Ways to die on a mountain: trip on a piece of ice; fall into a crevasse; lose your mind and wander the wrong direction; remain at high elevation for a sustained period of time; fall asleep; also, GET TRAPPED ABOVE AN AVALANCHE. Graham Bowley's No Way Down is blurbed as "an Into Thin Air for a new century," which is marketing whatever, and oversimplification of both works. Into Thin Air is a thrilling reported memoir told by Jon Krakauer after his disastrous Everest expedition. No Way Down is a reported story, borne from an article Bowley wrote in the Times two years ago. Bowley did not [...]

There is now a whole genre of books that chronicle the seasons of specific teams or entire sports. Halberstam set the standard long ago. Feinstein did it with tremendous success. Some people are very good at this. Others, less so. Rafe Bartholomew, as it turns out, has taken the concept—that of unfettered access to a professional franchise—and one-upped his predecessors by performing the duty in a foreign country.

In the early fall of 2008, Will Leitch, a St. Louis Cardinals fan, attended a baseball game at historic Wrigley Field in Chicago. So Leitch–decked out in Cardinals gear–masochistically forced himself to watch his team's hated rival, the hometown Cubs, clinch their second consecutive National League Central Division title in front of their adoring faithful. I do not know why he did this. And then he wrote a whole book about it? That can't be right.