Book and Movie Reports by Ed

Book report: Who’s Your Caddy? Looping for the Great, Near Great, and Reprobates of Golf, by Rick Reilly A lot of sports fans don’t care for Rick Reilly as a sports writer. He is routinely trashed by the sports talk station I listen to. But I think he is really and inventively funny. That’s what drew me to this book, even though I don’t play golf or know much about it. Reilly’s concept for this is that in no other sport can an ordinary person be so close to a star athlete while they’re actually competing as in golf, where the caddy is right near the player for the entire round. So, to see what it’s like being so up close and personal, Reilly asked many golfers if he could caddy for them for a round. Many said no, but a few said yes. This book is based on Reilly’s experiences caddying for golfers including John Daly, David Duval, Tom Lehman, Jack Nicklaus, Deepak Chopra, Donald Trump, professional gambler Dewey Tomko, Bob Newhart, Casey Martin (whose rare leg ailment allowed ...

Book report: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond  Having read Diamond’s phenomenal “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” I was looking forward to reading “Collapse.” GG&S was a brilliant analysis of why European and Asian societies came to dominate the rest of the world. This success was ultimately deduced from the effects of geography, with all of the logic and inevitability of the proof of a theorem in geometry. I expected the same kind of sharp analysis in Collapse, but I was very disappointed. This book is a rambling, anecdote-laden presentation of certain cherry-picked historical societies like Norse Greenland, Easter Island, the Mayans, the Anasazi, and modern Montana, where Diamond regularly vacations. His main point seems to be that societies that don’t take care of their natural resources – especially their trees – collapse, sometimes very suddenly.  Okay, certainly a good point, but one that could have been presented far more suc...