As I approach my 500th book review on Goodreads it strikes me how rare a “five-star” book really is. Goodreads.com is a nice place to find a new book and I especially like it because it allows me to create a digital archive, an online library of all the books I’ve read. This site lets you rate books on a scale of one-to-five stars. If a book only rates one or two stars then it’s crap and, well, it means you’re shitty at picking out books. I’ve never rated a book as “one star,” but, alas, I’ve stumbled and had to endure a couple of “two stars.” It turns out that most of the books I read, in the final evaluation, rate three or four stars. A “three-star” book, in my estimation, is a solid read but just not as compelling as I’d hope; a “four-star” book is a damn fine book just short of greatness.

Then there’s the rare air of a “five-star” book, delicious and satisfying in every way. I read seven such books in 2017.

Maybe you’ll find them a treasure as well. May your 2018 be especially well read.

Electric October: Seven World Series Games, Six Lives, Five Minutes of Fame That Lasted Forever, by Kevin Cook
The book is about the 1947 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers, told through the eyes and action of six obscure players and managers. It’s a joy, an old-school story told with style and compassion, about guys with names like “Snuffy” and “Cookie” and “Bucky.” Sports, and especially baseball, are enriching in so many ways, and baseball’s traditions link us in a unique way to the history of our nation and to the simpler days of Cracker Jack and the 7th inning stretch and afternoons spent around the radio or at the ballpark. This book is a celebration of baseball and America as seen through seen through a unique prism. Marvelous.

American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West, by Nate Blakeslee
The wolf is hunted to near-extinction in America and then reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the early 1990s. Those wolves were brought down from Canada and their every move is watched and monitored in minute detail. The main drama involves a female wolf know as O-Six. A gripping account right from the start. The author turns the act of wolves walking around a park into a personal journey where we root for the wolves, get bummed about their plight, become emotional about what happens to them and get pissed that instead of compassionate stewardship of the living things around us, everything turns into a political shitshow. Compelling non-fiction, well played Nate, thanks for introducing us to O-Six.

The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Cary Cooper, and the Making of a  Classic, by Richard Sandomir
This is a sentimental journey and a wonderful reminder of a great movie, a transcendent ballplayer and a courageous gentleman at a time, before the end of the innocence, when baseball and Country were sacred and a man and a woman could fall in love to a song like “Always.”

The Jersey Brothers: A Missing Naval Officer in the Pacific and His Family Quest to Bring Him Home, by Sally Mott Freeman
A tale of three brothers from a well-off New Jersey family (relatives of the author). They all fight in WWII, in very prominent and interesting ways, and one goes missing in the Philippines. Sally has an amazing family and wrote an amazing book, packed with meticulous research, natural suspense and the bravery, honor and achievement of her father and uncles … America is shaped, our enduring courage and principles cast, in the people and events depicted so skillfully in this book.

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, by Michael Finkel
A recent high school graduate walks out of his house, parks his car by the side of the road and disappears into the New England woods … and lives there undetected for almost thirty years. A fascinating story simply told, at a time when nonfiction so often gets caught up in nuance and minutia. We don’t have to judge this right or wrong, hermit or freak. That there are life forms among us that long for something other than the noise of society, who want a solitary journey, is not controversial. The world and its inhabitants are fragile, this fragility drives some to the woods and others to Disneyland

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, but I just got around to it. ‘Twas maybe fifty pages in when I decided to throw the book down, too much sorrow, too much disgusting poverty, too depressed to continue, yet with one last page turn Mr. McCourt began to go on about the “state of grace,” about the takin’ of god on the tongue and then spitting him back up in his granmother’s yard, about the “excitement” and the “first pint” and the asking of silly questions in the confessional and “writin’ the mean letters” and it was soon that I gave not a fiddler’s fart about the poor state of affairs in Limerick, only about the next page in Mr. McCourt’s book … ‘Tis a fine book.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson
In the early twentieth century, black Americans had had enough and started fleeing the American south in great numbers – this is that epic, dramatic story. Gripping, beautifully and lovingly written. Great determination, great achievement and great sadness at the reality (that the book drives home) that racism isn’t a Southern or regional phenomenon, rather it is an individual occurrence that easily jumps from place to place, generation to generation from the souls of haters who learned bigotry from their ancestors. Still, this book nor the people it describes can be kept down. “I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life … The wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.” – James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son.