Kevin Baker

A Manual of Acupuncture

5 stars (Ginormous) - This tome is huge and full of great info for the practicing acupunturist and layman alike. Being the latter its size is a bit intimidating but well worth the money and time to read through. I also purchased the excellent flash cards by the same publisher. 5 stars (My fave acupuncture book, one of my favorite Paperweights) - Really a phenomenal book- the best, most complete, and authoritative book on acupuncture for students and practitioners. If you're a regular person, though, don't expect to be able to use this info - it's for professionals. My favorite things about it are the anatomical point location drawings, and the references to Chinese classic acupuncture texts. Since not all of these texts have been translated into English, this is a treasure. Besides that, it has other uses: My desk from IKEA isn't too sturdy. The place you put the keyboard has a pad for the butt of your palms (ergonomic, but not really), but that part is attached by hinges (because it's so important to hide the keyboard when you're not using it) and I put a lot of weight there, and today the second of its three hinges broke. It just hung there looking stupid. It seemed to be saying, "See, wasn't it worth it to spend three hours lost in IKEA wandering around looking for the checkout, grunting me into the car, putting me together, then dissembling me and moving me across town to your new house, and reassembling me?" My wife and I determined that screwing door jam deadbolt lock hole covers across the space would be the ideal engineering solution. But to drill into it, I needed a solid surface beneath it. I placed atop my chair seat a hefty trinity of Harrison's, A Manual of Acupuncture , and A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine, plus the more slim Dao of Chinese Medicine to create a firm work table. With the help of those books and their authors, I was able to fix my desk, and now I obviously am able to work again. In fact, I spent more time writing this ...
Journal of Chinese Medicine :: Medicine :: Chinese :: Alternative Medicine :: Acupuncture points :: Medical & Alternative Medicine :: Medical :: Acupuncture :: Mazin Al-Khafaji :: Kevin Baker :: Pete :: A Manual of Acupuncture

The Natural

5 stars (The Game Beyond the Game) - I just re-read Malmud's truly great first novel, The Natural . I had first read it over 20 years ago. It was more moving to me now -- having experienced both success and failure in my life. It is a book about baseball and it captures the best elements of the game (I grew up loving and playing baseball both in NY and Denver) and Mickey Mantle was my boyhood hero, much like Superman -- the comic book hero. Compulsive baseball statiticians with no real appreciation of genuinely fine literature may grow impatient with some seeming discrepencies. However, the larger picture is that through poetic metaphor and very real tough dialogue Malamud captures the glory and the anguish of the elusive American dream. 2 stars (The Movie may be corny, but it's better than this) - I knew before beginning that Malamud's book was substantially different from the great film made from it. Specifically, I was aware that at the end Roy Hobbs would strike out instead of hitting that mammouth home run to win the pennant. I was, however, prepared to read the book, which I fully expected to enjoy. I was wrong. For one thing, and this I think should be obvious to any baseball fan of merit, it seems as though Mr.Malamud has decided to use flowery prose about mountains, women, and railroads to cover up a distinct lack of knowledge regarding the sport of baseball. At one point he refers to Pop Fisher having played for the Sox in the World Series "about forty years ago. It was the first series they'd been in in twenty years. Even if the book took place in 1952, the year it was published, that series sixty years ago would have been in 1892, eleven years before the first World Series. Another World Series is described as having pitted the Sox against the A's, when both of those teams were in the American League! There is much more to find disagreeable in this book, such as the illogicality of the plot. We go right from Hobbs being shot to 15 years la...
Farrar- Straus and Giroux :: Fiction & Literary :: Literature- Classics :: Literary :: Fiction - General :: Fiction :: Baseball stories :: Baseball players :: Baseball - General :: Kevin Baker :: B :: The Natural