MarysLibrary

Blue Nights

Blue Nights by Joan Didion
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Blue Nights does not recapture the magic of The Year of Magical Thinking. That book was an extraordinary description and analysis of the pain Joan Didion experienced after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and not too much later, her daughter, Quintana Roo. It was surprising that the woman was able to track what her mind was doing, let alone to figure out why she was thinking, for example, that she should leave her husband's clothes in the closet. (Because if she kept the clothes, he would come home to wear them. Magical thinking.)

In Blue Nights, Didion reminisces about the California childhood of her daughter and remembers some of the things that she and her husband were thinking and doing in order to keep their child safe. She also recognizes for the first time some of the anxieties and fears their daughter had as a child.

The ability to trace the origin of thoughts and feelings and then to watch them drift away was engaging in the first book. This book is more interesting for its description of the life the Dunnes lived with their bright and mercurial daughter in 70s and 80s Hollywood. Joan Didion obviously makes very close friends and does not forget them. Her joy in a conversation she had in 1966 with a woman long dead remains as crisp in this book as it must have been the day after. She remembers the clothes her daughter wore to parties and the lunchbox she took to school every day in Malibu.

The author also describes her own declining health and what is perceived as her frailty. (She is 75.) She maintains a low-level animosity towards doctors and their diagnoses. Or the lack of diagnoses when they do what they call a complete work-up and find nothing wrong - and then can't really believe the tests. (She is 75. There must be something wrong with her.)

I was disappointed with this book, having been so fascinated by the earlier one. I found it repetitious and poorly organized. Not that I didn't read it non-stop in about 5 hours . . .

2011 No 130

Collision at Home Plate

Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti by James Reston Jr.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There are those who say Pete Rose killed Bart Giamatti. That's putting it strongly, but it seems inescapable that with Giamatti's romantic and idealistic view of the game and Pete Rose's earthy hustle and his gambling problems, which eventually seeped into his professional life, the two men were bound to clash. Both suffered.

It's been a while since I read Collision at Home Plate and I wish now I had written down some comments about it at the time. There is a lot of detail in this joint biography of two extraordinary people whose lives and values differed so dramatically in the late 1980s when Bart Giamatti as commissioner banned Pete Rose from baseball for betting on the game. The investigation, the ensuing legal hearing and challenges, and the necessity as Giamatti saw it of chastising this superb player, foiling his hopes of being in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In 2004 Pete Rose admitted he had bet on the Reds when he was playing and managing the team, but insists he never bet against them.

Betting on baseball and throwing games to benefit the gamblers is baseball's original sin. The Black Sox scandal of 1919, handled by the first baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, banned seven players from the game and strengthened rules against any betting whatever by players. Giamatti was sensitive to this episode and saw his role as commissioner as the keeper of baseball ethics. He was deeply disturbed by the Pete Rose episode and died of a heart attack only a few days after the end of the dispute.

2011 No 129