New Book: The Beatles by Bob Spitz

Just before the holidays, I finished reading Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever by Jack McCallum. For anyone who likes basketball or remembers the Dream Team, it's a great book.  The author is a longtime Sports Illustrated writer and was in Barcelona covering the Dream Team during the '92 Olympics.  He hung around with the team while he was there, and he also covered the practices and pre-Olympic tournaments, so he has some pretty good first-hand insight about the team.  He also interviewed each Dream Team member in 2011 while he was writing the book and had a chapter on each of those meetings.  I enjoyed that the book didn't pull any punches.  It was laudatory, but it's hard not to be when your subject is the greatest sports team ever assembled.  At the same time, it dealt with why Isiah Thomas was not invited to be on the team (Jordan wasn't the only one who influenced the decision) and other hot-button issues, like playing against a guy with HIV and a bunch of non-Reebok-endorsed stars being forced to wear Reebok-made Team USA garb.  All in all, it was a solid book.

Now it's on to something I should have done a long time ago:  read The Beatles by Bob Spitz.  I've have the hardcover for several years.  It's a mammoth book, coming in at just under a thousand pages and weighing three pounds.  Thus, it will be a bitch to read on the train, and it will probably take me until June to finish it, but it is supposedly the definitive biography on the greatest rock and roll band of all-time.

Books read in 2012:
No Regrets by Ace Frehley
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
God, If You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked by Darrell Hammond
The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman
The Last Testament: A Memoir by God by David Javerbaum
Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever by Jack McCallum