Reviews and Comments

I liked it. I really appreciate Lacrosse and it really was Major Leauge Lacrosse that got me most interested and I have found the most enjoyable version of the sport I've seen. This book is a short tale about how the Body-by-Jake-Guy started the league after reading a magazine article about Dave Marrow's lacrosse company Warrior in Spin magazine and finding his number and calling him, something Jake calls "dialing for dollars" to ask if there was a pro lacrosse league and when told know he responded WELL THERE IS NOW and took off on this new venture. Jake then goes on to tell us how it all happened and all of the characters he met along the way. Jake seems to be a true entrepreneur to the point that he named names of everyone who helped along the way and uses nicknames describe all the people who were hindrances so as to preserve the anonymity and avoid burning bridges. One example being "The Mad Man" a fat real estate investor from New York with kankles and felt everyone owed him everything and in a really weird way. I have hunch that might have been Donald Trump, if it was I'm somewhat surprised he already thought he was part of the police force in 2000.

Last year I finished up A life in Sports a biography of Lamar Hunt focuses primarily on his part in forming the American Football League, while also touching on forming MLS and professionalizing tennis. I was hoping to have more of that here. While I was somewhat surprised that Mr. Hunt makes an appearance here and has a small role in helping Major League Lacrosse start out the authorship leaves some lacking.

Clearly Mr. Steinfeld has written business books before and this frequently turns into one with the "no matter how many times you hear know you just have to keep asking people until someone says yes" kind of boring derivative nonsense. He also thinks awfully lot of himself, example of him saying that he always thinks about his family first, when three quarters of the way through the book he didn't even mention he had a family.

At times I felt like Jake had some sort of minimum page limit to reach with his publishers. In particular usually when two authors write one book sometimes, I'll see one author with one chapter and another with the other, or more often you can't easily tell which part each author wrote as it comes across as a single prose. However, in Take a Shot! every part that Dave Morrow wrote is included as a long quote, often pages at a time with paragraphs intended on both sides and everything.

While Take a Shot! was written in 2012, after the 10th anniversary of the league with smiles on everyone's face that MLL would be around for years to come, in hind site we know better. Since the authorship of this book MLL was downgraded from a professional to a semi-professional league and later merged with the Premier Lacrosse League (PLL) that has a business model more similar to what Jake and Dave ran as the MLL's "Summer Showcase" than the regular league that followed. Also interesting the last team they got to join the first season, the Boston Canons, because Jake didn't have high faith in them, is the only team that still exists in the PLL.

If you are interested in professional lacrosse its worth the read, as for the ins and outs of starting a professional sprots league A life in Sport is better, and there are tons of better business books.

The first book I purchased from the fabulous AK Press (akpress.org) when I couldn't find a copy at any library in the state. This is the fictional tale of the wobbly way of life in the 1910s on their way to creating a new world inside the shell of the old.

I really wanted to like this book. But it was so out there I couldn't even force myself to pick it up most days. Calling it pseudoscience would be giving it too much credit.

This 1997 release is Keillor's first full-length novel. Earlier books were collections of "New from Lake Wobegon" stories previously told on public radio. I liked Wobegon Boy and following John Tollefson who leaves Lake Wobegon to take a job managing a new public radio station in upstate New York in order to avoid getting married to a high school sweetheart and regular bedmate.

Plenty of dry humor. He is so scared to bring his gf to Lake Wobegon, but the happy ending couldn't have occurred if he never did.

I liked how Keillor used the imagery of Tollefson's history in rural Midwest to introduce new ideas to upstate New York, like a restaurant built all around serving fresh sweetcorn. Never mind that such a thing good never actually survive as anything more than a hobby for a rich man IRL.

The story about Tollefson having to deal with sexual harassment charges in public radio and the college owned station wanting to change from primarily classical music to all talk seems like an unsightly foreshadowing of Keillor's own life when he was called out in the #MeToo movement and his final advice to the public on the matter is to never be friends with any women you work with.

The 2006 Audio book was of high quality with Keillor reading the work himself, as a radio actor would be one to do.

This Audiobook was originally released as a podcast. That means each "episode" ended with a full list of producers, voice actors, directors etc.

A full cast audio production told without a dedicated narrator follows the story of one historian who received permission from the Federation to travel to Ceti Alpha V to find what mire we may know about Khan 25 years after his interaction with Kirk. She boards Sulu's Excelsior and is assisted by an ear young Ensign Tuvok.

She finds all the old tapes made by Lt. McGyvors and we learn more than we every thought possible.

I found the original discovery of the Ceti eel disturbing but I might not have if I hadn't been plagued with nightmares of the earworms after seeing Star Trek II as a kid.

All in all, a fine story, some weird while that I could nitpick about, but you did not miss anything is you didn't hear it.

Another week 'till I get home and this is the only book I have left.

I liked in, In fact I really loved the IDEA of this book. A group of robot duplicates of SG-1 employed by the NID to try to steal technology from worlds the SGC has said can't be done. There are like six different versions of these duplicates each with slightly modified code some work better than others, and one goes completely rouge.

The execution, however, left me wanting. It got really confusing having several characters named "jack O'Neil" they tried to help you tell the difference, like Jackson Alpha, and Dan and one named O'Neil talking to another named Jack, but it wasn't consistent and I frequently forgot where I was, particularly with them switching time lines back and forth, I kept having to go back to the beginning of the chapter to find out where in time and space we were at. At least they had those clues built in. I thought it might make a good movie or T.V. episode, but I'm not sure how they'd do the ending in a way that would be both believable and not vomit inducing. Alas we'll never know.