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We know what guys like
REVIEWS BY MARTIN BRADY
Cars and sports books for the men in your life
Sports-centered
By Rob Fleder Sports Illustrated, $29.95 294 pages ISBN 1932994742
By John Taylor Random House, $25.95 416 pages ISBN 1400061148
Facts and stats
By Ben Schott Bloomsbury, $14.95 160 pages ISBN 158234406X
Get their motors running
By Randy Leffingwell Motorbooks, $50 352 pages ISBN 0760320926
By Richard Porter Bloomsbury, $14.95 112 pages ISBN 1582346380 Everybody loves Raymond 
Raymond Chandler wrote like the quintessential man's man. His novels, such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, gave us hardboiled gumshoe Philip Marlowe chasing bad guys and consorting with dangerous dames, and doing it all in some of the most colorful, first-person-narrative verbal fillips ever created. With that in mind, editor Martin Asher has pulled together Philip Marlowe's Guide to Life: A Compendium of Quotations by Raymond Chandler.
Asher draws from the Chandler oeuvre and serves up keenly evocative quotable quotes, arranged topically from A-to-Z (in this case, from Advertising to Writers). Laced with singular wit and a deliciously cynical world view, these carefully chosen snippets of the Chandler genius are also often mercifully brief. For example, on marriage: "For two people in a hundred it's wonderful." Or, on coffee: "I drank two cups black. Then I tried a cigarette. It was all right. I still belonged to the human race." A terrific gift idea for that literary, or maybe just very jaded, male.
By Martin Asher Knopf, $14.95 96 pages ISBN 1400041589
Martin Brady is making out his Christmas list at home in Nashville.
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In this year's very strong field of sports gifts, The Football Book probably leads the pack. This stunning coffee table item, put together by the editors at Sports Illustrated, will thrill both committed and casual fans of pro football. Hundreds of amazing action photographs, most of them in bright color, are held together by more than three dozen essays by such topnotch SI veteran contributors as Peter King, Paul Zimmerman, Dan Jenkins and Rick Telander. The coverage reveals the NFL in all its diversified historical glory: the players, the coaches, the big games, the equipment, the crowds, the great single moments, the ecstatic victories and the tough defeats. The photos are, in some cases, simply breathtaking, whether it's a tableaux of jewel-encrusted Super Bowl rings, a series of close-ups of old game balls, a shot of Joe Montana unleashing a pass while surrounded by attacking defenders or a glimpse of a thoughtful Vince Lombardi surveying his troops from the sideline. Heck, even the dust jacket here is a beauty, featuring helmeted head shots of 75 of the game's greats. Among the interesting textual entries are conversation-starting listings of the top 25 all-time players at each position, as well as a tribute to former Arizona Cardinals defensive back Pat Tillman, who left football in his prime to serve in Iraq and was killed in the line of duty. Suprisingly, this treasure trove is as attractive in its affordable price ($29.95) as it is in its engrossing content.
For pure sports journalism, one would be challenged to find a finer book than John Taylor's The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Golden Age of Basketball. Taylor, a New York magazine editor and regular Esquire contributor, tells the concurrent tales of basketball's most famous big men: Russell, who led the Boston Celtics to numerous championships, and the irrepressible and legendary Chamberlain, who usually eclipsed Russell in individual statistics but was hard-pressed to defeat him in a big game. Taylor relates his subjects' life stories, then deftly interweaves their career accounts, especially as the two behemoths squared off in critical NBA playoff encounters. Russell comes to life as a proud, defiant, determined and hardworking African-American man with a keen social conscience, while Chamberlain emerges as a gregarious but also sometimes-broody black superstar with a chip on his shoulder and a sense of showmanship that may have eclipsed his desire to win. The additional portraits of team owners, players and coaches, in particular the Celtics' Red Auerbach, help to provide needed perspective about the inner workings of the NBA, particularly through the 1950s and '60s. Sports history at its best.
Ben Schott has enjoyed success with two previous books, Schott's Original Miscellany and Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany. Now the London-based photographer, designer and all-around trifler offers us Schott's Sporting, Gaming, & Idling Miscellany, an ever-so-readable and information-packed compendium devoted to the trivia of all manner of sports, games and time-passing activities. Schott compiles fascinating, seemingly endless lists (Super Bowl champs, Stanley Cup winners, bowling and gambling terms, golf nomenclature, Evel Knievel's fractured body parts, etc.); intriguing quotes, from the diverse likes of George Orwell, Knute Rockne, Ian Fleming, Richard Nixon and Jean-Paul Sartre; and the rules for engaging in various parlor games and more uncommon sporting events and pastimes such as caber tossing, backgammon, croquet and hopscotch. He even offers a schema for making a paper airplane. There's arcane history here (e.g., the first crossword puzzle is reproduced), amazing facts, literary excerpts, superstitions and under-the-radar oddities such as an explanation of how a pair of dice are "loaded." This is a browsing gem that should supply any "idle reader" with plenty of entertainment and amusement.
Yet another volume distinguished by marvelous photography is Porsche 911: Perfection by Design. Car historian Randy Leffingwell provides the ample text, but he also shares the photo-taking duties with David Newhardt. The result is around 300 color and black-and-white shots of this hot-blooded Porsche sports car, from the early forerunners that first appeared in the 1950s, to the beginning of its distinctively long 40-year run in the 1960s (with the Type 901), on to the present 2005 models. Leffingwell's words provide the inside scoop on the vision behind the inspired aesthetic and technical design of the 911, drawing upon interviews with dozens of Porsche engineers and executives as well as competitors who were admittedly influenced by the automobile's powerful, sleek image and its nonpareil manual-shift high performance. Casual car buffs might get a little daunted by Leffingwell's discussion of things like digital engine management systems, while full-blown gearheads will be solidly engaged. But everyone will revel in the views of the various incarnations of this incredibly stylish car through the decades, distinguished by subtle, tasteful body tweaks and carefully thought-out mechanical enhancements, resulting in ultra-cool specific models such as the Turbo, the Carrera, the Cabriolet and the Speedster, many produced in limited editions and carrying price tags of upwards of $200,000. If you could afford one, you'd surely buy it, and this gorgeous volume shows why.
BBC writer and car buff Richard Porter takes another, decidedly different, view of automobiles with his Crap Cars, a delightful photo-and-text rundown of 50 of the more lamentable models foisted on an unsuspecting public from the '60s to the '90s. For the American audience, Porter's coverage might lean too often on European cars, since few of us on this side of the Atlantic would be familiar with the Aston Martin Lagonda or the Maserati Biturbo. But plenty of us know a crap car when we see it (or have owned or driven one), and we know exactly what Porter means when he sarcastically weighs in against such monstrosities as the AMC Gremlin, the Ford Pinto, the Chrysler K-Car, the Chevrolet Citation or the Yugo GV. The VW Beetle also comes under particular heavy attack, which only proves that a crap car can have a marketing life of nearly 40 years. Crap Cars is fun reading and a nice visual spike for nostalgia buffs.