Sports Fact and Book Rec of the Day 01/27/2008

1/27/1993:
Trailling 73-54 with nine minutes left, the North Carolina Tar Heels stage a miraculous rally, closing the game on a 28-4 run to shock Florida State, 82-77, at the Dean Dome in Chapel Hill. A flurry of three-point shots, 14 second-half FSU turnovers and a badly timed technical foul called against the Seminoles coach Pat Kennedy help Carolina erase the large deficit in a matter of minutes, and four late free throws by Donald Williams salt away the unlikely triumph. In two months, after fashioning a 34-4 record, UNC will win the national championship.

Birthdays:
Frankie Albert b. 1920
John Lowenstein b. 1947
Billy "White Shoes" Johnson b. 1952
Cris Collinsworth b. 1959
Marat Safin b. 1980


In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Mr. March was the absent father who was based in part on Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father. In Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, we learn that March has become a Union chaplain and then a teacher of “contraband” slaves. His letters home are cheerful, but the reader knows that he is hiding the truth from the family. He experiences firsthand the suffering of the war and feels the futility of his efforts to ameliorate it. Mr. March has his own inner conflicts as well, and by the end of the novel he is a changed man. “It feels honorable, elegant and true—an adult coda to the plangent idealism of Little Women,” said John Freeman in The Wall Street Journal.

MARCH, by Geraldine Brooks (Penguin, 2006)