The number 56, representing baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941, is the most resonant numeral in sports. Nothing approaches it — not in baseball, basketball, football, hockey, darts or kick the can. To deliver hits every day, amid constant inspection and increasing pressure, leaves athletes in all sports slack-jawed.
In the early 1970s, when the tide of summer residents would go out in September, there were always young people who didn’t want to leave the Vineyard — and they didn’t have to, because there was no particular place they planned to go. Land was still relatively affordable, or their families had land, and they built themselves homes back in the woods, had kids, a few animals and a garden, and patched together a living with the usual Vineyard hodgepodge of work or self-employment.
Every jittery Vineyard beachgoer is familiar with the iconic image of the restless great white patrolling the shallows, mouth agape, in search of a fleshy excuse to close it. Stacks of shark books celebrating the more lurid aspects of their behavior, particularly their extremely rare propensity to attack humans, already fill library shelves, but in Demon Fish, Washington Post environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin makes the case that the more fearsome animal is in the mirror.
Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search For Jewish Cooking In France by Joan Nathan of Washington, D.C., and Chilmark, is a delectable-looking cookbook with hundreds of delicious recipes. And, best of all, since many of them come from the hot climates of southern France and North Africa, you’re sure to be able to find in it just what you want to serve at a mid-summer Island dinner party.
Like most of us, Steven Rattner knew little about the automobile industry when in early 2009 he accepted the unenviable task of helping craft a government rescue plan for Detroit’s automakers.
But unlike most of us, Mr. Rattner knew more than a little about finance and profitable companies. And as President Obama’s former “car czar,” he has produced a readable book about the experience in Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry.
The Emperor of All Maladies is a billed as a biography of cancer and author Siddhartha Mukherjee treats his subject with all the reverence of a living subject.
“Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better,” he writes. “They are better versions of ourselves.”
