The Cockroaches (Harry Hole #2) by Jo Nesbo--Book Review

Photo: Jo Nesbo, from his official website

Extremely well-written follow-up to Nesbo's The Bat, this book takes Hole's character and adds a little more depth to him.  We see more of his sister, and we see the ex-girlfriend, Kristin--mentioned in the first book--even more here, to good effect.  The girlfriend from the first novel is mentioned frequently here, too, as is his compunction for alcohol--though he may have a new drug of choice by the end of this one.  But then, if I had to spend this much time in the traffic and heat and humidity of Bangkok, Thailand, I might feel the need as well.  (I'm a wuss; I need the central air.)

Anyway, the plot of this novel is quite intricate, though the reader shouldn't be hard-pressed to figure out who done it.  The "Why?" and the "How?" may throw the reader; however, when you learn the how, you won't feel badly about not figuring it out.  Nobody would, or could, have.  Except Hole, of course, who is so good at this kind of thing that two characters openly marvel at it.

Nesbo, the Raymond Chandler of Nordic Noir, writes a book that is a classic of its kind.  The bad guy is memorable, as well, especially in a scene right out of Titus Andronicus near the end.  (This has to be on purpose, because Hole finishes it all off with an instrument from Shakespeare's early play as well.)  I always saw the guy who plays Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones as the villain, though I'm not sure he's described that way.  Weird.  At any rate, Nesbo varies the writing a bit here from his last: some chapters show the villain straight out doing his villainy, especially at the end; more chapters start off with a minor character's POV before quickly focusing on Hole once again.  A couple of chapters don't feature Hole at all, which is also different from the first book.  (I think only one chapter was without Hole in the first book.)

I read this book in less than 24 hours.  I'm on vacation, so I can do that.  You might not, but you'll read it quickly.  It's that good.  And as openly depressing as its predecessor, so be forewarned.

Book Review: Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate

Photo: Book's cover (and the Chiandros portrait) from mathomhouse.typepad.com.

Mostly-fascinating collection of essays, thoughts, theories and placing-you-there Elizabethan history that attempts to understand nothing less than the very mind of Shakespeare, as a man of his time, and--as Ben Jonson famously wrote--as a man "not of an age, but for all time."  Besides a couple of chapters about the politics and religion of his time that I found a bit too dry, the book succeeds at doing so.  It is at its best when it sticks to the literary and theatrical stuff: his plays, his theatres and the people he knew.  If anyone doubts the existence of a non-university man who got a woman eight years his elder pregnant, married her, and left them behind to find his glory and future in the theatres of London, England, let them read this, and they will doubt no more.

This book brings Shakespeare to life like few things I have read.  Michael Wood's book and a couple of others are just as good, in different ways.  And they all delve into the man and his time using their own conceits.  The conceit of this one is to break the book down into sections that correspond to Shakespeare's famous "Seven Stages of Man" speech from As You Like It.  (This is the one that begins with the even-more-famous line, "All the world's a stage.")  And so Bate chronicles the life of and mind of Shakespeare by breaking his life up into the seven parts that we all supposedly share.  I got the feeling that Bate had much of the book written already, via separate speeches and chapters, and tied them all together with the conceit of the seven stages, but whatever.  It doesn't matter, because it works.

The narrative is at its best when it brings us pell-mell into Elizabethan England.  We see it as Shakespeare may have, and we witness things, and become aware of city-wide and nation-wide news that he would have been aware of.  We meet the Burbages, and Heminges, and Condell, and the theatre and publishing climates of the time.  We see him as one of the many in these realms, and as one in the businesses he was in.  He is placed firmly in his time, and yet the book works well also when it shows him to be a chronicler of his time.  Shakespeare is renowned as being perhaps not just the best writer of our times, but also as the best mirror to his own time, without blocking the visage with his own image.  He is within his world, and yet surprisingly intellectually and philosophically detached from it, so he can show it to us, and paint a picture of our human nature, and yet not include his own views and preferences in it--all at the same time.

In short, we know what Hamlet thinks--but we never know what Shakespeare thinks.  Of course, no writer is his character, and no character is its author.  We know all of one, and very little about the internalization of the other.

But Bate's book gets us closer to it than perhaps anything I've read before.  The best compliment I'd give to this book is that it shows you something different about Shakespeare and his England, even if you thought you'd read it all before, like I have.  If you enjoy that kind of literary history, and a biography of him (a little) and of his time, and of his place in his time (a lot of that), then you'll enjoy this.

Why the Sox Suck in 2012

Photos: Three out of about a dozen I took at Fenway, August 7, 2012.  Fenway's always beautiful.

I know this isn't my sports blog, but I haven't written there in awhile, and this is a very important issue, as it pertains not just to this sports team, but in many ways to our reality as a whole.  Read it and maybe you'll see what I mean.

The Sox suck this year because the team is essentially mismanaged (the manager's fault), misguided (the administration's fault), underperforming (the players' fault, though there have been an unbelievable number of injuries, but more on that later), and misappropriated (players are assuming roles they shouldn't be).  In other words, it's like most offices and businesses out there.  See if your workplace compares:

1.  Bobby Valentine, the manager, hasn't managed a team since 2002, and it shows.  I don't blame him for taking the job, but it's a mystery why someone with no big-league experience in ten years (which is an eternity in professional sports) is offered the job in the first place.  Ten years ago there was much less reliance on numbers; baseball today is mostly guided by data-driven decisions based on specific situations.  I'll go more into this in a moment, but a guy who hasn't managed in ten years can't be expected to learn all of the changes in the game--of which there have been a great many--during a tumultuous season in the most fan-driven and media-scrutinized job in all of baseball.  It's unfair to ask it of the guy, and that says a lot, because I dislike him immensely as a person (extremely narcissistic) and as a manager (does not make the simple, basic managerial decisions very well, and tends to chastise his players to the media), and yet I still have to say that he can't possibly be expected to learn all of this on the go in a chaotic environment in an already-impossible job.

