Joseph Epstein (1)Critiques

JE is a fine essayist, as you probably know; this is a collection of his biographical essays. Those about the intellectuals and authors of the 50s and 60s whom he knew are especially interesting and entertaining.

Aristides!

reviews

Many of the "essays" are book reviews reprinted as essays, and mostly they work well enough in that capacity. I would say that an essayist collects his magazine work into a single volume at his own peril: essays originally read months and years apart look very different when read straight through. For example, certain clever observations (Havard was difficult to get into, easy to get out of, whereas University of Chicago was easy to get into but difficult to get out of) and favorite expressions (eminence grise) lose their freshness after the second and third encounters.

If you like essays by well read very smart people that read effortless, this is about as good as you can get. the UR of that kind. Title comes from a line from The Producers once Max Bialstock loses all his money he says "Look at me! I'm in a cardboard belt!"

Witty, erudite, effortlessly constructed and studded with 5-dollar words I don't know but would like to learn. Epstein is the new half-brother to my favorite family of writers, sitting at Thankgiving between Anne Fadiman and Joan Didion, across the table from Bill Bryson and Phillip Lopate. These are my heroes, men and women who take often pedestrian subjects and light them with bottle rockets from the inside. I hope to have a literary legacy like theirs someday. And as I practice, I read books like these to imagine what I could aim for in the meantime. Will grab another Epstein right soon. I'm thinking In a Cardboard Belt

Just finished this amazing collection. It’s mainly about interesting, complex Jewish American lives set in Chicago. Several are cautionary tales. A few, including Dad’s Gay and Jdate are very touching. I’ve already ordered his other fiction. I had previously enjoyed his entertaining and erudite essays in the American Scholar when he was its editor. So glad I discovered his stories.

Occasionally droll but often irritating tour of the various forms of snobbery inherent in American life. The author, a professor of literature at Northwestern, ostensibly aims to puncture the pretensions of snobbery even as he engages in them himself; the book's fundamental assertions are confused and self-contradictory.

In a nutshell: "Artie Glick in a Family Way" is about a man who, at at fifty-seven, finally grows some you-know-whats and becomes an adult. After growing up in the shadow of a difficult father only to have him die in surgery, Artie substitutes this father for a just as difficult therapist. Twice a week for fourteen years Dr. Lieberman has been milking Artie's feelings of inadequacy; for Artie was never good enough for his dad. Let's count the ways in his dad's eyes: he doesn't have business sense. He has already failed at marriage once. He has never started a family. It is only after Glick's girlfriend announces she is pregnant does Artie finally realize he could have a much different life.

I think "The Executor" was my favorite story from Fabulous Small Jews. It was short, simple, and direct...but with a twist. Kenneth Hopkins is a Princeton student with a Jewish poet for a mentor. His time with Professor Bertram is profound, but not as life altering as his meeting with Mrs. Bertram. But, their meeting isn't what you think.

This is a remarkable collection of essays on sports, written in a serious manner by a man who is surprisingly (unexpectedly?) knowledgeable about sports. Some of the usual suspects for a sports essay are present, such as gambling, but others are quite unusual, such as the author's love of John R. Tunis sports books for boys.

The essays are at their best when they're personal and Epstein speaks of his love of baseball and of the various Chicago teams, as well as some of his sports experiences growing up, playing tennis, for instance, in Chicagoland.

There is some annoying redundancy but yet, for a reader who is looking for serious, yet interesting, essays on sports, this is the book for you. Highly recommended!!½

The stories in this book break all the rules my high school teachers taught me about writing stories: they are all told by a third-person narrator, there is far more telling than showing (I'm pretty sure at least one story in this book contained no dialogue at all).

But Epstein transcends these rules. His characterisation, in particular, is wonderful. These protagonists are not heroes; they are grandfathers, sons, husbands, employees, thieves, douchebags, & jerks. And they're all fascinating.

Epstein is an engaging and humorous writer and a long-time sports fan with a strong interest in the ethical aspect of sports, as well as an appreciation for athletic greatness. As a collection, some repetition becomes evident, as we regularly learn that the author was good, but not great, at many sports. It was a bit startling to have made peace with the author's recurrent fascination with athletes of Jewish heritage, only to then find him lamenting in another piece that other authors made much of the fact that certain athletes were black. "Just focus on them as athletes, period." Was Epstein's advice to these writers, advice that he himself most certainly had not taken.

The plus side to the collection was watching Epstein's trajectory from enthusiastic young fan to disillusioned middle-aged cynic to resignedly addicted old couch potato. From "Sports are great!" to "Sports are fake." to "I'm in too deep to quit watching."

