It's Not All About The Benjamins: Moneyball by Michael Lewis

This isn’t, at heart, a book about baseball. On the surface it’s about the how the Oakland A’s, who should be the equivalent of the kid in the old Charles Atlas adverts getting sand kicked in their faces, live with the big financial bullies of the league. How they compete in the only major American sport that doesn’t have a salary cap to provide a level playing field. The difference is this kid didn’t send off to get the muscles, he simply got smart instead. This book is about how being smarter than your opponents can work. Even if you’ve got zero interest in baseball, it’s an absorbing, intelligent read.

There are two real threads to this book. The first is the rise in sabermetrics, which tried to take the elements of luck and judgement out of baseball statistics and actually measure a player’s performance – for example, fielders being judged on how few errors they made when an error was obviously a subjective call. And the second is how Oakland’s general manager Billy Beane, originally a can’t miss prospect who missed, determined that the conventional methods of building a team were wrong and set about some unorthodox methods of constructing that team.
The threads intertwine as Beane, with the help of his assistant Paul DePodesta, uses the sabermetric system, rather than the conventional league approved ones, to analyse the truly important underrated stats and pick up cost effective players who performed well in these categories. In short, he takes advantage of crucial data that other teams ignore in favour of the more gaudy stats. It’s fascinating to see Beane rebuild the organisation using these stats as a basis. He fires the scouts, who look only at what they want to see - who looks good and athletic, who pitches the fastest, who runs the swiftest. These scouts, who’ve been trained by convention and accepted wisdom, are all booted in favour of those who’ll look beyond the appearances and to actual performances. And with the help of his new scouts and sabermetrics Beane takes the equivalent of rescue dogs from Battersea Dogs Home and transforms them into stars. And if they don’t work out, or work out too well he trades them to his advantage. And as the book clearly shows the methods are wildly successful – the A’s consistently have one of the league’s lowest payrolls yet consistently make the playoffs.

Beane’s a fascinating central character, a GM whose own experiences of being the can’t miss prospect who missed lead him to question the whole system of talent evaluation. He’s an intriguing mixture of gambler, thinker and horse trader, even not watching his own team’s games because it might bring cloud his judgement on players. It’s clearly his failure to make it that drives him to prove how wrong the league is when it comes to selecting players, and use that failure to outsmart the rest of the league. Michael Lewis clearly conveys the passion that drives him and the pleasure he derives from building his team. He doesn’t shy from portraying Beane’s ruthlessness either, mixing the fairytale pickups of Chad Bradford and Scott Hatteburg with Mike Magnante, who’s cut immediately before a game his wife and children had turned up to watch, effectively ending his career four days short of receiving his full pension benefits.

By the end of the book a couple of other teams have started to cotton on and follow Oakland’s methods, rather than dismissing them as a freak situation. Only a few though, the majority of baseball still cling to their received wisdom. When you finish reading this book the new afterword will give you the impression that the powers that be in Major League Baseball are like the Spanish Inquisition trying to silence anyone who tells them the world isn’t flat or the centre of the universe, suppressing and ignoring knowledge that might improve them and their teams.
It’s a great story which Michael Lewis tells fluently and clearly, meaning the baseball stats and often complex trades are rendered clearly to outsiders. It fires what Beane and DePodesta are dong through a business perspective, showing clearly how the often hollow business mantra of more efficiency, fresh perspective and exploiting previously unknown holes in the market can work even applied outside the traditional business arena. It focuses an already great story through a prism of fresh perspective, although naturally it’s an occasionally harsh perspective on Beane treating his players as commodity. Each chapter focuses on some aspect of Beane’s thinking and the background to it, meaning the methods he uses are vividly and clearly illustrated, even to those with little or no interest in baseball.

In the end the book is best summed up by a rare example Lewis gives from a game. A television analyst is explaining exactly why Oakland always fail in the playoffs, whilst in the background the team are actually doing what he’s saying. Naturally his lecture goes unquestioned, even in the light of hard evidence from the game. If there’s one favour a sports fan can get from Moneyball it’s to realise how little sportscasters engage their brains when ‘analysing’. In fact, how little most teams seem to be using their brain, instead favouring received knowledge.

This is a book that can be read, digested and enjoyed even by non-baseball fans, hell even by non-sports fans. In that respect, Moneyball is simply one of the greatest sports books ever published.

There's A Club If You'd Like To Go - Phonogram Vol 2 Issue 1 - Pull Shapes

Hey, more comics! Less Nazis though. Or mice.

