Boom Town by Sam Anderson

Why I Read It: Outside of my comfort zone; it seemed like something I would never read if I didn't grab it when I did.

Summary: The history of Oklahoma City told through the comparative juxtapositioning of a season with the local NBA franchise.

My Thoughts: OKC has always been a place of big ideas, and the author will have us believe that for the most part they have been too big. The Land Run shouldn't have happened, the crazy scramble that founded the community in the late 1800s. I.M. Pei's urban renewal project in the 1960s and 1970s should never have been attempted. In the end, he tells us through his narrative, OKC is in the wrong place. As tornadoes grow in power with climate change - a phrase he never uses in connection with their growth, as the state is the farthest right in the union - they have made an increasing habit of attacking the city and its environs.

OKC, he says, has been built on a series of boom moments - the Land Run, the head-scratching agreement to allow sonic booms overwhelm the city in order to get a major airport, the spiriting away of the Seattle Supersonics to the middle of the country - and processes. The processes of chamber of commerce directors and mayors are mirrored by the Process of Sam Presti, general manager of the Oklahoma City Thunder, who makes personnel moves calculated for an end-goal and not short-term effect. But it's the negative booms, including the biggest of all, Timothy McVeigh's terror attack on the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, and the impacts of major tornadoes, that overwhelm the narrative in the end. We are left to think that hope is gone.

It's easy, thanks to the author's witty style, to get on board with Angelo Scott, a city founder, with Stanley Draper, long time head of the chamber of commerce, with Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, with civil rights activist Clara Luper, as they create, scheme and dream for the betterment of their city. It's hard to watch them crash when things go horribly wrong, but it feels like the story isn't over yet. Despite blight, unrealized dreams, terror attacks and tornadoes, it feels like the next kooky idea, the next it could only happen in OKC idea, the next scheme to bring the city back is only a train ticket away. Someone will step off a train, or rise up through the local schools, to bring excitement and enjoyment back to the city.

The story is told through the lens of the year that the Thunder traded away their star in waiting, James Harden, when they put all their eggs in the Kevin Durant/Russell Westbrook basket. When Westbrook is injured and lost for the season, the Process is tested. Can the team rise again? In microcosm, the story of the Thunder becomes a stand-in for the story of the city.

Will the city rise again? Or should it fade away? We are left to answer this question on our own.

Ali vs. Inoki by Josh Gross

Why I Read It: I saw pictures of this fight in magazines as a kid.

Summary: Muhammad Ali, world champion boxer, met Japanese professional wrestler Antonio Inoki in a bizarre sport vs. sport match.

My Thoughts: It just seemed so strange to me. There they were, a wrestler, who I knew as "just another guy," but who, in reality, was a megastar in his home country of Japan, and the most famous boxer of all time squared off in the ring. Their juxtapositioning was just...weird.

But what would a 12-year-old know?

This book puts it all in context. I now see a heavyweight champ who had run through all his contenders and wanting to test his limits. I see a champ who had the final say, who could arrange the fight without listening to the real fears of his handlers. I see a wrestler who knows that this is the chance of a lifetime, to grab onto the coattails of the greatest entertainer in sports.

The author carries us through the history of mixed martial arts, meaning all the way back Ancient Greece. He brings us to the days when Muhammad Ali first encountered the outlandish wrestler Gorgeous George, and realized he could take his own game a notch higher. He brings us through the California wrestling scene that Classy Freddie Blassie dominated on the way to becoming one of Ali's seconds during the big fight (though he secretly wished the wrestler would beat the boxer). He introduces us to the man who will referee the bout, and fleshes out Inoki as well.

We're taken round by round through the fight, and then given the trails to follow afterwards. Unsurprisingly, the McMahons were involved, Vince, Sr., and Vince, Jr., tying the closed circuit broadcast to a major live wrestling event at Shea Stadium that included the return of the legendary Bruno Sammartino from a broken neck and an Andre the Giant vs. Chuck Wepner wrestler vs. boxer undercard match. The seeds of Wrestlemania were planted here, as were the notions that would eventually grow into today's fertile mixed martial arts landscape.

