fears and passions are visceral and moving, and his sad little story makes for a short, contemplative read (or two) with some lasting resonance. It's neither the first nor the fifth Philip Roth book you should read, but also not the last, and an estimable offering from a writer who has, for quite a few years now, turned out a book each and every year. That said, I would actually be willing to wait until 2008 for something a bit more substantial to sink my fangs into.

Enough with the literary bluster. I'm going to get back to that New York trip soon, even though it's quickly fading from memory here in breezy and lovely Portland.