Friday, October 16, 2020
As I've been writing a biography in recent years, I also read a lot of biographies. Many of these are more scholarly or academic-type volumes, but a lot have been trade-press works of varying quality. Especially with regard the latter, I pay particular attention to the writing and what you might call the "storytelling" aspect of the book. I pick biographies mainly based upon how interesting I find the subject, regardless of how closely connected they might be to my interests in the Turkic-Russian borderlands. This year I've read bios of Charles Schultz, Vladimir Mayakovsky, L. Frank Baum, Jim Henson, and Rudolph Nureyev, to name just a few.
For the past couple of weeks I've been reading David Halberstam's book on Michael Jordan, which was first published over 20 years ago. I love Halberstam's writing, and have read probably eight or nine of his books over the years. Breaks of the Game is, of course, a classic, but others like War in a Time of Peace and The Best and the Brightest are also really impressive.
In Playing for Keeps, Halberstam's book on Jordan, I found the organization of the writing--and the chronology of the book--particularly exceptional. It starts in Paris in 1997 and ends in Chicago one year later, but throughout its 32 chapters the book goes backward and forward constantly. Some might complain that Halberstam was "jumping around" too much, but not me. In fact, I'd say that this work was masterfully put together. It's a cliche to refer to a book as a "tapestry," but that's really the effect here. Whereas most biographies plod slowly forward, Playing for Keeps zooms in and out, hitting at different moments of Jordan's life and then circling back in time in a manner that kept me interested. The chronology of the book also had the effect of tying together Jordan's playing career in a much more coherent manner than simply telling the story from beginning to end. I'm not trying to write the kind of book that Halberstam would have written. As an academic and scholar, I've received too much training on specific areas of the world and developments in modern history to do that. Trying to say something bigger and important about an era, as opposed to talking about a single individual in a vacuum--or simply recounting the details of a person's life--will usually slow down a narrative to a certain extent. But still, it's so inspiring to read the books of such a beautiful writer. I actually shed a few tears when I got to the very end of Playing for Keeps this morning.
One last thing--I couldn't help but notice how much the much-ballyhooed 10-part Michael Jordan document released this summer picks up on so many threads from Halberstam's book. I really liked the documentary, and it's one of the reasons why I ended up finally buying this book a few months ago. But still--I kind of think Halberstam should have gotten some credit here. Obviously, if different creative types are working on the same subject, there's bound to be a lot of overlap. But the insights of the documentary--I see a lot of them in Halberstam from more than 20 years back.
David Halberstam died 13 years ago in a traffic accident at the age of 73. He had published 20 books, of which Playing for Keeps was one of his last. What a career that guy had. I wonder if anyone's ever considered writing a biography of him.
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Meanwhile in the Eurasian borderlands, the world continues to turn. Stories from the region which caught my eye this week include: