Tag Archives: Friday Reads

The premise of Ted Lasso certainly didn’t sound like a formula for award-winning television: Take a goofy character from an old TV ad and build an entire show around him; make it about soccer, a sport most Americans don’t care about; and fill it with a bunch of actors nobody knows. Then stick it on a subscription service that was less than a year old, with few subscribers, from a company known mostly for smartphones, watches, and laptops. Give it a title that makes it sound like it’s about a rodeo clown.

I was repeatedly encouraged to watch Ted Lasso and was too stubborn because it airs on one of the many streaming services I didn’t already subscribe to. (I am a subscriber now.) When there was a free AppleTV+ weekend last January I finally took the leap and binged all 3 seasons in just a few days. Ted Lasso now sits alongside my collection of cherished television shows because I purchased the DVDs so I could make my non-subscribing AppleTV+ neighbors watch. After I finished, I craved more: extra features, production notes, interviews, gag reels, etc. No joy on the DVDs. The same person who said I’d love the show told me about this book. Since The Richmond Way by Trent Crimm, is completely fiction, it will have to suffice.

The book is constructed like a game. It begins with warm-ups that introduce the show’s genesis and purpose. The casting choices, the location selection, character developments, and just exactly how Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), felt about eating all those biscuits Ted gave her every day. The answer? Not great until the recipe changed. One of the cast favorites, Roy Kent, is based on former Manchester United captain Roy Keane and is portrayed brilliantly by Brett Goldstein. Watching Roy progress from monosyllabic grunts and a singular repeated expletive to something beyond is damn near miraculous. The First Half and the Second Half of the book include chapters that focus on a key episode. There are discussions similar to a commentary on a movie with multiple people talking about how scenes were constructed, changed, and final decisions were made. The chapters end with answers to the questions: Who Won the Episode, Best Save, Best Assist, Best Line, and Random Stats. The Random Stats are chock full of callbacks and information we would never have known. An example, and not a spoiler, is a scene where bar owner Mae straightens a small portrait of Geronimo and this is revealed to be a tribute to Sam Malone and Coach in the Cheers series finale.

An integral part of the show is the music and the book provided excellent behind the scene stories. A eulogy sung to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up was even more poignant knowing there was a parallel real life loss with the character. The Rolling Stones approved She’s a Rainbow until the footage it accompanied was altered. When they had to approve it again? The Stones said no more changes. It’s good to have folks with a big checkbook when you’re trying to get the rights to use the iconic Disney song Let It Go for a karaoke scene. Father and Son (Cat Stevens/Yussif Islam) accompanying the season finale and the team performing So Long Farewell from The Sound of Music? Both bullseyes.  There are Ted Lasso playlists on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.  I’ve watched the entire series twice and am anticipating the fourth season. It will be good to return to Richmond Green although we’re hearing they are filming in Kansas City, home of Ted Lasso/Jason Sudeikis.

Egner, Jeremy. Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso, the Show That Kicked Its Way into Our Hearts. Dutton, 2024.

Michael Lewis is a master researcher, writer, and storyteller. Best known as a financial journalist, Lewis takes a different approach with Who Is Government?, departing from his earlier notable books and writings – The Big Short, Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, among others. Who Is Government? offers a focus on the public sector, highlighting the people who work within federal agencies.

Lewis didn’t go it alone in writing Who Is Government. He sought several of his favorite writers to collaborate in researching and writing stories for an in-depth series published by The Washington Post. Together, the Lewis team sought to find and profile exceptional examples of public service far outside the spotlight of day-to-day actions of public agencies. In Lewis’s words:

“The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.”

Six authors joined Lewis in contributing essays: Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell. Different authors and different stories, each with a unique story and perspective, but with a consistent format and style. In the audiobook version, the authors also serve as narrators, making it interesting to hear their stories in their own voices.

One example – Most Americans, myself included, know little about national cemeteries. Casey Cep, a staff writer for The New Yorker, profiled Ronald Walters, the principal deputy undersecretary for memorial affairs at the National Cemetery Administration. Cep observed that Walters is “one of the most effective people in the country.” He is responsible for overseeing 156 national cemeteries. Under his leadership, the cemetery administration has achieved a 97 percent rating on the Customer Satisfaction Index.