The irony is that in the short term, nobody won (except maybe for the promoters who swallowed the money owed all around). The match was a dud. Ali soon thereafter slowed down, lost the title and retired. In the long term, Inoki and Ali became friends.

And now, thirty years later, I get it.

Shakespeare and the Resistance by Claire Asquith

Why I Read It: Always found Shakespeare fascinating as a historical character.

Summary: New evidence points to the Bard as a rabble-rouser.

My Thoughts: Henry VIII of England, we know, was a bad man. Once upon the throne, he changed the game, consolidating power within his own hands, taking it away from the people of England. And he changed the religious landscape forever (well, so far), outlawing Catholicism and creating the church that met his personal needs. Echoes of that change - with imprisonments, land confiscation, questions of succession, and more - reverberated for decades.

Shakespeare came to his own type of power about a half century later, while the Tudors still held the throne. He became the world's most famous playwright, often dealing with historical themes, writing many plays about England's monarchy. It seems that he wrote more about them than we knew.

This book focuses on two poems, lesser read works that are lesser read for a reason. They never made sense, seeming to ramble on, un-Shakespeare-like, with no real point. It turns out that, like the old breakup line goes, it was us, not him, that was the problem.

When interpreted from an anti-Tudor standpoint, the poems, about the ancient themes of the Rape of Lucrece and a chance encounter between Adonis and Venus, make perfect sense. They're even quite daring. Shakespeare put his own neck on the line in writing the poems in the first place; how far he decided to go with his parallels to modern-day characters (Queen Elizabeth, for instance) proved a bit of his own haughtiness.

Aside from providing wonderful in-depth literary criticism of the poems, from this new point of view, the author also delves deeply into British history to explain to us the decades-long rule of the Tudors and the effects it had on the English people, to introduce us to the other characters involved and carry us beyond the poems to the end of the Tudor reign.

For those who believed that Shakespeare was in it just for the sake of his art, think again, or, at least, give this book a try

The Year of the Pitcher by Sridhar Pappu

Why I Read It: It's baseball, dude. Game on.

Summary: The year 1968 changed the world. Baseball was a part of it all.

My Thoughts: It must have been something to live through. Baseball 50 years ago was struggling with the same issues it has today: it's too slow, it's not relevant for the new generation, football's better. Yet, somehow, the game survived. The game, though, went through one of its worst offensive seasons ever. In other words, if you liked to watch baseballs fly out of ballparks, 1968 was just not the year for you. It was in many ways the year of the pitcher.

Pappu takes us through the remarkable season by following two of the most dominating pitchers of all time, the ridiculously juxtaposed Bob Gibson and Denny McLain. Bob was no-nonsense (and that's an understatement); Denny was all nonsense. Yet, despite their diverse approaches to life and the game, they both accomplished incredible things on the diamond in 1968. Partially because of their dominance, Major League Baseball figured that the pitchers had too much of an upper hand and made the drastic change of dropping the height of the pitcher's mound the next year, taking some of that advantage away. For one short year, pitchers dominated the game.

But when we look at 1968 beyond the foul lines, outside the stadiums, we recognize it as a year that, for better or worse, changed things. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated (just moments after mentioning Dodgers' pitcher Don Drysdale and his scoreless innings streak). Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. The Civil Rights movement was stunted and reaffirmed. Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the color line in baseball, was actively campaigning on behalf of his candidate during the presidential race. Detroit rioted.

Pappu reminds us in the end that though baseball players made news in 1968, their impact was minimal; larger issues carried the real headlines. The Tigers - more behind Mickey Lolich than McLain, whose arm was suffering from overuse by the time the World Series came around - took the championship, but the game was never more than just a sideshow in a year that made us all wonder what the world was headed to.

Is Wrestling Fixed? I Didn't Know it was Broken! by Bill Apter

Why I Read It: I've been a mark since before Hulk Hogan took out the Iron Sheik at Madison Square Garden.

Summary: The autobiography of the man who represented the Golden Era of professional wrestling magazines.