And special kudos to Rowman & Littlefield - this is one of the most well-presented, nicely bound books on my shelves. Having received hastily glued ARC's before, this finished product was a treat.½

This book will find two kinds of readers: those who will read anything about sports, and those who will read anything by Joseph Epstein. I happen to be the second kind. Epstein is a fine stylist, and that is reason enough to read him, but his principal merit is that he has what is sometimes called an interesting mind but is more properly an interested mind. If writers were classified like baseball players he would be known as a utility writer: whatever the subject, he can find something to say and say it pretty well, though he does, like utility players, tend to play the percentages with certain stock moves because they work. This tendency comes to the fore in the present book, which collects pieces across several decades. Reading it is rather like listening to a master conversationalist, the sort who is never at a loss, but whom you catch, if you spend enough time in his company, recycling the same anecdotes and clever illustrations. If the habit bothers you, this book will bother you; it doesn’t bother me.

Sports fans might hope to find in Epstein an eloquent advocate for the merits of watching nominally adult strangers play games which, under multitudinous scrutiny, do not even look as if they can be very much fun to play. Likewise those of us who do not see the merits, and would rather watch a little league game (at least if our kids are playing), might hope to learn to be edified by the spectacle of “professional players” (a term to boggle at). There is an oft-rehearsed case, which inverts the adage that if a thing is worth doing it is worth doing well by arguing that if a thing can be done especially well, it is worth doing (and, by extension, worth seeing done). At the highest levels of skill, the thought goes, sports are as much art as game, and that is why it’s worthwhile watching major league baseball instead of your kid’s game—in which there is, I must admit, no artistry though there is plenty of excitement and a much higher quotient of the unexpected than in the big leagues (you can spend every afternoon for fifty summers watching The Game on the tube and never see an inside-the-infield home run; and when was the last time you saw an NFL team run the old Statue of Liberty, than which there is nothing more fun in football?) If the person making this case is of a literary bent (as Epstein is) you will hear much about the poetry of the athlete, and sooner or later he will say something beginning “Ever since Pindar....” (However, dirty little secret: only those who have never tried to read Pindar can understand him.)

It’s a respectable case, and Epstein makes occasional half-hearted feints at it, but even these are often undercut by Epstein’s characteristic deadpan, as when, at once evoking and dispelling a Keatsian formula, he calls a graceful play “a thing of beauty and...a joy for about a second and a half.” For the most part it’s remarkable how little full-throated praise of sports he’s inclined to muster. Although Epstein does have a few pro heroes whom he can make us imagine and admire when he wants to—and none more so than Joe DiMaggio, the essay on whom is compelling, as is that on Bob Love, whose peculiar abilities he brings vividly onto the page—Epstein reserves his warmest appreciations for the amateurs (including himself), the casual talent, the naturally good, and the never quite good enough.

It is, I suppose, to be able to write about that last category—the sports star manqué—that Epstein turns to fiction. For as a writer of fiction, Epstein is a very good essayist. Indeed, his stories, which occupy a fair stretch of the middle of the book, read, in the main, like essays that happen not to be exactly true; and one gets the sense that he has simply fictionalized in order to avoid gratuitous unkindness in writing about a kind of athlete who never makes the big time, but whom he admires more than most who do.

The chief persona Epstein adopts in these essays, which will annoy some and amuse others, is that of the bookish man unaccountably mesmerized by sports. This affords him the opportunity for a comedy of delicacy, as when he paraphrases an athlete calling the fans “Oedipuses Rex,” from which translation you have to, as it were, derive the original; or when he sighs over John Madden’s oafishness, and fantasizes that Madden might be “working on a translation of the poetry of St. John Perse during the long commercial breaks.”

The chronology of the essays is not clear, since they are sorted into types, but one gathers the impression that Epstein grows gradually more cynical about pro sports, and about himself for watching them. Certainly he develops a recurring case of mental fidgets about the time he devotes to spectatorship. He chastises himself for listening to sports talk shows, and calls the essay “A Secret Vice”. Late in the book, Epstein goes so far as to disavow and even attack his own introductory essay, calling himself “the stupidest man on the face of the earth” for sticking to the sports habit; and one of Epstein’s running gags is imagining the languages he might learn to read or instruments he might learn to play if he weren’t parked on the sofa watching grown men whacking balls.

Ultimately, Epstein in these essays is not so much watching sports as watching himself watching sports. To some this may sound like advanced navel-gazing. Maybe it is. But Epstein does it very well, and if a thing can be done well, well, you know the rest.

