A Totally Subjective List of the Best Books of 2010

Aren't all such lists subjective? 

So why not make such a list totally subjective: "I chose these books because they were written by my friends (and me)." You have a problem with that?

It's hard enough getting a slice of media attention. Let's all pitch in and spin our friends, the people we can vouch for as hard workers, brilliant thinkers, and consummate professionals.  

As we come to the end of yet another challenging year, I offer these 2010 books as worthy of your attention and wallet. Buy and read any and all of them. You will be glad you did. 

A Totally Subjective List of the Best Books of 2010

A Writer's Heaven

Me reading from Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe at the launch of the Marmauke Writing Factory, Pleasantville, NY, Dec. 15, 2010. 

Spending several years writing non-fiction narrative is kind of like being a spy. No one knows where you are for weeks at a time. You float from archive to archive, a parasite sucking information from sources (archivists) deeply undercover in the bowels of historical societies and Special Collections in places like Canton, Oklahoma City, Cooperstown, and downtown Los Angeles. If you're into it, it's irresistible.

You have to have the instincts -- and passion -- of a sleuth. Or a bloodhound, nose to the ground, following the scent to the source. 

Then you have to write up into persuasive narrative written form all the information you've found. Hole up in an office somewhere -- like upstairs in your home -- and turn straw into gold. It's lonely, or at least other people tell you it must be. You aren't aware of feeling that way. If you were, you'd be doing something else with your life. However, when you start feeling agoraphobic, it's time to reach out.

Which is where a writers group comes in. I've been in such a group before. We met every week at a wonderfully welcoming restaurant in Chappaqua, NY (Le Jardin du Roi - great lobster salad) and read our stuff, shared war stories. But recently this idea got taken to a whole 'nother level. In September the Marmaduke Writing Factory Marmaduke was formed in Pleasantville, NY, just east of Chappaqua in Westchester County. Not only is there a group of about 10 writers, there is a designated space -- a craggy, rocky, edgy basement cave -- for established authors to go and write, think, and help each other. 

It's warm (there's a gas fire), there are desks, tables, armchairs, and copies of all our books on shelves to distract us. Very cozy and reassuring to literary spies coming in out of the cold of lonely endeavor.

My Favorite Sports Books

 

I just wrote a sports book -- well, it's a history book, too -- so people assume I've read sports books all my life and know all about them. I don't. 

Up until about age 22 I hadn't read much of anything published before 1900. I was the only one in my high school honors English class in California to read and really like Tom Jones (1749). I lived in my own private time machine filled with afternoon tea, crumpets, crazy Russians, dissolute French people, and Anglo-Irish aristos hanging on to eccentric elegance in crumbling Georgian mansions beyond the Pale. Sports? That was what my father, brothers, sister, uncles, cousins did. That was time away from reading. Time spent out of the time machine, blinking in the bright sunshine of the present.

At some point my brother Buck turned me on to sports books. Buck is the natural athlete of an athletic family. We like to say he could ski beautifully on two-by-fours. Buck has the instinct for a good story. He also haunts the mailbox every week, waiting for Sports Illustrated to arrive. The family often hides it, just to see his reaction: "Anybody seen the new SI?" "Gee, no, Dad." Buck told me about Stolen Season (see below) and that started it all. I liked the immediacy of sports stories, their apparent simplicity. But of course, behind the game, the life, there was so much more. A good sports book was like a transparent three-dimensional structure (cubic tic tac toe?) that you played as you read. Dynamic.

So, below are 1) my idiosyncratic list of my favorite sports books; and 2) Sports Illustrated's Dick Friedman's gaming of the system of putting sports books into such lists. Add in your favorites. Tell me what I haven't read and should! And, thanks, Dick!

1) My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life (Fireside Sports Classics) by Ted Williams
2)

The Enlightened Bracketologist

books.google.com

"Introducing the ingenious, addictive tool for judging everything under the sun: ENLIGHTENED BRACKETOLOGY, the new science that makes opinion a sport." And Dick Friedman has applied it to sports books. Click on THE ENLIGHTENED BRACKETOLOGIST title above and be sure to turn the page to see which book Dick ended up with as The Best (it wasn't on my list, but I'm going to read it right now). 

On Tour: What Am I Asked Most Often?

Jim Thorpe at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, c. 1907

The usual book tour FAQs: Why did you write this book? What specifically led you to this subject? Did you like him? Was it true Thorpe couldn't hit a curve ball? How long did the book take to write?

I answer that it took me, give or take, about 7 years to write NATIVE AMERICAN SON. After some gasps and raised eyebrows I get this question: HOW DID YOU KEEP GOING FOR SO LONG?

On the subject of the writers -- and process -- of narrative nonfiction, Garrison Keillor said in early May 2007: "They are at work at computers, with books stacked on the floor, around them and on tables, and notes, legal pads, scribbles, index cards and Post-it notes and a whole great, beautiful chaos of material, and they are just trying to get the job done."

Amen. I kept that quote stuck on the cork board above my desk during the last couple of years of work on Thorpe. Next to it was the May 21, 2007 cover of The New Yorker, which shows a mathematician in a studio apartment, his back to an intricately messy blackboard, paper-littered floor, and desk, as he boils an egg for his breakfast (I only now realize, as I sequence these May 2007 dates, that the cover artist Sempé may have been inspired by Keillor's comment. Chronology rules). 

