RaveAir Mail[Beller] evokes the hold basketball has on roundball obsessives with the kind of affection, enthusiasm, and inside knowledge that gym rats of all ages should find impossible to resist ... The book is a many-angled collection, and fans of the N.B.A. and big-time college programs will find much of interest in its pages ... Lost in the Game amounts to a kind of poem, as Tom writes, to \'basketball’s mystical, spiritual allure—basketball as a drug, as a safe space, as a unique experience of time.\'
Saul Friedländer
PositiveBookforumFriedländer reads In Search of Lost Time very much against the grain, alert not only to the pleasures of its prose and its psychological acuities and metaphysical masteries, but even more so to its many contradictions and moral ambiguities ... Friedländer, it must be said, is not a natural literary critic. His praise for the excellences of In Search of Lost Time are dutifully delivered but feel rote and under-felt in comparison to his reservations. Many of his sentences in Proustian Uncertainties are ungainly, in contrast with the elegant directness of When Memory Comes (first written in French and beautifully translated by Helen R. Lane). The historian in him is at the wheel ... It is finally quite clear that this author has a lover’s quarrel with Proust and his masterpiece, and that the relationship has almost descended in his last rereadings into the kind of bickering to be observed in certain long-tethered couples. But displeasure and disapproval can be stronger signs of love than swoony approbation, and Proust’s novel not only can survive such astringent examination, it relieves the reader of the often annoying burden of prescribed admiration that is expected in the reading of a classic.
