Queen: Of Biblical Proportions

Queen: All The Songs, The Story Behind Every Track – Benoit Clerc (Black Dog and Leventhal)

Full confession up front- as a recovering rock radio DJ, I fully admit to not being a fan of Queen’s music. Chalk it up to them not being my cup of tea and the fact that they were omnipresent on the airwaves and got played over and over.

I gained a new appreciation for the band with the release of the biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, which gave insight into not only their beginnings, but into the process of writing songs and recording.

So it is from that perspective, one of new found appreciation that that I approach Queen: All The Songs, The Story Behind Every Track by Benoit Clerc. For me, the book has a great similarity Mark Lewisohn’s timeless book The Beatles: The Recordings, which delves not the nitty gritty detail of the Fab Four’s studio sessions. Queen: All The Songs, dwarfs that book, not only shear volume, but in the depth of the very specific detail. It covers songwriting, the recording studio, the participants on the production side and the specifics on the session itself.

I am an old school album collector and as a music fan obsessed with the minutiae of liner notes. Clerc delivers liner notes on performance enhancing drugs. This is super-sized fan stuff.

Lavishly illustrated with archival photos and highlighted tons of fan friendly tidbits and trivia, this is one of those great books that fans will dip into on a regular basis. I can easily see pulling out a stack of Queen albums and gaining insights into what went into the making each of the songs. Great stuff all the way around.

The Death of Honesty

Win at All Costs – Inside Nike Running and Its Culture of Deception – Matt Hart (Dey St.)

“It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” – Grantland Rice, early 20^th century sportswriter. Ah, remember the good old days…

There is a phrase that gets tossed around, “sport is a metaphor for life,” which has been credited to actor Robert Redford, of all people. As I read Win at All Costs by journalist Matt Hart, which delves into the deceptive culture of cheating, fraud, and lying that is pervasive at Nike Running; I couldn’t help but think of how reflective this story is on the current state of our country.

With quite literally billions of dollars at stake in the world of sports, we have seen over the course of time, words like truth, integrity, and honesty, become quaint thoughts from a bygone era, replaced by a ruthless, win at all costs, and screw the rules attitude. Cheating and rule breaking have become not only accepted, but expected, not only in sports, but in everyday life. As former UCLA Bruins head football coach “Red” Sanders (no it wasn’t Vince Lombardi) first said “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

Hart, who covers sports science, performance enhancing drugs and human powered adventure and exploration, (whatever that is) does a nice job of capturing the intrigue and spy novel stuff that is a part of this story. Win at All Costs, is a well-researched and written tale, that will hold the attention of not only those who follow the sport of running, but those with even a passing interest in the business of sports. Hart’s portrait includes all the colorful characters and the internal machinations at Nike, all brought forth by a whistleblower, in the spy novel twist of a mysterious jump drive containing internal Nike documents, with a skilled eye to detail.

Anyone who even remotely familiar with Nike’s early story and that of the late, legendary, runner Steve Prefontaine, know that improvements came in form of harder work in training, and enhancement of equipment. In the case running, that came in form of improved shoes and housewife sacrificing her waffle maker, for a new version of the sneaker sole.

Sports, like so much in our life, has gone through a radical transition. Athletes, once admired for their on field abilities, are now more often lauded for their social media following, woke social stances and other non-sport endeavors. With our collective eye off the ball, cheating, rule breaking and defrauding fans has become common place. We end up with world rife with performance enhancing drugs and the pursuit of trying to find ways around the drug testing regimens becoming a cottage industry all their own. We live in a world where scumbags who abuse their wives or girlfriends are welcomed back to elite sports because the can hit the longball, the strike zone, the opposing quarterback or the wide receiver on the deep route, almost as well as the can their significant other. Law and order, and rules be damned; this is about ticket, jersey, and sneaker sales and ringing the cash register. So, bang on the garbage can and get a shot in the ass all you want, because in the end getting caught won’t matter much.

You can’t help but draw comparisons between this story and the news of the day; where not only is corruption, fraud, dishonesty and cheating accepted and/or overlooked, it is applauded and often abetted by a complicit news media, whose job it used to be, to call out these dirty dealings. The media has become nothing more than glorified stenographers for talking points and adoring cheerleaders for criminals.

In Good Compny

 The Company – A Novel of the CIA – Robert Little – (Harry N. Abrams)

The Company by Robert Little, re-issued in a new paperback version, this 2002 classic, is a dark, complex espionage thriller that walks the reader through a twisted maze of intrigue.

Its not surprising that Littell comes from a journalism background, as he brings an old school journalist’s eye for detail as he let’s the story of the post-World War II Berlin Station play out. There is a real sense of reverence for history that comes through in Littell’s words as he weaves in historic figures like William Casey, William F. Buckley and even G. Gordon Liddy, in with his fictional creations. This technique lends an additional level of authenticity to the story.

Not dependent on biff, bam, and pow action like so many of the books in the spy genre, Littell infuses The Company with suspense, driven by tension and a high level of tactical acumen that is reminiscent of John la Carre. As a reader, you will appreciate the detailed scenes Littell draws, leaving you with a sense you are viewing things through his eyes. You’ll really feel the cold, dankness of the drafty safe house and taste the smokey-ness of the whiskey that is being downed.

Doorstop heavy, at nearly 900 pages this is not a lite read, but it’s more than worth the time to delve into this epic read. It makes for a great lead into Littell’s forthcoming book Comrade Koba.

Inside the Supreme Court

One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History – Ted Cruz – (Regnery Publishing)

Sitting through some of the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings regarding the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States, it can become pretty convincing, pretty quickly, that attorneys have created their own language, rules and standards, in some sort of an effort to exclude ordinary working folks as to how the court works.

Over the course of the hearing for the last three nominees the potential justices seem to hold fast to a code of judicial conduct, about tipping their hand on where they might stand and how they might rule on any given issue that may or may not come before them. Try as they might, often asking the same question about 30 or 40 different ways, the mostly lawyers who make up the Senate panel, notably the Democrat members, don’t seem to be bothered by trying to coax the nominees to speak out of turn.

In his new book, One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a former Supreme Court clerk of Justice Antonin Scalia delves into the inner workings of the court and uses a handful often ground breaking cases, that were decided by the push, a single vote to secure a 5-4 decision, to illustrate how those cases have impacted our daily lives. He makes the case that these types of push decisions can be greatly impacted by the courts ever evolving makeup.

He uses his insiders knowledge to make the case that originalists, those justices who utilize the intent of the founding fathers in their decision making process are often what separates us from tyranny. In a crazy year where the word essential has been so over-used, it is the perfect word to describe the book which cuts through all of the legal-eze and hyperbole of the politicization of the Court to explain exactly how the Court was intended to work. It should be required reading for every high school student.