Book Review | Book Chatter

A Sportscaster’s Guide to Watching Football
By Mark Oristano
Synergy Books
August 2009
160pp

Here is the blurb from the publisher:

Want to know what everyone is cheering about? Learn to enjoy and understand the game with the football fanatic in your life. This book is the ultimate football guide for the novice fan. You’ll get answers to such complex questions as:

What is that yellow line on the field, and why does it keep moving?
What down is it, and why do I care?
What is a T Formation?
Whats the difference between a running back and a tight end?
What are Special Teams, and what makes them special?

Laced with hilarious and insightful anecdotes from Mark Oristano’s career as a pro football sportscaster, A Sportscasters Guide to Watching Football will turn you into a football-watching pro, or at least let you fake it.

The Short of It:

Short, yet packed with useful information. This is the guide for those that want to know more about the game yet don’t have a lot of time in front of the TV to figure it all out.

The Rest of It:

When I was asked to review this book I jumped at the chance. Sometimes books just end up in your hands at the right time, you know? The Hub has always been incredibly frustrated by my lack of knowledge in the area of football. When I watch football, I comment on the outfits (uniforms) and during the Superbowl, I choose a team to root for simply by asking who the underdog is. I always root for the underdog. This lack of information began in my high school days. I was on pep squad and during all the games I ran from one end of the field to the other with absolutely no idea what the heck I was doing or why. I just followed the others but felt incredibly silly at times.

However, those days are over! Well, not quite over but after reading A Sportscaster’s Guide to Watching Football, I feel as if I can at least follow the game now. Mark Oristano spent 30 years as a professional sports broadcaster so he certainly knows the game, but what impressed me with this book is that he tells me what I need to know in layman’s terms yet provides all of the vocabulary necessary to talk like pro.

The book is peppered with tips. Here’s an example:

If you’ve been watching football, you’ve probably been watching the football. I’m going to give you an order here: DON’T WATCH THE BALL. I know it sounds odd, since the ball is the whole point of the game, but the ball doesn’t tell you what’s going on.

So true.

The book is also peppered with sections titled Cool Things to Say During Game:

To really make the point, when the two-minute time-out commercial break is over, as your team comes up to the line of scrimmage, and your QB goes under center, swirl your drink, make that ice noise, and say, “Work the sideline, baby!”

See what I mean? Useful stuff. Since I knew nothing about the game, any info is really better than none, so feedback from me may not be that useful in determining if this is the book for you, so I had The Hub read it. You’ll be happy to know that he gave it his seal of approval!

With it being so easy to read and it being so short, I think a lot of folks might enjoy this and it would make a great stocking stuffer.

Source: Thanks to Phenix and Phenix Literary Publicists for sending me this review copy.

The Girl Who Played With Fire
By Stieg Larsson
Knopf Doubleday
June 2009
512pp

The blurb from the publisher:

The electrifying follow-up to the phenomenal best seller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and this time it is Lisbeth Salander, the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker, who is the focus and fierce heart of the story.

Mikael Blomkvist—crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium—has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.

On the eve of publication, the two reporters responsible for the story are brutally murdered. But perhaps more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander.

The Short of It:

After reading The Girl Who Played with Fire you’ll need a nice manicure as it’s quite a nail biter! Tense at times with a very quick pace, this one will keep you on your toes.

The Rest of It:

This is book #2 in the Millennium series and after reading and reviewing The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I knew I had to pick this one up quickly and that’s exactly what I did. Those that love the character of Lisbeth Salander will be happy to know that book #2 focuses on her and her story but when two journalists are murdered and Lisbeth is the prime suspect, she goes missing for quite a while and in fact, is not in a large portion of the book! I know! Scandalous!

As law enforcement gathers the evidence, Mikael Blomkvist and his staff at Millennium, try to put their own case together to find the real killer. As they conduct their investigation, additional details surface and the reader is given a very private glimpse into Salandar’s life. To be honest with you, I found myself frustrated with this portion of the story. I wanted to know what happened but it seemed as if so much time was spent on the forensic stuff. Yeah, I know that you sort of have to do that to solve a case but in the mean time, Salander is missing and you just want to know where she is and if she did it.

I was also slightly annoyed with the whole Giant thing. There is a Giant. A big, huge guy that is impervious to pain. It reminded me of that movie from the late 70’s, Foul Play. You know the one. It has Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn (good movie by the way). In that movie, she references a dwarf and she is given the warning “beware of the dwarf.” This was sort of like that. BEWARE OF THE GIANT LISBETH! I tired of the Giant.

We also get to know Mikael Blomkvist a little better but he is still the man with all the women! How he manages to bed these women and then remain friends with them afterward is beyond me. In real life I wouldn’t think too highly of someone like him, but for some reason he comes across as ‘okay’ in the novel, sort of an “Everyman” character which is really sad if you think about it.

However, even though I had some nit-picky moments with this one, I still enjoyed it quite a bit. It took off right out of the gate and kept going and it didn’t disappoint in the end. It all came together and left me feeling completely wrung-out and incredibly anxious for the next book. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is not available here in the U.S. but you can get it from The Book Depository and they have free shipping worldwide! However, they are now out of stock on the paperback so I will have to check back later.

Source: Purchased

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