Another example – Lewis writes about Chris Mark, a former coal miner and engineer who, while at the Department of Labor, developed industry-wide standards to prevent roof collapses in underground mines. His painstaking and dedicated work has saved thousands of lives.

A personal favorite of mine is historian Sarah Vowell’s essay about the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and its Chief Innovation Officer Pamela Wright. NARA is a national treasure serving as the nation’s record keeper. Vowell writes about her own experiences in relating the historical documents available through NARA with discovering her own family history. I especially appreciated learning about History Hub from Vowell’s NARA essay.

Who Is Government doesn’t need to be read beginning to end, excepting from the introduction. Pick a story and go with it. It is a remarkable compilation of stories about exceptional people who provide outstanding service for public benefit.

Lewis, Michael (ed.) Who Is Government? Riverhead Books. 2025.

Did you know that kaiju are an endangered species? Just like pandas? It’s true! Well, in another dimension, not in our own, but they still need our help to ensure their protection and survival.

Enter ‘The Kaiju Preservation Society’, aka KPS.

Jamie Gray has just started working at a new food delivery company in New York City, but is demoted to delivery when the COVID-19 pandemic hits in early 2020. They end up making multiple deliveries to a former acquaintance, Tom Stevens, who offers them a job ‘lifting things’ with an animal rights organization, KPS. All Jamie is told is that they work with ‘large animals’ and the salary and benefits are too good to say no. So, Jamie and Tom head off first to Greenland, and then on to where KPS does their real work, an alternate dimension where life has evolved differently, and giant kaiju roam the world.

But, if they are in a different dimension, away from our own, why do we need a Kaiju ‘Preservation’ Society? Well, naturally, other nefarious folks (government types and shady billionaires) have also found there way there, and they don’t have the kaiju’s best interests at heart. Even though they were only hired to ‘lift things’, Jaime’s resourcefulness and previous education is just what might be needed to help save our world and the kaiju’s world.

John Scalzi is one of my favorite writers. As usual, his writing is fun and the science is easy to understand. This is truly escapist science fiction at its best. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, which was something Scalzi, and all of us, needed when it was written during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2021. It does take place at the same exact time, there are references to it. But, as most of the novel takes place in the alternate dimension, we and the characters are lucky in that we don’t have to deal very much with that trauma.

My favorite true-crime stories are the ones I consider “niche” crimes.

Tree crime. Book crime. Mushroom crime. Dinosaurs! Fish! Birds!

By my standards, in order be considered a “niche” crime, a true-crime account must meet the following criteria:

1. It must, first and foremost, be niche. It must be a small, specialized crime. It cannot be ordinary. Most of us will never be in a position where we can steal moon rocks.
2. Very few — if any — people should be hurt; although murder is not an immediate disqualifier. However, I’m not interested in sensationalized and exploitative details of tragedies. If we are drawn to tales of crime for the same reason we crane our necks as we drive past an accident, then niche crime must resemble the collision between a clown car and a hijacked Oscar Meyer weinermobile.

The Feather Thief is, in my opinion, the crème de la crème of niche crime. I first read it about 8 years ago and I have never been able to stop thinking about it.

The crime? A theft. The location? The British Museum of Natural History. The culprit? A twenty-year old American flute-prodigy named Edwin. And what he stole — hundreds of irreplaceable, priceless bird skins — is as interesting as his motivation for stealing them, and as interesting as the confluence of man’s limitless capacity for obsession and nature’s finiteness.

Kirk Wallace Johnson is our intrepid journalist/historian/detective. He begins his saga in a river, fly-fishing. This origin is important. Edwin’s motivation for the heist? His obsession with fly-tying.

Wallace Johnson not only explores the details of the crime and its perpetrator; he also delves into the history of the feather-obsessed (“feather fever,” as he calls it). Somewhat reminiscent of the “tulip mania” of 17th century Netherlands, the 19th and early 20th century decimated exotic bird populations in pursuit of status. The more feathers/literal bird corpses affixed to your garments, the more wealth it signified — after all, rare birds had to be sought out from distant, difficult-to-reach islands and rain-forests. While women wore hats bearing plumes of feathers or one — or more! — stuffed birds, men competed to tie more and more elaborate flies with increasingly exotic materials. Public outcry eventually led to the disfavoring of real feathers in fashion, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act helped to cut off the fly-tiers’ supply.

