Tyler Bridges, Five Laterals and a Trombone *** 1/2

I have a personal connection to "The Play," the wild ending to the 1982 Big Game referenced by this book's title. I was a Cal student at the time and I had money riding on the game through a bet with my brother. We were listening to the game on the radio outside of the shopping mall, and Jim confidently went back inside after Stanford scored their late field goal. I heard the mayhem of the final play on the radio, then excitedly rushed back inside to taunt my brother and collect on the bet.

That explains why my parents gave me Five Laterals and a Trombone for Christmas.

Despite the sensationalist title and the madcap climax, Five Laterals and a Trombone is a thoughtful piece of sports journalism. It covers quite a bit of ground in providing context for The Play: there are chapters about the Cal-Stanford rivalry (since 1892), the coaches, the Axe, the bands, the major players (especially John Elway), the season leading up to the Big Game, and of course the exciting game itself. It provides surprisingly clear, concise explanations of college football strategy for a book that builds to a desperate, completely improvised finish.

The author is a political journalist rather than a sports writer, but he nails the flat, merely serviceable prose of the genre. (His connection to the story is that he was a trombone player at Stanford who graduated the year before the game.) The narrative is disjointed because it pauses to provide background for the players and makes room for unusual perspectives such as the Memorial Stadium maintenance worker in position to collect the goal post pads at the end of the game.

Would the touchdown have counted in these days of replay review? Hard to say. To me the only question is whether the third recipient Dwight Garner was down before he tossed the ball, but we don't have the footage to know for sure.

Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance ****

A Clearing in the Distance is a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, best remembered today as the designer of Central Park and Boston's Emerald Necklace but also known in his day as the author of a series of books about the antebellum South. The most notable thing is how varied his interests were and how long he lived before discovering his life's work. He doesn't start working in earnest as a landscape architect until he was 43, until page 269 of a 400-page book.

I feel myself becoming impatient with Olmsted. Why can't he just get on with it? We expect the lives of people -- especially people who achieve great things -- to follow a grand design... Following Olmsted's life is more like putting together a picture puzzle. All sorts of odd shapes are lying on the table... It's not yet clear how these fragments come together. Some pieces don't seem to fit anywhere.

As a young man, he took up scientific farming, journalism, health administration, mine management,  and social advocacy. He moved from area to area haphazardly; even his introduction to Central Park was the result of a chance meeting. One fortunate consequence of his wanderings is that it allows his biographer to comment on many different aspects of life in mid-19th century America as he puts the puzzle together. 

Rybczynski manages to suggest how many of the pieces fit together without seeming to promote an agenda. In particular, he shows how Olmsted's writing about the South relates to his landscape work as part of a larger vision of civilization. He is solicitous toward Olmsted, but the prickly parts of Olmsted's personality show through especially in his later years. I appreciated that he occasionally jumped forward to the present day to describe how some of Olmsted's works today compare to their original conception. 

I first read this book many years ago. I was thinking that I bought it from the gift shop at Olmsted's home and office in Brookline MA, but that's a confabulation. We visited Fairsted in 1992 while the book was copyrighted is 1999. I still think I bought it at one of Olmsted's places, but who knows.

Andrea Barrett, Servants of the Map **** 1/2

Andrea Barrett has a new story collection (Natural History), as I discovered while browsing at Barnes and Noble recently. I wasn't in the mood that day to buy a hardcover, but I was inspired to return to the book that introduced me to Barrett. I discovered Servants of the Map while browsing at Powell's many years ago, and it was unlike anything I'd read before.

The protagonists in Barrett's stories are scientists, often women and often from the 19th century, experiencing intellectual awakenings interwoven with emotional ones. I'd call her work "science fiction" if that term weren't already claimed. In a manner that seems unique to her, Barrett shows how thinking and feeling are inextricable, with curiosity and attraction reinforcing each other. The stories leave me with an optimistic focus on the wonders of life.

I was hooked immediately by the title story, which is about a young British surveyor in the Himalaya in 1863. He writes to his wife about his adventures and his loneliness while slowly recognizing his calling as an explorer.

Barrett likes to link her stories through shared characters. For example, the narrator of "Theories of Rain" has a long-lost brother who turns up as a major character in "Two Rivers." While these connections are mostly subtle, they occasionally interfere with the unity of the story. The final story, "The Cure," brings together characters from several other Barrett stories (in this book and others) and seems designed to provide fan-service updates about the characters rather than working as a standalone story.  

Brian Phillips, Impossible Owls ****

The essays in this collection cover familiar, even hackneyed, subjects (e.g. the Iditarod, Roswell, Route 66, the British royal family), but Phillips has a distinctive take on every one of them. He recognizes, for example, that the most compelling sports journalism addresses the experience of fans (cf. Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, David Foster Wallace's pieces about tennis). His essay on the Iditarod is more about the loneliness of the Alaskan outback than the race; the most vivid section of the sumo wrestling piece is about the arena ("bottle openers attached to railings with string, so fans can open beer...seat cushions resting on elevated platforms, so fans can slide their shoes underneath"). Similarly, the essay about visiting an Indian tiger preserve captures the mundane details of the rest stops alongside the wonder of the wildlife.

Phillips varies his writing style to suit his subjects. The essay about Queen Elizabeth begins with a lovely poetic vision of London in the late summer.

Every essay in the collection includes an owl, usually it's as tangential as a pair of stone owls at the top of a staircase. I only noticed the glancing references because of the book title. Do they mean something? And what makes them impossible?