Playing for Keeps
David Halberstam
Yellow Jersey #8
AMERICANS take their sportswriting seriously. David Halberstam, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, is just one of the many great practitioners of the art of telling a great sports story well operating on the other side of the pond. Playing for Keeps is Halberstam's compelling take on Michael Jordan, the hero of basketball and businessmen. It is more reportage than biography with Halberstam paying due attention to the rise of basketball which was due in no small measure to the rise of Jordan. Halberstam stalks the locker rooms, prowls around the front offices and quietly invades the world of business to paint a convincing portrait of a sport and its hero. This is a story of the sports business and its greatest player, I wrote in the hardback review, and Halberstam tells it with meticulous precision and almost casual brilliance. I can find no reason to change my mind. Yellow Jersey has become
a publisher with a record of unblemished excellence in sports publishing and a selection of its titles is this week's prize for the Opening Lines competition on the back page.
Shooting Sean
Colin Bateman
HarperCollins #6.99
BATEMAN is a stroller in that most difficult of worlds, the land of the comic writer. While other readers laugh out loud without restraint at the latest offering from the latest comic writer, many of us find we can keep the laughter muscle well under control. But Bateman can and does make me laugh. I believe his secret is in the darkness of his comedy. He started with an uncommon verve and originality with Divorcing Jack. But my personal favourite is Of Wee Sweetie Mice and Men, which should be bought for its title alone. Sweetie Mice managed to take the most unlikely setting for a comic caper - the dark days of the Troubles - and marry it with a plot that produced riotous scenes and no little provocative comment. In Shooting Sean one of Bateman's returning heroes, Dan Starkey, is offered the chance to write a biography of film star/ director Sean O'Toole who just happens to be unwittingly
auditioning for a hit list. Bateman scatters his story around Europe with visits to Amsterdam, Belfast, and Amsterdam. Sharp-edged humour with a touch of suspense.
Secrets and Lives:
Middle England Revealed
Mary Loudon
Pan #7
THE most unpromising of premises can make the best of stories. Secrets and Lives is a collection of 46 true stories, in the subjects' own words, taken from years of conversations from the market town of Wantage. Oddly and utterly fascinating.
The Life and Times of A Teaboy
Michael Collins
Phoenix #6.99
One of the more palatable side-effects of the Booker prize is that an author's past works become instantly available. Collins , shortlisted for The Keepers of Truth, now finds a novel written in 1993 is back in circulation. Simply plotted but immensely powerful, Teaboy showed an early promise that was justified.
The Paper Eater
Liz Jensen
Bloomsbury #6.99
Welcome to the island paradise where politics, sex and shopping collide explosively. No, it's not Millport but Atlantica, Jensen's fantasy world of conspicuous consumption. Jensen manages, just, to maintain an original idea and reach a satisfactory conclusion. Clever and engaging.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article