Christopher Caldwell

Products they talk about

• Ball Four👍 Recommends

  …book recommendations including sports writing and baseball memoir

  “And then, I guess, if I could recommend a baseball book, a book that really sort of changed the way I, I don't know, look at both sports and writing, is Ball Four by Jim Boughton. I don't know if you know that book. I don't. Jim Boughton was a 20-game winner with the Yankees in the early 60s, and he, and he had two great years, went to the World Series, blew his arm out, and, um, six years later, he fought and tried to make a comeback. He taught himself the knuckleball, and he came back with an expansion team, the Seattle Pilots, which are now the Milwaukee Brewers, and he kept a diary, and he was a very, very weird guy and kind of an intellectual and an, an opponent to the Vietnam War, and he sort of wrote about the drugs that the players were taking.”

  on The Ezra Klein Show

• Common Ground👍 Recommends

  …book recommendations on politics and american political history

  “Since we're talking about politics, I think if you asked me to name the best political book, it would probably be J. Anthony Lucas's Common Ground, which is a book about busing in Boston, and, which is kind of the first political event that I have any memory of from being a child.”

  on The Ezra Klein Show

• The Gulag Archipelago👍 Recommends

  …final book recommendations for listeners on political philosophy and historical understanding

  “I think everyone should read The Gulag Archipelago. I think that that is such a wonderful book. I, and this is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It's a, it's a story of his time in the, you know, a Soviet prison camp, but it's so much more than that. It's three volumes. It's got a history of Russia. It's got a history of the Soviet Union. It's got poetry. It's, it's really a very capacious book in the way that, say, Boswell's life of Johnson is.”

  on The Ezra Klein Show