Playing Hard Ball, by Ed Smith

Playing Hard Ball by Ed Smith

Earlier this year, while reading Ed Smith's On and Off the Field, I saw on the dust cover that Smith had written a book comparing baseball and cricket. I immediately ordered it on Amazon. It's taken two months for the book to arrive.

Because Smith is such a good writer, the book doesn't disappoint. He is also quite a serious thinker. The only knock, if anyone can believe it, is that I found the analysis to be not thorough enough. I would have liked to see a comparison on the differences in scoring, and therefore in strategies, in the two sports. I could do with less emotional stuff. Why is it that writers, even the likes of Smith who are not otherwise sentimental, get so touchy-feely as soon as they start talking about baseball? I love the game, but it's still just a game...

Pompeii, by Robert Harris

Pompeii by Robert Harris

While it is always fascinating to read historical novels, I can't help but wonder just how much of it is accurate and how much of it is fabrication. Of course, even if someone had been present at the time doesn't mean the person's account is dependable.

As for this book, it is full of details which Harris must have done painstaking research to obtain. Here is a good quote at the end of the book regarding the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius:

"Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the center of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer -- it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying us -- we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little -- a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behaviour, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded. But here was nature, sweeping toward him -- unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent -- and he saw in her fires the futility of human pretensions."