So, if you are absolutely obsessed with fly-tying — particularly recreating the ties of the Victorian era — but those birds are either extinct or illegal to have in whole or in part…what do you do?

You could use synthetic materials to mimic the classic ties. After all, the fish don’t care. But this isn’t about the fish, of course — Edwin never waded into a river — it’s about status.

So, you go where the feathers are already neatly collected and preserved…

And since the British Natural History Museum isn’t just going to hand over specimens so that you can destroy them…

Well, that’s when you become The Feather Thief.

Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. Penguin Books, 2019.

I went on a ghost tour in Seattle several years ago. We walked down a steep set of stairs and explored the damp underground. Every nook and cranny had a dark story of fire, greed, insanity, and murder most foul. The guide was good enough to make us all jump at shadows.

As our little group walked back into the light I considered how each person’s life could change in an instant. The gift shop was an oddly bright place to sell murder and chaos. The tent city across the street seemed to fit the theme better, so I found myself staring out the window at rows and rows of tents. In my mind, each tent was another dark story.

Over the years, I saw more massive tent cities across the nation. I wondered about the real stories behind all those tents, then I stumbled upon Brian Goldstone’s There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America in a free book talk webinar through The Aspen Institute. He spoke with passion and conviction, dispelling the myth that homeless people are all mentally unstable or unwilling to work. There’s more to the story.

Turns out, a good number of people are working full time but still can’t afford rent. Some lost their homes due to unexpected fire or natural disaster and weren’t able to find new housing in their budget. Goldstone humanizes the homeless crisis through real stories of people who landed in tents or cars after unexpected events. Each story represents a significant portion of the population.

In many cases, insanity doesn’t lead to homelessness, but homelessness can drive people insane. People are working full-time and striving towards work that pays a living wage, but are caught in a loop of trying to afford the schooling to build new skills while paying for rising childcare costs and trying to find an address to put on forms.

When cities make it illegal to live in your car and homeless shelters run out of beds, you get tents. The real story is that people are just trying to survive in a broken world. Life on the streets is hard, but people don’t want to become just another ghost on a tour of the city. All people should have the opportunity to survive and thrive.

Read this book if you ever walked past a homeless person and wondered about their story, but were too afraid to ask. You’ll never look at a tent the same way again.

Cinder is the first book in Marissa Meyer’s young adult fantasy/science-fiction series, “The Lunar Chronicles” (and is her debut novel). This series follows classic fairy tale characters as they’re rewritten into Earth’s only hope for survival against powerful villains from a lunar colony.

Among the crowded streets of New Beijing, humans are battling a increasingly deadly virus outbreak. Cinder works as a skilled mechanic with her best robot friend, hiding the fact she’s a cyborg. As a cyborg, she could be “traded in” to be a research subject at any time by her stepmother, who threatens her so daily.

Cinder is approached by Prince Kai one day to fix his android, leading to a royal invitation (of course). Between the Prince, her beloved sister’s illness, and past secrets, she quickly finds herself in the center of an intergalactic struggle – complete with an evil Queen.

Meyer, M. Cinder. Square Fish. 2012.

The series continues with Scarlet – a spaceship pilot searching for her grandmother, Cress – an imprisoned computer hacker, and Winter – a kind and beloved Lunar princess. As the plague mutates, dangers grow, and the Queen continues to gain power, all four must team up to fight evil and save the world.

The New Yorker magazine celebrates its 100^th anniversary this year. At Wit’s End is perfectly timed to showcase cartoonists and cartoons that have been a consistent part of the magazine since its inception. Wit’s End is a truly fun book and one that diverts from books many of us typically read. The New Yorker has provided readers with hundreds of thousands of cartoons from over 700 cartoonists that delight, capture, and depict the happenings of the time. Whether pop culture, politics, or other, The New Yorker cartoonists drill into topics of the day with skilled artwork and clever captions. With or without captions, cartoonists tell stories within the art of a single-frame cartoon.

