Reading in a time of quarantine

By Bart Barry

SAN ANTONIO – If writing this column in a time of
quarantine has advantages they are not immediately apparent.  This city has reacted quickly for a Southern
one, postponing Fiesta – our admittedly incongruous celebration, wherein a
majority-Latinx community celebrates the taking of Texas from Mexico by playing
in unfaltering rotation “Sweet Home Alabama” – which means at about half the
speed of a Northern city.  Looking out
the kitchen window is not much fun as the coffeeshop window, even whilst
sipping TexaCola
while Gramatik’s SB#2 saunters through AKG noise-cancelers.

There was a metered line at the entrance to the
supermarket this morning, after it closed four hours early yesterday, but it
wasn’t ominous as that; the stockers, too, were locked out all night and needed
extra space to shelve items.  The
metering was done by the time I left.  Here,
too, there has been a run on toilet paper because everybody is doing it so it
must be worth doing and one regains a sense of control when he stockpiles for
his family, especially bulky, soft items.

There’s raw generational conflict on social media,
and as a member of our smallest contemporary generation I find it more amusing
than enkindling – greeting each day with practiced pragmatism in lieu of ideological
braying.  The GenX philosophy: Referee
the fight, treaty with the winner.

Since there’s plenty of time for reading these
days and Press Box Publicity was kind enough to send a review copy of “Coach to
Coach: An Empowering Story About How to Be a Great Leader” by Martin Rooney
(Wiley, $23.00), let’s go there and see. 
Wherever it might wish itself shelved – “BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Motivational”
says the back flap – this book is a selfhelp work of fiction based on true
events, light and breezy, its 30,000 or so words stretched ambitiously across 182
hardcover pages.

It’s a sparse sort of football-themed remake of Eliyahu
Goldratt’s “The Goal” – that genrebending tale of production dynamics that save
a manufacturing floor and a marriage, 15 years before “Who Moved My Cheese?” reduced
American business literature to a coloring book.  “Coach to Coach” feels like a book a mentor
gives a young man starting-out in coaching after getting through college
without reading a full-length anything.  Maybe
it knows its audience too well.

It also feels like this hardcover is but the
opening gambit in a multimedia extravaganza, to be followed by a TED Talk,
corporate speaking engagements and the ubiquitous podcast.  Nothing in the book is wrong.  And nothing in the book is complex.  Promoters and participants in this genre
would have us believe they take mankind’s greatest mysteries and distill them
to their essence, roughly one mystery a week, like Gurudev channeling Sudharshan
Kriya after a decade in isolation.

Unlikely.  Their
selfhelp magic works in inverse proportion to a reader’s experience outside the
genre:

“Empathy is first about spending time thinking
about where someone is coming from.  Only
then can you help them get to where they want to go.  And the only way to ‘hear’ where someone
wants to go is to take the time to listen.”

That is an aphorism Martin Rooney’s coach, Brian
Knight, writes in his coaching notebook the night before his team’s “big home
game” about 4/5 of the way through his book. 
That it’s italicized says quite a bit.

A more sophisticated reader interested in improving
himself as a coach might be better served by Nunyo Demasio’s “Parcells: A
Football Life”.  About six times the
length of “Coach to Coach” Demasio’s exhaustive biography shows how successful
a man can be manipulating young men in football equipment while laying waste to
the lives of those who love him.

Ah hah, see that, “Coach to Coach” gets right to
the essence in a fraction of the time!

And whither the time you save not-reading long works
about complex characters?

Rooney’s story is driven by an “old coach” who
appears without exposition after Brian Knight’s linebacking corps underperforms,
and the old coach teaches with stories.  In
the spirit of that method, here’s a quick story about misplaced efficiency:

Mark kept a large dictionary on his desk in the
marketing department at one of the nation’s largest insurers.  One day, Billy came by and spotted the
dictionary.

“Hey bro,” Billy guffawed.  “What, haven’t you ever heard of Dictionary.com?”

“I have,” said Mark, a little annoyed by Billy’s
question.

“We’re the same age,” Billy said, knowing he and
Mark liked to flirt with Sarah, a project manager across the hall.  “Why are you wasting time looking things up
in a big old book?”

“Have a seat,” Mark said, offering Billy a
chair.  “There’s a secret I’m going to
tell you.”

“Think I’ll stand if it’s all the same,” said
Billy.  “But tell me the secret.”

“If you only go right to the words you know you
don’t know,” said Mark, “you never get a chance to see all the words you don’t
know you don’t know.”

“Wow!” said Billy, with deep admiration.  “I guess I never thought of it like that.”

“Happy to help,” said Mark.

“I’m going to go tell Sarah what a cool guy you
are,” said Billy, giving Mark a fist-bump.

*

The truth of selfhelp books is they succeed at
what they’re about, which is selling more selfhelp books.  It is rare such a book leaves you feeling
less than you did when you began reading it and rarer still you remember its lesson
a year later.  But they serve a purpose,
and those of us who read often and deeply probably oughtn’t scoff often and
deeply as we do at the genre.  You could
do much worse than spend this quarantine reading selfhelp books.  You could do better, too.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry