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Saturday, 15 November 2008 |
Pinch Hitter: Baseball Fantasy Becomes RealityReviewed by Stuart Nachbar
 Pinch Hitter But David also has a secret that is a driver to the story. His older brother Danny was also a baseball protégé. Unlike David, Danny is an over-confident pitcher with quality stuff, good enough for a scholarship or a major league contract. However, Danny’s promise ends when he is hit above the eye by a line drive—off the bat of his younger brother. Immediately after that fatal incident, David ends his own baseball dreams, and years later, Danny disappears from his life, crippled by lingering pain and lost dreams. At the start of this story David has not seen his older brother for nine years.
Pinch Hitter is a moving story and I could see that Whitney spent a lot of time around a major league baseball team. The clubhouse and front office scenes are more detailed than I would expect to find from an author with no personal day-to-day connection to major league baseball, and Whitney also shows a strong knowledge of the situational game, where managers have to strategize again each other, using mind and matter to win. It’s no surprise that his main character is a pinch hitter, since that is a situational position in a game, as opposed to an everyday star. Reading Pinch Hitter, I was reminded of Rudy, the Notre Dame football movie, where a 26 year old college senior has overcome dyslexia to earn a degree and have a chance to play for a national championship team. Rudy is carried off the field at the end of his only game, just as David is heralded by his teammates at the end of this story. |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 15 November 2008 )
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Thursday, 23 October 2008 |
A Trip Back In Time to ChinaReviewed by Stuart Nachbar
In 1977, when I was a junior in high school, Roots was the first family legacy series I had read. I was motivated to read the book after I had learned so much from the TV series. The series spanned several generations of a black family immigrating to the United States and surviving slavery to eventually prosper on their own. Released nearly a decade after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Roots won nine Emmy Awards and the finale is the third-highest rating television program ever. The movie and book were factually disputed at the time, but I learned much from the story.
 Return to Middle Kingdom
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 23 October 2008 )
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Wednesday, 21 May 2008 |
Succession: A Story of Corporate PastReviewed By Stuart Nachbar
 Succession
Succession has a shorter timeframe than the author’s career, but it is based on the same idea. Jake Garrison, an aspiring Civil War fiction novelist has a pregnant wife and sick father and he must return to a career of handling undercover due diligence for investors who want to purchase businesses.
The business in Succession is a large, struggling typewriter manufacturer that has been merged into an even larger corporate conglomerate, as was the practice during the 1960’s when the novel takes place. The company, Kensington has been in a losing battle on price, sales practices and technology; IBM has fast become a dominant player in the business-to-business with the Selectric and it is feared that they will enter the consumer market as well under their label or someone else’s. Some Kensington executives want that someone else to be Kensington, though Garrison’s client is not one of them.
To make matters worse, Garrison’s client has supposedly impregnated his wife. However, needing money, he follows a lesson he has lived by his whole life: show no pain. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 21 May 2008 )
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Wednesday, 30 April 2008 |
Virtual Book Review Network interview with Lindsey Pollak, author of Getting From College to Career
How do you get a job without experience and get experience without a job? It's the question virtually every college student or recent graduate faces. In Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World, Lindsey Pollak offers the first definitive guide to building the experience, skills, and confidence grads need before they start their first major job search.
 Getting from College to Career
LAUREN SMITH: What inspired you to write Getting From College to Career – your own experiences, the experiences of others, or a little of both?
Lindsey Pollak:
Getting From College to Career is the book I wish I’d had when I was in college. It’s the book I wish my younger brother and sister had. It’s a collection of all of the tips, ideas, advice, secrets, strategies and warnings that I didn’t even know I didn’t know.
It has also launched a dream career for me—working as an author and speaker helping college students and young professionals. My senior year of college I was a freshman counselor (resident advisor), living with and advising a group of freshman students. To this day it was my favorite job I’ve ever had—and this book provided the opportunity to continue this work. As a counselor I learned that helping students build confidence and a sense of themselves is just as important as teaching them specific skills. That’s the attitude I brought to writing Getting From College to Career—compassion for this very challenging and scary time of life, and a desire to help each student/reader find his or her own path and not fixate on what a recent graduate “should” do. I think of the book’s readers as extensions of the freshmen I counseled in college. My goal was to be a big sister to the reader—young enough to relate to their time of life and old enough to have some wisdom and perspective to share.
LAUREN SMITH: Do you think today’s college graduates face bigger challenges than ever before; if so why and what are those challenges?
Lindsey Pollak:
In many ways, yes. Demographically, there are simply more young people today, who are more educated and who more aware of available opportunities and global competition because of the Internet. Millennials are building careers in a time of tremendous competition, but also unprecedented global opportunity. I think it’s incredibly exciting!
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 30 April 2008 )
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Saturday, 26 April 2008 |
Review By Stuart Nachbar
I used to be an urban planner and I worked in and followed big-city politics in New Jersey. I’m one of those people who watched eight seasons of The Sopranos and told friends that there were some scenes that were not too far from real life in urban North Jersey.
 Landmark Status
Rolnick’s main character, Benji Bluestone, is the type of lawyer I might have become had I gone to law school instead of becoming a planner. He’s reasonably sane, knows his work and loves sporty cars, but he’s not interested in the big money or the big deals. Benji is the son of a lawyer who founded the leading real estate law firm in Miami. He prefers to be his own man, but wants his father’s respect.
Benji’s the most believable character in Landmark, but Delia Torres, who becomes his love interest, is less credible. Maybe it’s me, coming from Jersey, but a Princeton grad returning to Miami to become an exercise instructor, then later a real estate broker, seemed too far flung. It would have better to characterize her as a former Florida Gator cheerleader with a 4.0. It would have also been more consistent with the story. Miami fans hate the Gators and it would better explain how Delia could kick “admirers” in the cojones and walk away with a smile. But I’ll drop a hint about the ending: it’s Delia who conceives the brilliant business solution to save the day. |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 26 April 2008 )
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