'Breaking the Slump' By Jimmy Roberts

Reviewed by Joe Logan

Philadelphia Inquirer

When you plow into a book subtitled How the Great Players Survived Their Darkest Moments in Golf and What You Can Learn From Them, you sort of expect to come away having, you know, learned something.

Ha! The joke's on me.

Not that Roberts' book isn't a pleasant, breezy read, ideal for the beach or - let's be honest here - a last-minute gift for that golfer in your life. Just understand that while this gift might get you off the hook, it won't get rid of his or her hook.

It's the first book for Roberts, a solid, likable golf correspondent for NBC Sports. (In the acknowledgments, Roberts writes that when he called his older sister to tell her he was writing a book, there was silence on the line until she said, "I think Mom and Dad would have been happy if you just read a book.")

Breaking the Slump is literary cotton candy. It's chock-full of fun stories and anecdotes about some of the biggest names in, and out, of golf, such as Greg Norman, Phil Mickelson, Paul Azinger, Johnny Miller, Ben Crenshaw, Arnold Palmer, the first President Bush, and Jack Nicklaus.

Jack Nicklaus? Who knew that Nicklaus, who remains the greatest player in the history of golf so long as Tiger Woods continues to chase his record of 18 major championship titles, ever had a slump?

I write about golf for a living, and I'm old enough to remember Nicklaus in his heyday, and I didn't recall a slump.

But, hey, there was one year. It was 1979, 17 years into his career, when Nicklaus was pushing 40. He'd already famously dethroned the beloved Arnold Palmer, and he had won the PGA Tour money title six times. But in '79, inexplicably, Nicklaus stunk the joint up. He didn't win once. He didn't even finish second. He only had one third-place finish all year, and he fell to 71st on the money list.

"I mean, you wouldn't believe how pathetic I was," Nicklaus told Roberts.

So, what did Nicklaus do? Nothing. He took four months off.

Come January 1980, when he was rested and ready, Nicklaus went back to his old coach, Jack Grout, like he was a fresh-eyed kid.

"I started from scratch," said Nicklaus. "OK, Jack Grout, my name is Jack Nicklaus and I want to learn how to play golf."

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'It All Began With Wilt' By Cecil Mosenson

It All Began With Wilt
By Cecil Mosenson

Reviewed By David Cohen
Philadelphia Inquirer

The ghost of Wilt Chamberlain still towers over Philadelphia-area basketball.

Except for suburbanite Kobe Bryant, no local player has ever come close to matching Chamberlain's accomplishments. So many other phenoms - from Clarence Tillman and Billy Thompson to Eddie Griffin and Dallas Comegys to Milt and Dajuan Wagner - simply fizzled out in his shadow.

Beyond that, the magnitude of Chamberlain's feats is still staggering. His 100-point game for the Philadelphia Warriors on March 2, 1962, was like a moment when the heavens aligned - unprecedented, unreal, and unlikely ever to be matched.

Cecil Mosenson knows these things, and he knows them better than most. Having guided Chamberlain at Overbrook High, Mosenson has lived the last half-century known as "the guy who coached Wilt" - a tag that stuck with him even as he spent decades helping other youngsters as a coach, teacher, and principal. Chamberlain's ghost presumably is never far from his side.

Of course, that is why this book exists - so Mosenson can tell the stories about Chamberlain that everyone asks him to tell, as well as remind the world he's accomplished other things. The result is an autobiographical collection of anecdotes.

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'Yogi Berra - Eternal Yankee' By Allen Barra

Reviewed by Bill Lyon

Philadelphia Inquirer

With his stocky, runty torso and his boardinghouse-reach arms and his stubby, ungainly legs, he looked like he had been assembled from leftover parts, or as one writer of the day put it: "A body only an anthropologist could love."

But Lawrence Peter Berra played the most difficult and demanding position in all of sports, and played it so uncommonly well that there are people who consider him the greatest at his position of all time, and make a compelling, statistic-buttressed argument in his behalf.

One of those people is Allen Barra - one vowel removed from, and no relation to, his subject - a prolific and decorated writer of books, columns, and magazine articles, a baseball maven, and an unabashed champion of Berra, who is one of those people instantly recognized by one name. In this case:

Yogi.

The Grand Master of the Malaprop.

Surely the most quoted athlete of all time, cited so frequently that it requires some diligent digging to unearth exactly what he said and what he might have said. Or as Yogi himself might observe: "If I didn't say it, I should have."

Barra on Berra, neatly timed for Opening Day, makes for an impressive tome. It is an exhaustively researched, meticulously prepared, and lovingly presented biography of a man whom the author proclaims to be "America's most popular former athlete." (I would counter with Muhammad Ali, but that's a matter of opinion.)

It will require more willpower than I possess not to sneak ahead and turn immediately to Appendix B, Page 396, for a sampling of Yogiisms. Herewith, indulge:

When you come to the fork in the road, take it.

You know, a nickel isn't worth a dime any more. (To the economist Milton Friedman.)

What paper do you write for? (Upon being introduced to Ernest Hemingway.)

