Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 10/24-25/2009

10/24/1965:
George Blanda throws five touchdown passes for the Houston Oilers, but it takes a last-minute field goal by Jack Spikes to clinch a 38-36 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs. Trailing 17-0 at the half, the Oilers explode for three touchdowns in the first five minutes of the second half as Blanda hits Charlie Frazier for 64 yards, Ode Burrell for 49 yards and Willie Frazier (no relation) for 17 yards to silence the boobirds, who had serenaded them upon leaving the field at the break. After Houston goes ahead 35-20, Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson leads two scoring drives and converts a pair of two-point PATs for a brief 36-35 lead. Blanda will not be denied, completing four passes during Houston's final drive to set up the game-winning placement by Spikes.

Birthdays:
Y.A. Tittle b. 1926
Jim Brosnan b. 1929
Ron Gardenhire b. 1957
Arthur Rhodes b. 1969
Corey Dillon b. 1974

Packers Fact:
Halfback Paul Hornung scored a club-record 5 touchdowns in a game in 1965 against the Baltimore Colts. Hornung ran for 3 scores and caught 2 touchdown passes in a 42-27 victory.

MANIFEST DESTINY AND ALL THAT Kit Carson, Manifest Destiny, and the destruction of the Navajo nation is the topic of this lyrical, gripping narrative of the history of the Southwest. “With Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides has taken an implausibly broad canvas of time, people and events and created a brilliantly realized portrait on an epic scale,” wrote Jeffery Lent in The Washington Post. BLOOD AND THUNDER: AN EPIC OF THE AMERICAN WEST, by Hampton Sides (Doubleday, 2006)

10/25/1973:
Despite hitting .351 in a brief trial at the end of the season, Bill Madlock is traded away by the Texas Rangers to the Chicago Cubs for proven starter Ferguson Jenkins. While Jenkins will win 42 games for the Rangers over the next two years (and 51 more in a second stint with the team), Madlock will become a veritable hitting machine in his 15-year major league career. He'll compile a .305 lifetime batting average, get over 2,000 hits and win four batting titles, two with the Cubs and two with the Pirates.

Birthdays:
Bobby Thomson b. 1923
Zelmo Beaty b. 1939
Bobby Knight b. 1940
Dave Cowens b. 1948
Dan Issel b. 1948

TANTO AMORE SEGRETO

André Aciman, author of a memoir, Out of Egypt, and a book of essays, False Papers, here pays homage to other poets of forbidden love and momentous yearning—Proust, Mann, Nabokov, Colette—and his writing is as good as theirs, too. In this coming-of-age love story set in a Mediterranean villa, the fairly simple narrative achieves its power through the beautifully rendered characters, the 17-year-old Elio and the 24-year-old grad student, Oliver, and through the power of the novelist to evoke the terrible joys and pains of youth and love.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, by André Aciman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)