Joseph Epstein is one of the foremost living practitioner of the art of essay writing in our English world today. His choice of subject is eclectic, ranging from the serious to the whimsical. So it is with some trepidation that I approach reading this book, because a serious essay writer coming down from Mount Olympus to regale us with him impressions and thoughts on the quite different realm of sports is somewhat surprising. I also did not want to lose my image of Joseph Epstein, erudite essayist and serious minded commentator. My fears were that he would not be able to translate his facility with the English language onto the subject of sports. or worse, I feared that his nimble mind was not able to grasp the simplicity and beauty of sports.

I need not have worried. Not only is Mr. Epstein quite adept at the sports genre, he is quite impressively, an erudite and opinionated observer and fan of the sporting world.

The book itself is a series of essays written throughout the years, mostly having to do with his beloved hometown of Chicago and their sports teams. If one knows anything about Chicago sports, one knows that the fortunes of those teams varies widely, the average Chicago sports fan of course are on a vertiginous roller coaster ride of emotions. From the depth of despair that is the Cubs to the ascendancy of the Blackhawks and the Bulls. Mr. Epstein travels the same tracks as the average Chicago fan, but he expresses his opinions and observes the foibles of sports with such clarity and expressiveness that it seems to this reader that I am re-examining the events with fresh eyes, even though we are treading old grounds.

The chapters helpfully delineates the general flow the topics: Essays, Jocks, Stories, Short Takes, Opinionations, and Summing up. It serves somewhat effectively to guide the reader to the essays that he desires to read. Collections like these fairly screams for the reader to pick and choose through the selection as the mood strikes him. The pleasure comes partially from the work the reader has to do to decipher the topic through the titles.

In general, Mr. Epstein did a magnificent job in presenting his viewpoint, as only a master of the art are wont to do. Though I did not fully agree with all of his arguments, his viewpoints did cause me to deliciously ruminate and digest his thoughts, which is what a book of essays should do: make the reader think.

One thing that struck this reader is the magical conciseness and precision that Mr. Epstein was able to effect in these essays. not a wasted word or thought was offered in his writing, every word offered was necessary and sufficient.

In short, it was a pleasure to read this book, I highly recommend it. In fact, I wish the usual suspects who call themselves sports writers would study this book as a primer on efficient and effective use of the English language as applied to sports.

The book is a nice collection of essays and stories from a fluent writer with his own, local, biases. These works are, fortunately, short, as anyone not especially interested in Mr. Epstein's subject may simply turn a page or two to get to a different matter. These are well-written works, but grammar aside, the person only casually interested in the thesis subject of any particular piece would be just as well off picking up a local sports page. I will leave this one for the windy city.

Masters of the Games by Joseph Epstein

This is a neat, breezy compendium of essays, book and personal memories on sports. The author, Joseph Epstein, an academic specializing in literary criticism who also is obviously a student and fan of the world of sports.

Starting out with reflections on his childhood he writes of how his interest in sports developed. A Jewish kid growing up in Chicago he gravitated towards basketball and baseball, eschewing the more violent, strong boy sports of football and hockey.

The pieces in this book are varied but his tasteful, literary take on the world of sports is refreshing. His essay on John R. Tunis who wrote sports novels for young adults reminded of the days I spent in the library of my own elementary school , waiting to get my hands on The Kid From Tompkinsville. Keeping track of all the Jewish athletes and the greats of sports form the 1940’s to 2000’s has a breadth that should appeal to many.

He also writes about how literary types have been drawn to sport, siting Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Updike and Naipul. He has an interesting piece on gambling, an activity, he says, Andre Malraux in On Man’s Fate called “suicide without death”. Anyone who has lost more than they can afford betting on a game or chance can relate to that line. Unfortunately for Dostoyevsky the novelist won “11,000 francs in his first attempt at gambling…and…The hook was in….suffering the inability that gamblers share with gluttons-that of not knowing when to leave the table.”

The greats of sports are profiled usually in the form of book reviews of biographies: Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio, David Halberstam’s Playing For Keeps about Michael Jordan and John Rosengren’s homage to Hank Greenberg. While not all the books are highly recommended the nuggets Epstein accounts give the reader of this book a quick insight into the essence of who these “masters of the game” were.

Other lesser known sports figures are found within this book: the incredibly efficient and dedicated Bob Love of the Chicago Bulls, the famous sports writer Red Smith and the Chicago Bears of 1985.

