October’s Books of the Month

I’ll be at a conference in Milan for the next few days (yes, I know, I lead a rough life), so blogging may or may not take place. However, here are some belated October book recommendations. The international relations book of the month is Sebastian Mallaby’s The World’s Banker, which avoids the common flaw of most books about the international financial institutions (IFIs) — a dearth of amusing goat anecdotes. To elaborate: tomes about the International Monetary Fund or World Bank tend to be drenched in a dull earnestness about the best ways to promote global development. The exceptions are the books slathered with righteous indignation about the alleged injustices committed by either institution towards the environment, local cultures, women or the poor in general. Either way, readers are frequently forced to wade through pages of exposition written with all the prose style of the phone book. The debate about the IFIs has a wide-ranging impact on global policy, but with the current state of the literature, even the eyes of interested readers start to glaze over. Mallaby deals with this by writing a book about the World Bank under the guise of writing about the Bank’s current president, James Wolfensohn. As a result, debates about the myriad complexities and paradoxes of fostering development and combating poverty are intertwined with tales about Wolfensohn’s life and times at the Bank – including the tangled fate of a goat given to him during a 1995 goodwill trip to Mali. How well-researched is this book? Mallaby’s description of Wolfensohn’s first trip to Africa as World Bank president has a lot of eye-grabbing detail, including one graf that describes how Wolfemsohn looks at an airplane tarmac. The description was a bit thick, and I was ready to chide Mallaby for inserting colorful details that neither he nor anyone else could have remembered — until I checked the footnotes. Mallaby had recreated the scene using a World Bank video recording. It sounds like a small thing, but is indicative of the excellent sourcing in The World’s Banker. Finally, you won’t finish the book without having an indelible impression of Wolfensohn. I never thought anyone could write a book about the IFIs that merited a movie treatment, but after reading Mallaby’s book, I can see an HBO film of Wolfensohn — Michael Douglas would be perfect for the role. As it’s October, the general interest book is Steve Kettmann’s One Day at Fenway. The book is a tick-tock account of an August 30, 2003 game between the Yankees and the Red Sox at Fenway Park through the eyes of twenty-five different people — ballplayers, managers, executives, staff, fans, and the scoreboard operator behind the Green Monster. The subtitle of the book is A Day in The Life of Baseball in America, and that’s pretty much accurate. The pointillist account would be fascinating on any terms, but the fact that it was a good game makes it all the more engaging. Kettmann had multiple eporters, writers and research assistants follow around each of these people for the entire day until the end of the game. For example, Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power shadowed Red Sox GM Theo Epstein for the whole day — giving this blogger just one more reason to be unbelievably jealous of Ms. Power. In the epilogue, Kettman reaches the following hopeful conclusion:

[Red Sox owner] John Henry may never take Sox fans closer [to a championship] than they were that night, five outs away from the World Series. The topsy-turvy Game Seven with Pedro Martinez on the mound might have been his one and only shot. But I don’t think so. Based on what I saw during the several months of the 2003 season I spent studying the John Henry REd Sox from up close, and helped in the preparation of this book by unprecedented access, I believe the Henry ownership group is really going to do it. That is just a guess. But one thing I picked up in nine years covering professional sports for the San Francisco Chronicle was a conviction that when you have a hunch about a team, or an organization, you’re right often enough to trust your hunches. Bostonians would be unwise ever to go on record with such a prediction, but as an outsider, a Californian of all things, I’m willing to say it here in black and white: The Red Sox will win a World Series on Henry’s watch. It may be this October. It may be next October. It may take several mor years. But it will happen.

I hope he’s right, but as a loyal Sox fan I am obligated to fear that he’s wrong. Which leads to another side-effect of being in Milan — I won’t be able to watch any of the games. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.