Now I Can Die in Peace: How ESPN'S Sports Guy Found Salvation and More, Thanks to the World Champion (Twice!) Boston Red Sox Book

It's hard for anyone to write a book about the things they love, I think, and it's especially hard when that love borders on the masochistic and obsessive - what else can you do but vent, gush, and pontificate about the significance of your emotions? About the only way to make such an effort work is to gear it to your fellow sufferers as testament and therapy, which explains why Kahlil Gibran is featured in every crappy wedding vow, why Charles Bukowski has such godlike status in AA, and why fellow Red Sox martyrs aged 28-52 responded so wildly to Now I Can Die In Peace, one of the messiest, nerdiest paeans to undying love that I hope I ever read.

I should preface this review by saying that while I sorta like Bill Simmons, I think he's a sportswriting equivalent of what old baseball writers used to call "press box hot", a phenomenon in which a kinda pretty girl suddenly looks like a top model when set against the heifers in the press box. Compared to most of the windbags, blowhards, and schmaltz merchants who infest contemporary sports journalism, Simmons has the wit of PG Wodehouse and the common sense of Thomas Paine, and considering how much fun sports are to follow he's naturally a favorite of every sports fan with a brain and a sense of humor: after all, he seems to be the only writer with a meaningful platform in the entire industry who comes even close to Getting It, and as such is the incidental champion of millions. At his best -- very infrequent these days -- Simmons is as good as any comic-minded sportswriter, and anybody reading this review who hasn't read his "Atrocious GM Summit" or his "Idiot's Guide to the Isiah Trial" needs to get to Google posthaste.

That said, outside of the world of sports writers, Simmons looks good but not great: though he can be thoughtful and sharp, he's really not a 'writer' per se, but more of a talker whose preferred audience is a word processor screen. He never does much with language itself, and his analysis tends to ramble, contradict itself, and worst of all, detour into all these excruciating lists and scales and arbitrary nerd metrics (The Vengeance Scale, a 50-item Wonderlich test to determine true Red Sox fans, the 18 reasons one can root for a team, etc.) that make this reader crumble in despair. All his faults tend to proliferate when he writes about teams he loves, probably because he can't pause or self-edit -- he thinks he can, but I think his idea of 'editing' is too often polishing up ideas that were misguided to begin with -- which brings me to an unhappy verdict.

This book sucks. It combines the worst features of a diary -- tics and foibles and regrettable displays -- with the glibness of a sports bar argument -- unconnected or unexplained passages, scads of distracting footnotes -- while making virtually no attempt to evoke why anyone would be a baseball fan, just giving a numbing catalog of the minutiae and badinage of those who were born one. Like any diary the book is almost without a narrative, which means that if you don't own DVD's of Sox seasons from 1998-2004, you'll be lost every other page ... and none of this complaining even begins to address Simmons' proclivity for pop culture metaphors, which are lazy and perishable in the first place and crippling for a writer who supposedly has an eye on posterity: half the jokes in here expired the week they were written. Some funny one-liners still sparkle here and there, but ultimately this is as much of an ordeal to read as it must've been to live. The worst thing is that this book didn't have to suck: it's just riddled with straight-up bad writing and self-indulgence. I suppose that for Simmons this book was a personal Zihuantanejo, and I respect that, but for non-Sox freaks it's just that 500-meter tunnel of shit that Andy had to crawl through to get out of his cell. Let this one die in peace, or at least the remainder bin, and let's hope for a lot of improvement in Simmons' forthcoming history of the NBA.