March 2025 media
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The New York Game: A history of baseball and New York City, starting with the sport’s murky origins and ending in 1945, written by Kevin Baker. This was a feel-good pick to get myself in the mood for Opening Day, and it worked—it’s chock full of rollicking old-timey baseball lore, often starring players with improbable names—but its more sober retellings of New York history are worthwhile as well. The concluding “bibliographical essay” suggests that Baker is planning a second volume, which is good news—not just because I enjoyed this first one, but also because its abrupt end comes before so many important New York baseball moments: Robinson breaking the color line, the Dodgers and Giants going west, the ’69 Mets, and so on.
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Thank You Very Much: A documentary about comedian provocateur Andy Kaufman. I enjoyed it, though I would bet its appeal is U-shaped: those who only have a passing familiarity with Kaufman (like me) will learn a lot, and hardcore fans will be attracted by fresh interview segments and never-before-seen archival footage, but folks somewhere in the middle will find it a bit cloying. It also can’t resist attempting to be tidy. Trying to pin down “the real person” with a documentary is fraught in the best of circumstances, but with a personality as diffuse as Kaufman’s it feels like an exercise in futility. (I’m not convinced we can attribute his career to the time when his parents did not explain his grandfather’s death when he was a child, for instance.) But I did still enjoy it!