Talking In Obscurity, "Sidney Crosby the Rookie Year," by Sidney Crosby

 

Or Download This Episode Here: https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/36eei3/Sidney_Crosby_Podcast_Edit6xjkh.mp3

Alright, book fans who also happen to be sports fans, today Steven and I are talking about Sidney Crosby's audible original "Sidney Crosby the Rookie Year." 

"Sidney Crosby The Rookie Year" by Sidney Crosby--Nonfiction Review

Today’s “book” is an audible original on one of the best to play the game of hockey, “Sidney Crosby the Rookie Year.”

What I love about this book:

It’s a short book that gets you right into it; introductions are made, and then—bam—we’re back vicariously living out the day Sidney Crosby was drafted to the Pittsburgh Penguins.

How this program is presented, through some narration by Joe Manganiello and interviews with Sid himself and those closest to him during his rookie year, creates an intimate atmosphere. I found it interesting to see what this moment in time looked like from Crosby’s point of view because to say he was kind of a big deal in the league then and today—is a major understatement.

You get to learn what his life was like, to be one of the best to play the game from the very beginning, and to play with and live under Lemieux’s roof, literally. That mentor dynamic between Crosby and Lemieux is unique because—while I’m not an expert in the subject—how often does a sports phenomenon get to apprentice under one of the last generation’s phenoms?

What I don’t love about this book:

The pressure we put on people like Sidney Crosby to be “on” all the time is shitty and unfair. When he was drafted by the Penguins, he was still a teenager, and many of the city’s sports fans put their hopes and dreams squarely on Crosby’s shoulders. They were all counting all of the Stanley Cup wins before even that first playoff game—and when that did not pan out, Sid got a lot of the blame. As if one player, and one player alone, could change the trajectory of a team’s winning or losing season. That isn’t to knock the influence one player can have; leadership has a tangible effect on performance. I’m merely stating that the group is more important than the individual in a team sport. If the group can’t perform, that extra edge by having a few ringers can’t make up for the deficit.

This is more a thing I don’t like about the game of hockey than this book, and that is how often fights break out and aren’t immediately stopped. Which, I get, is an unusual stance for me to take because of all sports; boxing is probably my favorite. I don’t like it in hockey, though, because it tacitly makes it ok to counter someone skilled at the game, maybe even the best on the ice, like Sid, by just hurting him. I get that there is a difference between a hard hit and a fight. But think about any time anyone hauls off and straight up punches a guy in football, baseball, and basketball. It’s rare, and it isn’t tolerated.

Parting thoughts:

I’m not much of a sports guy—I know, shocking, right? So as exciting as some of this book is, a lot of it is wasted on me. Actually, I’ve been to a lot of hockey games over the years. I’m always excited to go, and I enjoy myself when there, that atmosphere, seeing incredible athletes be effortlessly amazing on the ice, and the concession stand… I might have an unhealthy relationship with food. In any case, of the several dozen games I’ve been to over the years, with one friend or another, I’ve probably only ever “watched” the Penguins game on TV, maybe just as many times over the years as I’ve been to games in person.

Anyway, the point I’m making here is that hockey just isn’t in the orbit of my life regularly. That’s important because I still remember the day Sidney Crosby was drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins all these years later. I remember the conversations I had that day in 2005. Pittsburgh is that much of a sports town. It was the only conversation happening before and after it was confirmed that Sidney Crosby was coming to Pittsburgh.

Everyone was saying, “Sid is the next Super Mario,” and nobody was confused about who they meant, and it wasn’t the video game character.

I find it fascinating how the passion for some things, like when this Canadian kid about my age came to town, is so transcendent that it doesn’t matter who you are—you’re aware.

Micro Mention "Up From Slavery"

"Up From Slavery" is one of those historical books, first published at the turn of the last century, that everyone should read at some point. The life and accomplishments of Booker T Washington are best first introduced in the man's own words.

The man had an optimistic view of the future for himself and his people in America, during a time where there was precious little to go on to vindicate him on that point. Still, there is something admirable about such stalwart optimism. Certainly, there are charges leveled against Booker T. Washington that he was more than a little bit naive, but I think that's an oversimplification of the man. After reading his book, I think he knew there were many challenges ahead, heartaches, and struggles, and maybe the work doesn't get done in a single generation—or ten. In the end, though, like any true American, he knew that our strength has never been through division but in unity.

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"I Am Malala," by Malala Yousafzai--Nonfiction Review

Hey, it’s Friday, so as the song goes, let’s take a look, it’s in a book, and we can go anywhere. So why don’t we take a trip to Pakistan, specifically to the Swat valley during the time the Taliban occupied the valley? I was fired from my first day on the Reading Rainbow by the way—but anyway, today’s book is “I Am Malala” by Malala Yousafzai.   

