Sports Fact and Book Rec of the Day 04/20/2008

4/20/1936:
Pittsburgh Pirates first baseman and captain Gus Suhr cracks a three-run, walk-off homer at Forbes Field as the Bucs rally for a 9-8 victory over the Chicago Cubs. With the win, Pittsburgh ends the personal hex Cubs left-hander Roy Henshaw had over them, notching seven decisions against the Corsairs in 1935. Suhr is in the midst of a National League record 822 consecutive games played streak (since broken), which unfortunately will come to an end next season when he must leave the team to attend his mother's funeral.

Birthdays:
Ernie Stautner b. 1925
Steve Spurrier b. 1945
Don Mattingly b. 1961
John Carney b. 1964
Tai Streets b. 1977


When Carlos Eire was 11 years old, in the early 1960s, he was among 14,000 children air-lifted from Cuba to the United States. Here Eire, now a professor at Yale, remembers the years before Castro’s takeover as a paradise lost—a world of turquoise sea, sun-drenched plazas, fireworks—and especially his father, a man of great imagination who believed he was the reincarnation of Louis XVI. Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003, Waiting for Snow in Havana is a beautifully evocative and sometimes angry memoir.

WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA: CONFESSIONS OF A CUBAN BOY, by Carlos Eire (Free Press, 2003)