My Thoughts: My closest friends and I created a Strat-o-Matic style wrestling game. We used twenty-sided dice mixed with six-sided to create, or recreate, the great matches of the 1980s. It was the time of the expansion of cable television, when WTBS started to reach the northeast, when we could watch the NWA, WCCW, WWF and even at times the AWA in our own living rooms. We had jumped from five to six good local UHF and VHF stations to a whole new world.

And it was the time, after the passing of Vince McMahon, Sr., when the WWF was breaking the rules, moving out of the historic territory system and taking over the wrestling world. The WWF didn't even acknowledge that the rest of the wrestling world existed. It was, from a fan's perspective (I was 13 when Hulkster took the WWF title), frustrating. We could never again see a WWF superstar face a champion from the NWA.

Thank God for PWI (Pro Wrestling Illustrated). And The Wrestler. And Inside Wrestling.

Like good comic book collectors, my friends and I gathered each issue each month, read them cover to cover, and eventually cut out the pictures for use in the upper right-hand corners of our wrestler profile sheets for the game (which we hyper-creatively called "The Wrestling Game").

Although he wasn't behind all of it, Bill Apter was a major, visible component of the wrestling magazine landscape. He was the photographer at ringside, navigating the wrestling world during those glory days, making friends across the country, and elsewhere on the planet. He oftentimes was mistaken for a one-man operation; some wrestlers believed the other writers on staff were just his alter egos, or pen names.

But as much as we learned from the magazines...well, this book speaks for the rest of it. There are plenty of behind-the-scenes stories to more than fill the pages. There are tales within tales. I laughed when, after finishing the book, I picked up the most recent copy of Pro Wrestling Illustrated (for which Apter no longer writes) and read an article on the 25 greatest Bruno Sammartino covers, the "Living Legend" having just passed away. There, in the bottom left corner of one cover was the teaser for the story of how a "midget" (actually, Jerry "The King" Lawler) had beaten Andre the Giant. Apter tells the story of how the pictures came into the office, the magazine ran with the story, and then fielded heat from the elder McMahon, who was furious over the notion that anybody had been credited with defeating Andre. As McMahon property, Andre was supposed to remain undefeated, invincible, in fact.

The book is written in short, disjointed chapters, not chronological at all, like a random collection of magazine columns, but it works. There are some repeated themes, but the stories are so much fun that it doesn't matter. Wrestling was still in its "kayfabe" stage when Apter started, meaning that the old carnival-style secrecy that it was all fixed still existed. Apter was in on the secret.

He's still going strong, by the way. Check him out at WWE.com, at www.1wrestling.com, or on Twitter at @apter1wrestling.

The Wrong Stuff by Bill Lee with Dick Lally

Why I Read It: Re-read it, actually. It was s good the first time around I sought out another copy.

Summary: The autobiography of the Spaceman as of the mid-1980s.

My Thoughts: There are baseball biographies and then there is this one.

Yes, it helps that I grew up in the Boston area and that Red Sox history is familiar to me, but the fact is that there is no one else in baseball history like the Spaceman. To be fair, by this time in baseball history, the first "tell all" autobiographies had emerged. Warts had been exposed, about drinking, drugs, extramarital affairs and more. But nobody had ever shared the details in such a stylish way.

Lee is as individual a thinker as anyone on the planet, with sometimes what amounts to his own dialect. He played during a transitional time in American history, the late 1960s and 1970s, when the United States broke out of the staid 1950s of crew cuts and straight flying. Long hair, wild clothes and outspokenness had trumped coloring within the lines.

And even at that, Lee still stood out, oftentimes for his stances on roster moves, when his teammates were released or traded. He was as anti-authoritarian as any player in history. And he had some of the greatest one-line comebacks in history. When told that Sparky Anderson, manager of the Cincinnati Reds, opposing the Red Sox in the World Series, had stated that his starting pitcher was going to the Hall of Fame after the game, Lee said that he didn't care, that he was going to the Eliot Lounge.

We still get some Spaceman here in the northeast, as he regularly checks into a Boston area radio show. He still has that same warped sense of reality that made him such a standout.

I bought the copy of the book I currently have on Amazon for about $3. Boy, was I surprised to find out that it was a signed first edition. But there it was in blue ink: "Bill Lee, Earth."

Viva el astronauta!