Basketball God

I love playing and watching basketball, and I also love reading about players and coaches as well. I have just finished Robert Cherry's Wilt. Larger Than Life and I must say it was a great read.

It is always hard to say who the greatest basketballer was, or is, different eras played in different ways, and it is more than just comparing statistics and championships. But some players are always going to stand out, Jerry West, Michael Jordan, Elgin Baylor, Bill Russell, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Oscar Robinson and the list goes on. One name who would be near the top of most lists is Wilt Chamberlain.

Cherry's book does a great job of exploring this complex individual, while also highlighting the amazing things he could do on a basketball court. Some of the records he holds will never be broken, and it is rare to find someone of his height 7'1" who was so athletic.

Some of his stats:

Career average of 30.1 points per game (equal first)

Career average of 22.9 rebounds per game (first)

Career average of 45.8 minutes per game (first)

Only player to score 100 points in a game

Only player to grab 55 rebounds in a game

Only centre to lead the league in assists

4 time league MVP

Won Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same year ('59-'60)

A book for all fans of the game.

A bit of history

If you're a fan of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels then Mark Urban's Rifles is for you. Instead of being fiction, Urban follows the 95th through six years of war, and puts you in the shoes of these legendary fighters.

The book mainly focuses on the campaign in Spain, and finishes with the battle of Waterloo. Using the letters, diaries and other writings of the soldiers themselves, Urban does a good job of showing the reader what it would have been like to fight with these men. The book also shows just how hard life in the ranks was, were casual brutality and a lack of proper provisions was the least of your worries.

Well worth picking up if you are interested in the Napoleonic Wars or want to know more about the inspiration for Sharpe.

Right Man for the Job

Garth Ennis's run on The Punisher is a great read and adds an extra element to this often one-dimensional character. Instead of confining Frank Castle to the USA, and especially New York, Ennis has him in Russia, Afghanistan and other places, as Frank's war on crime comes to include international criminals.

Ennis has an eye for tough guy characters, and is suited to writing the story of this iconic character. Sure the violence is over the top, as Castle blasts his way through masses of bad guys, and how many times can he be wounded and get up and continue the fight. But the story flows, and adding the international angle with the expected amounts of politics, dirty deals and corrupt individuals helps to show Frank's moral core, and unwavering belief in what he is doing is right.

Look for the trade paperbacks as each one collects a storyline and break the run up into chapters.

Also Ennis's version of Fury is a lot of fun as he is in pure bad-ass mode.

For the love of books ...

Sometimes libraries surprise you with the books you can borrow from them. I put a hold on Twenty Years After by Dumas and waited for the only copy in our extended service to show up. And what a beauty it turned out to be.
The book was catalogued by the owning library in 1924 and is a beautiful leather bound edition which is slowly falling apart but still retains enough charm to make you want to just hold it. Yes the binding is going, and the pages starting to fall out, but this is a book built to last. I doubt many paperbacks will still be gracing our shelves in 80 years time.
Reading it is a pleasure as you turn the whisper thin pages, and peer at the small type.
I am enjoying reading this immensely and the age of the book is adding to the enjoyment as well.

More Fantasy

My recent spate of reading fantasy novels continues as I have just finished another great read in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Empire in Black and Gold. This novel, first in a trilogy, expertly sets out the intriguing world that these books are set in.

The Lowlands are home to many kinden, humans who share characteristics with different types of insects. There are beetle-kinden who are short and stout and are inventors, mantis-kinden who are excellent duellists and fighters, ant-kinden who are great soldiers due to there hive-mind, spider-kinden who are able to climb any surface and so on. And then we have the wasp-kinden who are the empire mentioned in the title. Their special ability is that they can create a 'sting' to attack their enemies as well as all wasp-kinden being warriors who use slaves to make their society function.

As the wasp empire begins to encroach on the Lowlands one beetle-kinden, Stenwold, has for years been warning about this coming threat but no one has paid him any mind. Therefore he must send off a small group of operatives to try and protect the world from the growing darkness.

This inventive premise is wonderfully used by Tchaikovsky to tell a great story that will leave you hanging out for the next book, Dragonfly Falling.