The first series of Phonogram was my favourite comic of 2006 for all sorts of reasons, but mainly because the whole damn book captured all the reasons pop music owns my soul. The whole use of Britpop was just a surface bonus, the big ribbon on the best present you’ve ever had. I’ve been looking forward to the second series from the nanosecond I finished Issue 6 of the first series.

First impressions are that, as all good series do, it’s developed. It’s gotten more vibrant, more pop than ever. Instead of the album cover pastiches of the first series, the covers here are modelled on club flyers. It’s a shameless attempt to be eyecatching, as is the largely pink cover. And inside – my God, they’ve gone colour! And they don’t waste it, the whole nightclub concept wouldn’t be half as effective without Matthew Wilson’s sympathetic colouring capturing the colours and atmosphere. It’s tough to review the main strip as it’s a portmanteau plot, a series of short stories which’ll build up to tell a story. Gillen’s story feels like it could’ve been told in the British teen girl magazines of the 70s and 80s, featuring as it does much dancing and unrequited love for a good looking fashionable young lad. He’s smart enough to give the story enough flavour to avoid that though, there a satisfying happy-ish ending and the musical references are as well chosen as ever – Laura Heaven, who seemingly exists just to quote lyrics from the sadly late Long Blondes is a favourite. And for we music fans who’ll spot the lyrical and visual references it’s a sharply observed contrast of the ethos and attitudes of the Long Blondes and one of the other bands who made 2006 a joy, the Pipettes. It’s not essential to know but it does give an extra appreciation of the story. Perhaps the story’s a little straightforward but there’s enough off unexplained key hints to suggest we’ll be able to view it in a different perspective later on.

Backup strips are well chosen, effectively contrasting and complementing each other. Visually and thematically, She Who Bleeds For Your Entertainment is reminiscent of Sandman, art and story combining for a creeping claustrophobic intensity that makes it genuinely unsettling. On the other hand Murder On The Dancefloor is an appealingly goofy throwaway joke with a decent punchline. Of course, there’s also McKelvie’s splendidly opinionated ‘sleevenotes’, playlist and essay material which were an essential part of Phonogram’s charm last time.

Pull Shapes then is like the perfect first single from the second album – it’s still got enough familiar elements hanging around to remind you what you loved about the band in the first place, but it’s changed enough to give you enough new thrills to replace the sensation of hearing something that blew your mind first time out. Oh, and they’ve got a load of irresistible hooks and the effortless cool to make the most of their greatness. In short, it rocks like a bastard. Again

Maus by Art Siegelman

How do you bring home the horror of a tragedy that’s been dulled by familiarity and the distance of time? Sure, you can tell a survivor’s story, as Spiegelman does here, you can even give it a family angle. But that’s not enough. Spiegelman’s twist of genius is to fuse the ideas of Hitler and Disney, playing the Nazi portrayal of the Jews of subhuman against the Disney conception of mice as cute and sympathetic. Somehow, substituting innocent animals for humans does the impossible and brings home the horrors of the Holocaust – the burning mice portrayed twice in the second chapter of Part II is amongst the most disturbing images I can remember, certainly in a graphic novel. It’s a story that would have been diminished, less powerful in any other medium, the imagery equally as crucial to the success of the story as the words. And Spiegelman never resorts to gratuitous gimmicks to tell the story, instead the artwork and words used are kept as simple as possible. It’s therefore arguable that Maus is the most mature and intelligent use of comic storytelling yet seen.

We get not only an account of the horrors of the Nazi treatment of Jews but how it had lasting consequences too. Spiegelman carefully and subtly lays out how the Auschwitz ordeal left its mark, inevitably warping the survivors , through his portrayal of his father. Spiegelman’s father isn’t a particularly sympathetic protagonist, particularly as an old mouse. What we get is far better, a character who, despite being a mouse, is more human for all the flaws he demonstrates. Eschewing the simple option of a lovable, heroic narrator for a complex and flawed ‘human’ being is another brave move that emphasises the horror. A hero would, by nature, react heroically, a human being’s actions are more recognisable as the ones we probably would make, as opposed to the ones we’d hope we would make. It gives the persecuted a more recognisable face and character.

If there was a minor niggle I can’t say Spiegelman’s exploration of his difficult relationship with his father engaged me, it’s one of those elements that’s been worn into meaningless by overuse, particularly in American fiction. But it’s inextricably linked with the telling of the story, the device that allows him to frame the recollections and bring them to life.

In lesser hands the cocktail of cute animals, cannibalisation of family history and the horror of the Holocaust could have ended up seeming maudlin or exploitatitve. Instead, the strength of the storytelling and characterisation means it This is a story that simply wouldn’t have been half as powerful or effective in any other medium. In short, Maus is the single most powerful argument you’ll ever see for the graphic novel.