Thank you for making this day necessary. (To the fans, on Yogi Berra Day.)

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'Etta' By Gerald Kolpan

'Etta' By Gerald Kolpan

Reviewed by Caroline Berson
Philadelphia Inquirer

Our heroine is dead before the tale can begin. The opening pages deliver the obituary of Lorinda Jameson Carr, an 80-year-old woman remembered for her philanthropic work and sharpshooting skills. Her adult life is well chronicled by the New York Herald Tribune, but "little is known of Mrs. Carr's early life."

And thus our story begins, not as a novel built on suspense, but rather on bringing to life a little-known member of the infamous Hole in the Wall Gang and capturing the mood of the Wild West.

According to historians, Etta Place was either a prostitute or a schoolteacher who, through unknown means, was rumored to be the girlfriend or wife of Harry Longabaugh, alias the Sundance Kid.

Gerald Kolpan's version of history opens on a gentleman's farm in 1898 Philadelphia, where Lorinda Jameson, celebrated debutante and daring horseback rider, lives with her alcoholic father. Lorinda's lifestyle disintegrates when her father commits suicide rather than deal with his growing debt.

In a meeting with the family lawyer, Lorinda learns that one of her father's lenders is a notorious Sicilian gang.

"Your poor father had been laid to considerable debt by a cabal of gamblers, unscrupulous and desperate men who preyed upon your father's weakness for horse betting, no doubt with his enthusiastic support," the lawyer says. "Like the remainder of his creditors, these villains have contacted this office and informed me of their need to be remunerated . . . [or] they shall be forced into actions that will mean suffering for any whom your father loved in life."

To escape their promised revenge, Lorinda accepts a new name - Miss Etta Place - and travels west to Colorado, where she serves travelers as a Harvey Girl waitress. Etta soon realizes that her incomparable beauty attracts unwanted advances and is forced to extremes to defend her pure character. She escapes to "Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming territory. Somewhere between the beginning of nowhere and the end of nothing."

Here she finds herself in the company of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Kolpan first mentions the well-known outlaws by including a wanted poster in his narrative, one that identifies their criminal occupations as "bank robber and highwaymen, train robber, cattle and horse thief." These stark depictions are later softened by introducing different perspectives. Kolpan breaks away from his journalism training to reveal the souls in his novel through diary entries, newspaper articles, personal letters, and straight third-person narrative.

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'Maimonides' By Joel L. Kraemer

'Maimonides: The Life and World
of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds' By Joel L. Kraemer

Reviewed by Robert J. Dobie
Philadelphia Inquirer

In 1896, more than 200,000 religious books, manuscripts, and personal letters were found in the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt. Among the most important were writings of a man considered to be the greatest Jewish philosopher, theologian, legal expert and physician of the Middle Ages (some would say of all time), Moses ben Maimon, known to the West as Moses Maimonides (1138-1204).

Why would this medieval Jewish philosopher and theologian interest us today? This is the question Joel L. Kraemer's new biography aims to answer. In fact, Maimonides' thought speaks to our own day, which cries out for thoughtful approaches to the complex and delicate relations between secular science/philosophy and revealed religion. Maimonides' work should serve scholars today, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, even secular, as both a model and an inspiration.

Born around 1138 in what was then Moorish Spain, Maimonides grew up in a thoroughly Islamic and Arabized milieu. He had a deep knowledge of Arabic poetry, even penning his major works in the language, rather than in Hebrew. An even stronger influence was that of the great Muslim philosophers, scientists and theologians. He set out to master logic, mathematics, astronomy, and Aristotelian philosophy.

As Kraemer carefully notes, while Maimonides took much from Islamic society, he was even more concerned with preserving and enriching a unique Jewish identity and philosophical/theological perspective. His family was forced by political changes to emigrate to Egypt, where they could live openly as Jews, despite continued pressure to convert to Islam. Maimonides made it his lifelong project to demonstrate the inherent rationality of Judaism, both as a system containing the highest truths about reality and as a guide to human fulfillment and perfection.

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The human brain: Not perfect, but good enough

Kluge
The Haphazard Construction
of the Human Mind
By Gary Marcus

Reviewed by Steve Mirsky
Found at the Philadelphia Inquirer

Furniture, self-confident, corner, adventuresome, chair, table, independent, television. Early in Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, author Gary Marcus asks the reader to memorize that short list of words. He then notes, "What follows is more fun if you really do try to memorize the list." So go ahead; it'll take only a few seconds.

Marcus then tells a short story, the gist of which is: "Donald often sought excitement. He had climbed Mount McKinley, kayaked rapids, driven in a demolition derby, piloted a jet-powered boat. He had risked death numerous times, and was now seeking new thrills."

Now your assignment: Sum up Donald in a single word.

Chances are your word is adventuresome. But had the list substituted for adventuresome the word reckless, your word choice would probably be more pejorative. The snap judgment of Donald is swayed by information - the word list - that should be irrelevant. Unfortunately, your brain turns out to be alarmingly bad at evaluating individual situations truly objectively.

To read more of Steve Mirsky's review of Kluge, please click here.