What I love about this book:

This book scratches the same itch and feeling as “The Kite Runner” but has the added dimension of being about a real person. You get a snapshot of the culture as seen through Malala’s eyes, and the book puts a human face to the Pashtun people living in the Swat valley. 

Malala’s bravery is the same stuff they wrote epic poems about in antiquity—but in all of those, the hero is usually some burly man slaying some monster. Malala, on the other hand, surpasses that in her attempt to reason with people as far gone as Taliban true believers because it’s the right thing to do according to her interpretation of her faith. She stood up to the radicals and argued that women deserve an education, full well knowing that the Taliban’s typical rebuttal to a viewpoint that they disagree with usually involves a Kalashnikov and a lot of bullets. Then after she was shot in the head by the Taliban and nearly dies, she still makes it her life’s work to fight for women’s rights. 

I admire her candor in telling her story as a young woman in a culture that is by any western standard, is very hard on all women. Still, it’s kind of nice to read about little details of her life, like her and her friend reading the Twilight novels, and her father taking her whole class on field trips. These heartwarming little anecdotes break up the truly terrifying parts when the Taliban came to the Swat valley and generally ruined everything.

Another thing I respect about her honesty is that Malala never tries to describe herself as a perfect person. In fact, she tells numerous stories about how she could be petty, a little vain, and sometimes jealous. It makes her seem like a real person, which of course, she is since this isn’t fiction. As a flawed person, her bravery to stand up to and try to reason with literal murderers seems even more heroic.  

What I don’t love about this book:

After the horror-filled introduction, which is read by the author, if you go in for the audiobook version, there is a bit of a wait until we get into Malala’s story. She had opted to tell the story of her father’s life and her mother’s before she was born. I don’t begrudge her that, clearly, she loves her father—her mother too—and her father seems like an extraordinary man in his own right—but if I’m nitpicky, and I am, it does go on for a while. 

On the subject of things I don’t like that happened, and not to be confused with a suggestion of not including them in the book, I find it disheartening how western culture has often failed these people. A popular self-inflicted myth of Americans is we tend to see ourselves as the heroes of the world. We do this without so much as polling the rest of the world for their opinion on the matter. 

Turns out, at best, we come off as paternalistic and patronizing—at worst, greedy imperialists in all but name only who don’t care about other people’s sovereignty. That viewpoint was greatly exasperated and underscored in Malala’s narrative when President Obama sent in our Navy Seals to raid Osama Bin Laden’s compound, and ultimately kill him, without so much as a howdy doody to the Pakistani government explaining our intentions. President Obama took that action for operational security reasons so as to not tip off the target, was that the right call? I’m not qualified to second guess him on that point, so I’m of the belief that I’d just have to take his word for that was the case. It’s not like the president particularly cares about my—a random schmuck on the internet—opinion. Anyway, I can see her point on why the Pakistani people were upset about the whole thing. 

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as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Author's Website: https://www.malala.org/

Parting thoughts:

When I was a freshman in college, I had a professor loosely “teach” us about the geography and society of the Swat valley. It wasn’t until nearly a decade later, when I read this book that I had the realization that, oh, that professor was a racist. This professor explained to my class that those people were all warlike and are unconquerable because they train all of their children to be warriors. One of the “practices” this professor taught of the people of the Swat valley is mothers would randomly slap their children, unprovoked by anything, to teach them the valuable lesson that life is capricious and violent and condition them for the eventual rigors of the battlefield. 

Like most good bullshit, there is a kernel of something that is part of the truth. The people of the Swat valley historically speaking were very good at setting aside their numerous differences to repel invaders. Malala even talks about a famous battle where the Pashtuns, a group of people spread out between Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the Swat Valley, repelled the British, and fun trivia it’s the same battle where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson was injured. The whole slapping babies part of the lesson? Utter made up nonsense as far as I can tell, but who knows, maybe someone somewhere does that, but I’m pretty sure that would be a disturbed individual, not a cultural norm. Like I said in my “The Kite Runner” review, my vision of what the Swat valley was like had been warped by the general perception that everything that is reminiscent of the middle east—or middle east adjacent in Pakistan’s case—is endless desert.

Clearly, with this photo from Wikipedia, you can see that it isn’t true.

To think, in a place so beautiful, some of the worst modern-day atrocities happen. If there is a God who created everything and everyone, it’s hard to imagine that shooting children in the head for the crime of being a woman and wishing for an education was what he had in mind.  

"Failure Is Not an Option," by Gene Kranz--Nonfiction Review

Morning my dear, dear internet strangers, this Friday, we’re doing another non-fiction review. We’re establishing a pattern here, like serial killers. Today’s review is of “Failure Is Not an Option” by Gene Kranz.

It’s the book about space, specifically about when we went to the moon. I bring this up because, after just a cursory search, there are like four other books with this exact title. So just remember, we’re not talking about retirement or self-esteem or whatever—we’re going to the moon, Alice, to the moon! I heard that in an episode of Futurama and can’t possibly imagine it could be a reference to anything else—ever.  