Epstein’s ideal reader would be the college graduate who loves fiction, participates in sports, watches ESPN or his local teams (win or lose) and for the perfecto is also Jewish of a certain age (coming of age in 1950’s). Having checked off on all these criteria I can say I enjoyed breezing through this book.

A very pleasant surprise near the end is the section of his fictional stories, well written catching the lasting allure sports have on young adults.½

Just a note toward a full review. Joseph Epstein's Masters of Games is well-written, but like the Boys of Summer, I think too much hinges on the author's story into which the sports bits are more or less woven. This is how each of us experience sport: as something that is wrapped up with all the other things in our lives. And sport should be written about as if they were a mere element in our lives. But we come to this book for the sport--that which is common to us all--not for the life of the author, which is his own.

Not that Epstein's life is without its intrinsic interest. Just that this was advertised as "essays on sport" not "sports memoir."

Anyhow one thing that is of great interest to me is that Epstein is from Chicago, and I have never until now realized how much a second-class sports town Chicago is compared to New York. The 1920s through 1950s were years during which the US created a new identity based on its immigrant origins and the strength, intelligence and ingenuity of its lower classes. Brooklyn was the spiritual capital of the early twentieth century US. And as far as baseball goes, NYC had it all over everyone else during that period . . . so we know the story of the Dodgers rising in the 40s to become a dynasty in the NL, virtually owning the privilege of losing to the Yankees each year in the World series. We know the story of the intense crosstown rivalry between the Giants and Dodgers. We know the story of how New York's NL teams were trailblazers in integrating baseball with, of course, Jackie Robinson, but also Monte Irvin, Don Newhouse, Willie Mays, Roy Campanella, Junior Gilliam . . . all of whom became stars before the Phillies the Yankees or the Red Sox had fielded a single black player.

But what about Chicago during this period? The Go-Go White Sox. Minnie Minoso. The Cubs kept losing. That's about it. That's all I really knew. Epstein's book is a partial antidote to that ignorance of Chicago sports, which I do not think is particular to me.

Lastly, Epstein, quite rightly, is a great appreciator of Michael Jordan. But reading Epstein's essay on Jordan I wonder to myself, Why is it so difficult to describe this man's greatness, because he was undoubtedly a great player, and why is it so difficult to like him? I hated, say, Larry Bird when he was beating the Sixers year after year, but I certainly see his merit as a player in retrospect and can see how he'd be beloved by the fans who rooted for him. But Jordan is different. Having rooted for Jordan still seems to me to be a kind of moral failure. Like being a Yankee fan.½

There’s undoubtedly fine writing here, though it is sometimes repetitive owing to the fact that this is collected writing spanning Epstein’s long professional career. But therein lies one of the joys in reading this work: it is a time capsule of 20th Century sports history. Reading Epstein’s essays we encounter firsthand accounts of Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Bob Love, Muhammad Ali, Hank Greenberg, the sports writer Red Smith, Kareem Abdul Jabbar when he was still a Milwaukee Buck – tales and memories of the 20th Century’s greatest sports figures up to and including Michael Jordan (who, himself, is becoming a historical figure as time marches on even for those of us who grew up watching him). Reading Masters of the Game is like touring a Smithsonian Institution collection on sports.

There are two primary audiences for whom this book would be most interesting, I think. First, younger readers interested in the history of sports as the history of American culture. These stories, written both during and after the times upon which they focus, by someone who was there – if not at the games, then in the society enlivened by those games – is a rare eyewitness testimony of the ground level life and attitudes of America’s past. Second, this book will find a favorable reception among the generation who lived through the times recorded in these essays. Epstein’s boyhood spanned the 1940’s and ‘50’s. Anyone who grew up watching sports at that same time will certainly recognize the names and events referenced and, quite likely, find something to agree with in Epstein’s repeated suggestion that the sports, the athletes, the society of the now-distant past America were all better, more pure, more worthy of our admiration than the sports, athletes and American society of this celebrity-obsessed, performance-enhanced, money-drowned modern era.

It’s hard to say whether Epstein is right or wrong about his assessment of the past VS the present. The singer Paul Simon once told us in song that “every generation throws a hero up the pop chart.” As it is in music, so it is in sports. Each generation thrills to its own set of superstar athletes because they see themselves, or their own hopes and ambitions for themselves in those figures. And as the fans age, though new superstars emerge, it’s always the superstars of their youth the aging fans admire most. I’m no different – I was on the high school basketball team when Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan ruled the NBA. They were the figures who inspired me to try to be a better athlete and leader than I was at 15. They’re still the ones who quicken my pulse today, just as I get more excited when I hear Tears for Fears on my radio than when I hear Lil John. The aging fan finds his or her own vibrancy preserved in the remembered exploits of their long-since departed heroes.