It might be that I’ve been a decades long subscriber to The New Yorker magazine for its cartoons and covers. And that may be why I had to get a copy of At Wit’s End after reading a review. Every once in a while, it is fun to spend time with a book that amuses and fascinates. I found that in this book.

In At Wit’s End, Michael Maslin, a cartoonist himself, profiles 50 some of The New Yorker cartoonists selected from the hundreds whose cartoons have been published in the magazine over the past century. Some of the cartoonists have been contributors over many decades and some are newer and more recent magazine cartoon contributors. Ed Koren, for one, is among just a couple of dozen who have sold more than two thousand drawings. A typical reader likely knows little about the cartoonist but will readily recognize their style. That’s why it is a joy to learn about the cartoonist behind the cartoon aptly profiled by Maslin. The cartoonists are uniquely creative with atypical personalities, even eccentric perhaps.

The cartoonist profiles are complemented with Alen MacWeeney’s photographs and a sampling of single-panel cartoons depicting the cartoonist’s style.  The New Yorker readers no doubt have their favorite cartoonists. Mine include George Booth, Charles Addams, William Steig, David Sipress, James Thurber, and Robert Mankoff (The New Yorker cartoon editor for over two decades), and there are many more. For the record, mentionable are a couple of well-known cartoon captions – Peter Steiner’s “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” and Bob Mankoff’s “No, Thursday’s out. How about never – is never good for you?”

From 1997-2012 The New Yorker published an annual Cartoon issue. The magazine’s Cartoon Caption Contest began in the 1998 Cartoon issue and has continued as a weekly feature since 2005. The feature, near the back pages of the issue, includes the new contest cartoon, three finalists, and the winning caption.

Cartoonist Michael Maslin is a notable writer as well and whose Ink Spill Blog is “The go-to chronicle of all things New Yorker cartoon.” Photographer Alen MacWeeney is an internationally celebrated photographer whose photographs accompany cartoonist profiles in At Wit’s End.

MacWeeney, Alen, and Maslin, Michael, Alen. At Wit’s End: Cartoonists of The New Yorker. Clarkson Potter, 2024.

When Ann Mah moved to Paris in 2008, she envisioned three glorious years of exploring the French cuisine. Living in Paris was a dream come true for Ann, a freelance food writer, and she had always imagined exploring it with her “favorite person,” her husband. The couple was accustomed to moving frequently, but after only a month in Paris, her husband, a foreign diplomat, was called to serve in Baghdad for a year. Ann is suddenly forced to change her expectations and explore France on her own.

Mastering the Art of French Eating: From Paris Bistros to Farmhouse Kitchens, Lessons in Food and Love focuses on Ann Mah’s first year in Paris. Each chapter is devoted to a different French dish like steak frites, crepes, soupe au pistou, and cassoulet. She also explores the history of each dish and connects with those who make them today. Recipes are included if you want to make them at home.

Her need for crepes reminded me of my Chinese mother, who can’t go more than a day without a bowl of rice, or my Italian friend Gianfranco, who requires regular infusions of pasta, or even Didier, who once told me that he missed cheese so much on a trip to South Africa that he ate an entire wheel of Camembert on the airplane home. Crepes, I realized, were a Breton’s comfort food.

The strengths of this memoir are in the exploration of French cuisine and its history, but it is also about navigating loneliness and independence, and exploring identity. Although Ann has a lot of experience traveling and living abroad, she is not comfortable doing those things alone. Her experience has always been with a parent or partner. At times I wanted to reach into the book and shake her as she wastes a lot of time wallowing in loneliness. She struggles to find her own joy, but by connecting with others, she also learns about herself.

How does a cross-cultural seesaw affect a person’s identity? Perhaps if I learned more about Alsace and its cuisine, I could better understand what might happen to me, an American of Chinese ethnicity who changed countries every three to four years.

If you want to explore more of Ann Mah’s writing, you can also check out two of her novels inspired by France in Nebraska Overdrive.

Mah, Ann. Mastering the Art of French Eating: From Paris Bistros to Farmhouse Kitchens, Lessons in Food and Love. Penguin Books, 2013.