Pure Pleasure by John Carey

Yeah I know, eight months and no posts. So much for good intentions. A+ for intention, D- for effect. Anyway, I'll try and be a little better about it this year. So anyway, about this book...

I love John Carey’s attitude towards the arts. He doesn’t hold with the reverence endemic in British attitude towards arts which, he argues, means a lot of people won’t even try to engage with arts seen as highbrow and scary – opera, classical music, theatre, art, sculpture and vast swathes of literature are all seen as museum pieces, to be admired at best rather than enjoyed and engaged with. Carey’s righteously angry with this attitude, propagated by what he sees as a self proclaimed intellectual elite who proclaim the quality of art. Part of this is the cheap listmaking that fills space in cultural magazine – all those all time or end of year 'best ofs' that proclaim to you what the best albums/books etc have been. So when Carey was asked to write a series of articles for the Sunday Times on the best books of the twentieth century he eschewed the usual ‘best of’ lists, or a chance to show off his undoubtedly wide range of reading and intellectual prowess. Instead he came at it from the angle of writing about books which had given him the most pleasure. This book collects those articles.

Aptly for Carey’s crusade to bring literature in particular out of an intellectual ghetto Pure Pleasure impresses by being concise yet rigorous about the books it covers. None of the articles covers more than four pages, yet each one manages to give a flavour of the book and exactly why Carey found them so much of a pleasure. Carey performs the balancing act of using accessible prose yet conveying complex ideas with aplomb, and his obvious enthusiasm means this is far less dry and more engaging than similar works which seek to enshrine classic status for their chosen artworks.
As with all such books, you’re unlikely to agree with all his choices, but here that’s hardly the point. It seeks to make the reader more active in their appreciation of literature, to bring it back to being an enjoyable activity rather than a slog through heavyweight classics. To remove the stigma from those who don’t enjoy sitting through six hundred pages of Victorian prose but may find a shorter, wittier or more recent book far less intimidating. Of course, given his Oxbridge background, Carey’s choices come from literature rather than including the huge selling likes of Stephen King or Catherine Cookson. That’s what he enjoys, that’s the point here.

The only point I found myself wondering about was exactly where this book was aimed – it’s probably not going to create many literary converts, and it’s appearance in an upmarket broadsheet paper (and now as a book by itself) was hardly ever going to lead to a resurgence in popularity for the likes of Auden or S J Perelman. However, if it was aimed at readers who like to read more than the holiday blockbusters it’s perfectly targeted, providing a wide enough range to intrigue almost any possible reader. I can only judge it a success, soon after finishing I’d ordered five books I’d either never heard of or knew by repute, and added a fair few more to my wishlist. Which probably proves that the most effective reviews talk about why they enjoyed the book rather than why it should be admitted.

Thank God it wasn’t any longer and only included one book per author though, otherwise I’d probably be selling the Big Issue by now.

Dubliners. Because I don't just do lowbrow...

I think of myself as widely read - not well read, because I think of that as a near impossible feat, there'll always be authors and/or genres that elude even the most catholic reader, whether it be scary doorstops such as War and Peace and Ulysses, Jeffery Archer's potboilers, Eastern European literature, ghostwritten celebrity cash ins, science fiction or the much derided Mills & Boon romances. There just isn't the time (nor breadth of interest) to try everything. But there's plenty of 'classics' I haven't read, either through allergy to other works (Sense and Sensibility's just a tad too smug for me to contemplate any more Jane Austen) or just not getting round to them (the likes of D.H. Lawrence). James Joyce fell into the latter category for me, reading his earliest 'classic' would decide whether I'd got the interest to proceed to his more notionally imposing works.


Dubliners is a collection that's far stronger than the sum of some fairly insignificant parts. It's almost a trial run for Ulysses' panoramic portrait of a Dublin day, using snapshots to build up a picture of a lively city, drawing these snaps from all ages and social strata. It's the former that lens a structure to the collection, the protagonists moving from a child experiencing the concept of death for the first time that to the most famous of the tales here, The Dead, a man realising a truth about his wife late in life. The concept of death in both the first and last tales lends a symmetry to the collection, evoking the circle of life. Each tale hangs on an epiphany for the central character, built up to by the events of the story. Some epiphanies are more important than others, particularly the ones toward the back end of the collection where experience allows the character to grasp the consequences of their revelation more, the stories therefore being richer. The likes of Eveline cover ground already trodden a thousand times, but then it's largely the case that the lack of life experience means younger characters are less dramatically interesting, particularly when they know little outside Dublin's city boundaries.