Epstein is a figure of rarified professional pedigree: former editor of The American Scholar, author, book reviewer, he taught English for 30 years at Northwestern University. Despite those credentials, when he relates to us on the topic of sports, he remains an everyman. In fact, it is on that point – the ways in which sport binds us together despite our differences – that Epstein writes most eloquently in this book. Sport is the common ground available to the blue collar truck driver and the white collar professor or lawyer alike. Through shared love of sport we move past our differences and find one another’s basic humanity. It is a beautiful point and one I believe Epstein is right to make. I wish only that he had done so less defensively – too often he almost apologizes for his love of sports and the amount of time he has spent watching sports even as he artfully argues the fact of sport’s cultural importance.

This is not a perfect collection. Ideas, themes, even individual anecdotes repeat. Some more discrimination in the selection of the essays might have helped that. But it’s a minor complaint about what is, overall, an entertaining, thought-provoking, at times touching and even amusing walk with one very good writer through his lifetime of watching sports and reflecting on what sport means to and about our multi-faceted American identity.

I was sent a copy of this book as a member of Early Reviewers. It's a collection of stories and essays written by author Joseph Epstein about sports. The collection includes some short stories as well as brief historical pieces, and narratives about his love of sports.

Not an athlete himself, the author describes himself as an early sports fanatic and spends time explaining how he acquired this 'habit.' The writing is accessible and entertaining. I particular enjoyed the few page "A Secret Vice" about the author's enjoyment of sports talk show programs.

In describing the 'vice' of watching/listening to sports, Epstein does a nice job reading out to multiple sets of readers - those who enjoy this pursuit and those who are confused by it.

This book is a rarity in that it is a book about sports not written by a full time sports writer. That turns out to be a very good thing because this is an excellent book of essays and short stories that will be of interesting to both serious and not so serious sports fans as well as anyone just interested in a good read. One of the things that sets this book apart is that it incorporates many literary references into its essays. There is an essay about John R. Tunis who is a notable writer for children about sport. I can remember reading those books to my children. There are three short stories in the middle of the book which were the highlight for me. One is about the fate of two young sports phenoms and another concerns a man who has successfully combated a gambling addiction. These stories are alone worth the cost of the book.

My favorite essay is about Joe DiMaggio. The first half extols his greatness as a player and the second half describes his failings outside of baseball. It is a well balanced essay.

There is a bit too much about the Chicago Cubs for my taste. Nobody cares much about the Cubs outside of Chicago for a very good reason, mainly that they have been a bad ball club since the dawn of man or thereabouts. Also Epstein seems to think fondly of Wrigley Field which is only worth going to if you hope to have a seat behind a pole which is entirely possible.

That next to last article really pulls the stories together as the author succinctly itemizes what is wrong with sport and shows regret in what he calls his wasted life watching sports. However the title of the last piece, "Still Hooked" shows that he can not truly give up being a sports fan.

This book is deserving of wide readership and might be especially useful to spouses of sports fanatics as they may learn something about the addiction.

Entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking. Sometimes the detail is distracting for a sports book, but overall "Masters of the Games" a satisfying read.

The dust jacket for the hardcover edition of this book (unusually reasonable at $20.29 from Amazon)begins by describing it as a "delightful book of writer-to-writer correspondence ...transacted via the Internet." It closes by saying that "Epstein and Raphael ...invite us into an intimate world where literature, cinema and art are keys to self-discovery and friendship." What it fails to mention--and it's surely intentional because it's impossible to avoid--is the tenor of the "correspondence." In an age where "judgmental" is pejorative, these very literate and successful men judge everyone, and many of their critiques are, shall we say, unkind. It's a sort of two-man cafe table at the Algonquin Hotel. Highly entertaining, but not for the faint of heart.

Well written and thoughtful biographical essays. The only quibble I have with the book is founded in my own prejudices. I just wish more of the subjects were pleasant people. Looking at the table of contents, there are only 9-10 people that I wouldn't cross the street to avoid (assuming they were still living). The problem is assuredly my own hatred of confrontation and unpleasantness!

Good easy read that introduced me people that I had heard about but didn't really know. And others I didn't know at all. As a reader it's amazing how much is still out there.

It is hard not to like this book if you like Fred Astaire, and since I love Fred Astaire, I loved this book.