But that doesn't answer the question of how (and, implicitly, why) I -- or anybody -- could keep sitting down at that desk day after day. The answer is the subject himself: Jim Thorpe. Several authors had covered his glory years from 1907 - 1920, but no one had finished the life, told the whole story, right up to the current burial controversy. "The mother lode of subjects," said Ben Cheever of Thorpe. And the excavation of his life indeed felt like digging for something precious to our culture. Enough and more to keep me going.

The young man in the photograph above shaped modern sports. A century later, sports are the common, global passion of our time for boys and girls, men and women, young and old. How we got there is, in large part, the story of Jim Thorpe.

Book Tour: Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C.

Me and grandson Kevin, signing books

 
Politics & Prose - what a great, fabled independent bookstore! I had heard about it for years, but had never been to 5015 Connecticut Avenue in our nation's capital before my Native American Son book signing date on November 8. 

Every detail seemed to be perfect in this quintessential book haven. The children's section downstairs was like a time travel dream -- all the favorites I remembered + new titles that looked terrific. My grandson diligently pulled all the squishy books off the shelf and then re-shelved them, over and over. Who says books are a doomed artifact?

It was a good group of grownups upstairs for the reading. Some passionate Thorpe fans, some women, and one man who came all the way down from Harrisburg, PA, ready with his questions and enthusiasm. It's interesting: there is always at least a handful of true fans among the audience who have been waiting for a chance to express their devotion to Thorpe. 

Maybe they learned it from their father or grandfather, but it's always the same questions:

• was it true Jim couldn't hit a curve ball? (no)
• did be beat Army in 1912 all by himself? (just about)
• was he as good as my grandfather said he was? (yes)

On the Road: The Book Tour

 
Los Angeles, LA84 Foundation, Book signing: Sunday, October 24, 2010

Book tours are grueling. Adversarial people show up. Nobody shows up (well, not really). Your hand gets cramped signing lots of books. You wish your hand got cramped signing more books. Back and forth. The usual, except that the national book tour -- maybe like bookstores -- is now pretty rare, soon to be extinct, they say.

So, it has been a wonderful and a little sad but sweet privilege to be sent out by Knopf on a proper book tour for NATIVE AMERICAN SON. I am acutely aware that even having a hardcover, beautifully designed and edited non-fiction book to my credit is, in 2010, rather like owning the last Model T to roll off the Ford assembly line.

This Christmas, so the news feed says, will be the "tipping point" when e-readers may overtake books themselves as holiday gifts. Last weekend, at the Kingston, NY Barnes & Noble, as I headed to the back of the store for my scheduled book signing, I passed a booth right inside the front door with an employee demonstrating the Nook. Hedging their book bets.

In my next blog I'll list the highlights of this official, publisher-sponsored, book tour. As it might be the last I'll ever do, I'll try to bury it with honors -- while I enjoy every single minute.

A Mission Band Potawatomi Book Blessing Ceremony

 

Now that the Jim Thorpe biography is done, I'm convinced,  in retrospect, that it got done because it was blessed early on by a Mission Band Potawatomi blessing ceremony. Whenever I got discouraged, which was often, Jack Thorpe, Jim's youngest child, would smile and say, "It's going to be fine. We blessed it."

Jack was the one of Thorpe's eight children who became the most connected with the spiritual dimension of his American Indian heritage. He was the chief of the Sac & Fox Nation and has also worked for many years as a dedicated, even dogged, administrator and organizer for Potawatomi and Kickapoo tribal projects. He lives in Shawnee, not far from where Jim was born in 1887.

Jack took as his mission to expose me to some essentials of Indian life in Oklahoma. For several days I drove him around Lincoln and Pottawatomie counties as he pointed out his father's birthplace, the Sac & Fox headquarters on the former reservation land near Stroud, and the locations of Jim's mother's allotment. He introduced me to Ruth Sanderson, a full-blooded Kickapoo who builds the tribe's Woodland-origin bent-branch wikiup ceremonial structure each year in the same place on her mother's original allotment where is has been situated for over 100 years.

Jack also brought me to a Potawatomi funeral -- a private, very small, intensely spiritual and emotional ceremony it was a privilege to attend. Jack asked that I wear a long skirt (which meant a quick trip to the local WalMart). The Indian rite was followed by a Catholic burial in the little graveyard at the Benedictine Sacred Heart Mission church founded in 1876 in Konawa by Jim Thorpe's grandfather after the tribe's removal from Kansas.Charlotte Vieux Thorpe, Jim's mother, is buried in the same graveyard. The Potawatomi have been linked to the Catholic church.since their exposure n the 17th century to French trappers, Catholic priests and monks in their Great Lakes place of origin.

The only Sacred Heart Mission structures that survived the fire of 1901.

The blessing of the book took place at sunset in a wooden ceremonial structure behind the house of Leon Bruno, the former chairman of the Oklahoma Potawatomi Mission Band. A small group of us entered, stepping clockwise to make a circle around the fire in the center that had been lit at dawn. The purpose of the ceremony was not for personal gain, as Jack explained, but to ask for "help for good, to come out right, that no evil happens."  He told me later that implied in that request is a wish for patience, to let the goal run its course on "Indian Time."

The details of the ceremony are private and I will honor that here. However I can say that at the end I was given a deerskin tobacco pouch; I was to sprinkle tobacco at the base of a tree whenever I felt threatened or frightened. I was also given a medicine bag containing the four sacred elements of sage, cedar, tobacco, and sweet grass.

The tobacco pouch and medicine bag were on my writing desk every day for the seven years it took to write NATIVE AMERICAN SON.