The Dead is clearly the standout story here, the theme of the dead always being with us haunting the dinner party and main character. Despite being by far the longest tale in the book, it doesn't feel like the longest to get through. Of course, that might just be a consequence of it's position as the finale. Personally, my favourite was A Little Cloud, since I could certainly relate to the thwarted literary ambitions of the protagonist, although in my case those are due to cowardice (and yet I'm blogging - go figure! Maybe the cojones are there after all) and, aside from The Dead, the poignancy of A Painful Case and late comic interlude of A Mother, seemed most successfully realised. For me it's at its least successful when dealing with the then hot political issue of nationality, important in establishing a sense of place and time, but of less interest or importance today.


I'm a fairly fast reader but Dubliners took me a fair while to get through, it's a combination of Joyce's deliberately simple language and the stories increasingly having the weight to demand that they be reflected upon. My edition was cursed with an overlong introduction (informative but could've done with losing a good ten or twenty pages from fifty) and overenthusiastic footnotes (the contextual notes about period Dublin were handy but when it goes so far as to tell what the Wild West was, it's going a long way overboard. but then I'd rather have too much context than no context, particularly when the city's as much a character as any of the people in the stories. Worthwhile, but despite the simplicity of language and story, don't expect an easy read.

Doctor Who 4.1 Partners In Crime

Fans today, they just don't know they're born. Twenty years ago we had to put up with Doctor Who being treated as schedule filler, an underbudgeted anachronism shoved in the Timeslot of Death against what was then the invincible ratings juggernaut that annihilated anything in its path, Coronation Street. A show that shared that slot with high concept low brain US sitcoms like Doogie Howser M.D. In the days when recordings weren't factored into ratings that's kiss of death scheduling. Now a show that achieves the Holy TV Grail of high ratings and high audience appreciation, that changed the mindset of what you can do with Saturday evening viewing, that kills whatever ITV puts up against it for fun, from Celebrity Wrestling to ITV's golden boys Ant and Dec, gets moved forward by forty minutes against probably the tiredest show on television, You've Been Framed, and the end of the world is nigh. Moreso when comedy marmite Catherine Tate's been cast as the companion. If DWB were around today it'd probably have done an RTD Must Die! front cover by now.

And of course it gets 8.4 million viewers and the usual astounding appreciation index rating and all is right with the world. There'll be moans that it's lost five million or so since Voyage of the Damned next...

And what we get with Partners in Crime is an indication that the series is still reassuringly at the top of its game going into its fourth year. Like previous season openers this is Big Dumb Fun that won't require you to think too hard, what Old Skool Fans used to call a romp, but Big Dumb Fun with agreeably dark undertones.

Let's get the most controversial element out of the way first. After three years of young lasses going moon eyed over a Time Lord, Donna is a refreshing change. After three years of apparently answering When Harry Met Sally's question of whether mean and women can be friends without sex getting in the way with a firm 'no', RTD seems to have changed his mind. The Doctor-Donna dynamic looks to be going for more for Steed-Mrs Peel than Steed-Tara King, a slight but necessary reformatting. Another year of a girl going moon eyed over a centuries old and it'd start to look like RTD could only write a companion generic to his vision of Who, but he's far too smart to fall into that trap. He does still appear to believe that viewers can only relate to London companions though. Tate also has the chemistry with Tennant that neither Rose (since, by design of her character, she works better with the Ninth Doctor) nor Martha (arguably because Freema Agyeman's not a great actress) did, right from the comedy masterpiece silent conversation, through the plot resolution scene where she provides the MacGuffin that foils the Evil Plot, to the last 'mates' conversation. The last half of The Runaway Bride proved there was more to Donna than just the shouting, particularly in her realisation that Lance betrayed her, and her final scene in the snow so for the moment, I'll just go along with my usual assumption that RTD knows how to run a TV show better than any of us and look forward to seeing how their relationship develops over the remaining 12 episodes.

The other casting masterstroke in the new recurring cast is, of course, Bernard Cribbins. There's a real understated pathos to the stargazing scene, paying off with a lovely coda. Another refreshing change - the female companion has a strong male family figure who's always been there for her, which compensates for the usual disapproving mother figure.

