Such is the Promise, Such is the Curse

On Friday, I mentioned the enshrinement of NY Times columnist David Brooks in the Running Down a Dream author/writer/columnist Hall-of-Fame. At the point when I made that famous declaration, said Hall-of-Fame was an entirely contrived entity, and I guess it still is, but I wanted to run with the idea and commit it to the firmament of the internet. That last clause is probably an oxymoron, but I'm moving ahead regardless.

If I had to construct my version of Canton, Grauman's Chinese Theater, or Cooperstown, it would look something like this:

First-Ballot Members (since Cooperstown had 5 initial members [Mathewson, Ruth, Wagner, Johnson, and Cobb] I'm going with 5 of my own) in no particular order:

David Halberstam

As if it were not enough to have written the definitive book on the Vietnam War (1972's The Best and the Brightest), the Pulitzer Prize-winner also authored one of the best sports books in the last half-century with 1980's The Breaks of the Game.

Over the years, he developed a pattern of alternating a book with a weighty theme with one that might seem of slighter import but to which he nonetheless applied his considerable reportorial muscles. “He was a man who didn’t have a lazy bone in his body,” said the writer Gay Talese, a close family friend. Obituary in the April 24, 2007 edition of the NY Times.

David Brooks

I was introduced to the writing of Brooks through the Op-Ed page of the NY Times, but his best work, at least in my opinion, is found in his two books, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. When viewed as two parts of a larger whole, they represent one of the most accurate pictures of modern America that I have read.

Bill Simmons

Even though his rampant homerism for the Great Satan this year has been a bit too much to handle, the Sports Guy still holds down a spot in the Pantheon (I know, I'm mixing my metaphors), due to the fact that he has introduced me to The Ewing Theory, the Manning Face, the Levels of Losing, the Tyson Zone, and "Yup, these are my readers." His first book, Now I Can Die in Peace, chronicling the 2004 World Series run by the Red Sawx, may just be required bedtime reading for my (non-existent) children or grandchildren when the Rangers, Cowboys, and Liverpool still have not won a title.

Malcolm Gladwell

Out of the Top-5, Gladwell is easily the figure that I have read the least, but his ability to present technical, jargon-laden information in an engrossing and engaging manner is a skill that I greatly admire. Whether it was 2000's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, 2005's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, his pieces for the New Yorker, or his blog, almost all of Gladwell's writing makes me view the world in a new way that I had never before considered.

Jon Krakauer

Krakauer rose to prominence based on his first hand-account of the 1996 Everest Disaster in Into Thin Air, but 1990's Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains, 1996's Into the Wild, and 2003's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith are just as good, if not better than Into Thin Air. Krakauer's writing is reminiscent of the settings he describes: stark and often unforgiving. If the sign of a great writer is the ability to remove himself from the story and place the characters on center stage, Krakauer is surely near the pinnacle of the modern non-fiction genre.

Honorable Mention (Maybe next time, fellas)

• Ernest Hemingway
• John Grisham
• Stephen Ambrose
• John Steinbeck
• Bob Woodward
• Chuck Klosterman
• William Manchester
• Edmund Morris
• David McCullough