What I love about this book:

Let’s get the obvious done right away. It’s got space stuff, and like I’ve said before, I love me some space stuff. The author, by the way, Gene Kranz, is one of the ultimate insiders in the early days of NASA. He was the flight director on not just Apollo 11 but also Apollo 13. Also, he was the guy in a white vest played by Ed Harris in the Ron Howard movie, also called Apollo 13—go figure. So he’s the man, as in the man in charge during some of the most significant moments in early space flight.

I love that this book takes you sequentially through the early days of the Mercury, Gemini, and, finally, the Apollo programs. Kranz breaks down the three early space programs, from the technology they used to their specific objectives. In Mercury, the first, we here in the United States were playing catch up in just getting an American astronaut into space, orbit the earth and getting him back down again. This goal was compounded by the problem that we were still getting over our “everything just blew up in a fiery ball of hellfire” phase of rocketry. Gemini was different in that all of its objectives, as a program, were to be a proof of concept that would prove the Apollo program was possible. Finally, Apollo, the program everyone knows, is where we actually landed on the Moon.

In addition to all that—the author also tells the very human stories behind the men and women who fought for, sacrificed for, and tragically in some cases—died for the dream of setting foot on another world separate from the Earth. It’s great to remember how Neil Armstrong stepped foot—for the first time ever—on land that was not from our world. However, it’s far less pleasurable to remember how “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died on the launch pad during a plugs-out test of Apollo 1. Their sacrifice is just as necessary to remember, in my opinion.

It isn’t all heroic pioneering stories or tragedy laced accidents, you learn interesting things about the people who lived and worked at NASA. For instance, Gene Kranz himself is a judo aficionado, something he got into because of a coworker and as a way to blow off steam. There are plenty of interesting little details about the people who actually lived through these events, and it isn’t all sterile facts about rockets and capsules.         

What I don’t love about this book:

Kranz is a wealth of information, and that’s a good thing—but he does tend to get bogged down in minutia. He doesn’t just know exactly what part or piece of machinery was used during a particular mission, but what he wrote on forms and memos to his superiors. This level of detail isn’t all that fascinating. It is a little amusing that either his memory is just that good or his level of personal notes that he kept was that complete, but the actual details themselves can get tedious. For me, it’s a blurry line of when he crosses over from being thorough to too much, a choice much like how many Reeses peanut butter cups are too many Reeses, never all the Reeses, eat all the Reeses!

He also has a tendency to talk around events, restating certain pieces of information multiple times before diving in directly with what actually happened. Overall, the whole book feels a bit overly long, and each story he tells could be tightened up and edited down.

Parting thoughts:

I believe that landing on the moon was the single greatest moment in human history—up to this point. It was one of those few moments in human history where we did a thing not for basic biological needs, or purely out of cynical socioeconomics. True, it is impossible to say that we weren’t motivated to beat the Russians there, because yes, that competition is what pushed us, in the United States, over the top. However, I don’t believe we did it purely just to say we did it before the Russians, we did not spend billions of dollars, people did not dedicate their lives and in some cases die, just for bragging rights. We did it because it had never been done before. We went somewhere no one had ever been before to go see what was out there. It was that adventure that thirst for exploration that drove us to go to the moon.

Like everything, though—as a society, we’ve become complacent with the idea that we’ve been to the moon. Everything loses mystique eventually, and I find most people just take it for granted, like sure they personally haven’t been there but they know someone has, a lot like they probably rationalize they haven’t been to Madagascar but someone clearly has been there. My point is this complacency saps enthusiasm, motivation, and those are the very qualities that got us there when our best computers couldn’t even be considered a useful calculator today. Like the man said, it was a hard choice to go to the moon. Every time we slash NASA’s budget to go fight another endless war over hydrocarbons, it becomes easier to not make that choice going forward. Why is this important? What has space exploration ever given us for how much it costs? The thing you are reading this blog on can trace its genesis back to the technologies NASA first pioneered and helped to develop directly and indirectly. The GPS you use to find your Aunt Sally’s house in Maine likewise comes from the same family of technology.

There is another class of people who go a different way than just run of the mill indifference. They outright deny that we ever made it to the moon. First off, even the Russians admitted it at the height of the cold war—we were not friends at the time, and they would have literally zero reasons to lie about this. That aside, this is one of those few conspiracy theories I narrow my eyes at immediately. Usually, I’m indulgent in listening to dumb conspiracy theories, bring on the ancient Aliens, but on this point—denying possibly one of the greatest achievements our species will ever attain—I become suspicious. I’m under no illusion that mostly this is a visceral emotional reaction on my part and therefore not totally rational. But when someone tells me that the moon landing was faked, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if, in their next breath, they tell me about their pet theory of how the holocaust was a hoax.