As for the Adipose - well, I don't mind a cute monster, they can be far more effective than the monster designed to scare. What's more scary - teeth and tentacles or the innocent grin that conceals fangs? They're largely played for their comedy potential here, not being directly harmful to anyone aside from how they're formed. After this, I expect Who to have conquered one more frontier, either the cuddly or stress toy market. It's a stroke of genius to use the miracle diet phenomenon as the basis of a Who story (even if it seems indirectly inspired by Andy Lane's Torchwood novel Slow Decay). Sarah Lancashire's chilly turn as their 'mistress', the supernanny Miss Foster gives the Doctor some suitably strong opposition for the episode too, until she's literally brought down to Earth.

And then there's that last scene. I twigged about two seconds before the turn to camera who it was, but then that's how the scene seems to have been designed. Absolutely gobsmacking, well done to Cardiff for keeping that one under wraps. It's a bold move but, given the pre-publicity told us she'd be back, it's the only way her return has shock value. Again, I'm looking forward to finding out just what's going on.

There's flaws of course, Donna's sudden pursual of anything unusual isn't convincing (surely she'd have moved to Cardiff?) and the Doctor and Donna narrowly missing each other goes on a scene or two too long. Given past form it's unlikely to win any season polls or be remembered for anything bar setting up the season. What it provides is the laughs, chills and spectacle that have come to be de rigeur for a Who season opener, and a promise that after four years, RTD's Who still isn't close to jumping any sharks.

Torchwood 2.13 Exit Wounds (spoilerific from the off)

Well now we know how Chris Chibnall sees Torchwood, essentially an SF version of Spooks. And he's the new Eric Saward. And that means, since we've seen since Doctor Who's second season working for Torchwood is dangerous, dammit, we have to prove it!

If you've been watching carefully it's been fairly easy to guess who's not going to make it through to season three. Naoko Mori was permanently underused in the show, all of her character's plot functions being pretty much duplicated between Ianto and Owen. And every time she got centre stage there was only one plot - fall in love, get hurt due to time/species incompatibility issues. If you've got such a limit on the character it makes sense to get rid of her. Fair play to Naoko Mori though, she got the best dramatic scenes she's had in two years and made the most of it, giving the overly drawn out death scene pathos and impact, although Barrowman's mugging undercut it just seconds later. As for Owen, Burn Gorman's raging against the second dying of the light was the sort of thing he does best but the lack of a definitive final scene meant Owen's finale just tailed off. If he did survive I like the idea of Owen feeling abandoned by Torchwood and being King of the Weevils. I've got a great image in my head of the team marching in and finding him sat brooding on a Weevil throne. Killing him undermines the emotional arc from his earlier death though - oh he's dead again, bet he's back. At least this series redeemed the first season's treacherous rapey bastard to an extent, finding some sympathetic character traits that he utterly lacked before. It's hard not to see Martha's temporary substitution for Owen earlier in the series as a trial run for her being his permanent replacement.

Aside from that the finale fumbled a few very cool ideas. James Marsters stole the show again, even if Spike lite Captain John was largely wasted - was he just written in after being so damn good in episode one? There's a lot of dramatic mileage in the sundered brotherly relationship, and one blaming the other but you need decent actors to do it. John Barrowman's got charisma, but he's basically a stage actor, not a TV actor, so every emotion is overplayed when the nature of television enhances the small gesture and lampoons anyone going OTT. And Jack being buried alive for nearly 1900 years? Surely anyone would go somewhat nuts at that, and nothing we've seen from Jack before indicates he'd go for the meek acceptance he gives here, even for his brother. Essentially that storyline hits all the wrong emotional beats, rare for a show from the modern Doctor Who stable. And was it me or did Gray's plan make any sense whatsoever, particularly when most of it had no dramatic payoff? As a Newport lad it was fun to see Cardiff blown to smithereens, but the plot didn't demand it when the Rift distractions lured the Torchwood team out anyway.

And damningly, just when it could have done with it most, Torchwood abandoned the snarky sense of humour that had raised it from the swamp of angst and despair series one sank itself in. Not coincidentally the last three largely humour free episodes have all been Chris Chibnall's. The ending implied we won't be seeing too much fun next season, at least to start with, since Torchwood seems to demand angst. So it'll be back to square one unless we can get some characters (or, please God, writers) who can lighten the tone. A few more episodes along the lines of Something Borrowed , a few less angsty episodes that play to the fans, would be a stride in the right direction.

Two years in I'm not sure anyone quite knows what to do with the show, which is a shame since the first episode of each season offered tantalising of what a smart, sexy show Torchwood could be, modern, witty and slick, adult in the truest sense and providing enough subtext to fuel generations of fanfic-ers, something we've only seen intermittently since. There's a sense that lessons were definitely learned from the mistakes of season one, but there's still a frustrating sense that this could be so much more.