How many of my readers have a manager/supervisor/boss who's completely out of his element, due to years away from the job, or to a lack of essential knowledge of the job?  And with bad people-skills, too?

2.  The Red Sox administration this year is essentially in Chicago right now, misguiding the Cubs.  Ben Cherington was the Asst. G.M. for a long time, and he's now the Sox's G.M., but he's working with a team that Theo Epstein put together.  Cherington is therefore stuck with long contracts and underperforming players that is both hurting the play on the field and strapping their resources to get better players in the future.  Basically, he inherited an impossible situation made worse by an unknowledgeable and bad manager and severely underperforming players.  Just after Epstein made the great trade for Adrian Gonzalez, he blundered badly by signing Carl Crawford to a long, ridiculous contract, and John Lackey, too.  It's like he was a gambler who won the jackpot, and in his excitement and hubris, bet all the money on two bets and lost it all.  Those decisions were the opposite of the baseball decisions that made the Sox great for so long: spending affordable money on smart, productive, workman-like players who were solid defensively, worked the count, had great on-base percentages, and kept the lineup moving.  But he also got players who could handle the chaos of the Boston fans and media, and that's not your typical player.  Carl Crawford, it seems, is the prototype of a player who cannot handle this circus.  He does not thrive in it; in fact, it clearly hurts him, both on the field and in his head.  He's said so.  Does that matter if he's making $120 million?  Yes, it definitely does.  Quieter places like Tampa Bay are perfect for him; he'll flourish where he's not under the microscope.  That's just the type of player he is, and the administration needs to know that his mental makeup is just as important, if not more so, than his makeup as a player.  He'll excel again if he's traded to Minnesota, Oakland, Kansas City, Seattle, or someplace like that.  He's simply a bad fit for his environment.

They also fired a great manager who, as we're now seeing, managed not just the team very well, but also the individual players.  It was said that they wouldn't play for him in the second half last year, but that says more about Beckett and Lester than it did about him.  I know managers are hired to be fired, and that you can't fire all the players, but you can certainly discipline two of them.  Had that happened, Francona would be around, he'd be managing the team and the individual players better, and they'd be winning.  I'm reminded of Joe Morgan, popular and good Sox manager of another era, who said, after he was fired, that the team wasn't as good as the administration thought it was.  He was right, because they fell off the planet after he was fired.  I see the same here.  Morgan, and now Francona, were clearly the glue that held their teams together.  Firing Francona was a travesty that the team is now paying dearly for.  

Sound familiar?  How many of us work for an administration short on an understanding of human nature, or the psyches of its employees--or simply doesn't care?  How many of us work with someone who's normally great, with a solid reputation and stat sheet, but is a poor fit for the environment he's been placed in?  And how many of us have seen a good, popular leader go just because of one bad stretch that he didn't cause, that was made much worse after he left?

3. The veteran players are simply, and excessively, underperforming.  Beckett and Lester should win 18-20 games each, and eat up a ton of innings.  Before the middle of last year, that's who they were and that's what they did.  Since then, they just plain suck.  They're so bad, I can't even tell you why, except they're not throwing as hard, and they're walking too many guys and they're leaving their pitches up and over the plate.  That's why every bad pitcher is bad, so I don't know what else to say.  I'm suspecting, though, that Terry Francona managed his team better than the administration thought.  I said that above and I'll say it again.

And the other guys?  Bad fits.  Cody Ross is a swing-for-the-fences guy who'll win some games with a heroic longball, like at the end of July, but he'll finish with just 80-90 RBIs, a below-.500 slugging percentage and few walks.  He doesn't keep the line moving.  Saltalamacchia is the same, but worse.  Worse than that, he doesn't call or catch a good game.  (Jason Varitek is very badly missed.  Salty caught most of the games during the collapse last year and during this terrible year.)  Sweeney is a singles hitter who will hit .280-.300, but not walk, or hit for extra bases, and now he's probably done for the year because his fist got into a fight with a wall, and the wall won.  (He apparently doesn't hit for extra bases in the head, either.)  Ellsbury is often injured and was again this year.  When he's healthy, he's great.  Ditto for Pedroia; his thumb is still bothering him.  Same for Ortiz, and his heel.  Youkillis was done; replacing him with Middlebrooks is fine with me (and now he's on the DL for a long time with a fractured wrist), but it was excessively mishandled by the manager and the front office, both of which lost this year's fans (and a few of its players) by how they dealt with him.  Aceves is doing the best he can, but he's a great 7th and 8th inning guy forced to be the closer because Bailey, a great closer, has been on the DL all year.  That's misappropriation.  Injuries have killed this year, sure, but there was just as much of that last year, when they missed the playoffs by one game.  Despite all the drama at the end, they clearly would've made the playoffs last year but for the injuries; you can't say that about this year.

And the whole team is basically being blown up because of the personalities of just three or four guys, out of the hundreds involved in its daily operation.  I'm thinking specifically of Valentine, Beckett and Lester.

Injuries are being used as an excuse to hide all of the above.  How about it?  Does that sound familiar too?