Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 4/7/2011

4/7/1977:
The Blue Jays play their first regular-season game, the first American League game staged outside the United States. Their opponents are the Chicago White Sox, and the contest is played in near-freezing temperatures and snow flurries at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto. The Blue Jays win, 9-5, as the White Sox strand 19 men on base. Doug Ault contributes the first Toronto hit, home run, run scored and RBI on one swing with a first-inning solo homer.

Birthdays:
John McGraw b. 1873
Bobby Doerr b. 1918
Tony Dorsett b. 1954
Ricky Watters b. 1969
Ronde and Tiki Barber b. 1975

Packers Fact:
Defensive end Aaron Kampman led the Packers with 9.5 sacks in 2008. He topped the team for the third season in a row.

ON TEXANS, SO FAIR–MINDED

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TEXANS SUPPORT DEATH PENALTY
BUT ONLY FOR THE GUILTY

headline for an editorial in the Houston Chronicle

“One man with courage makes a majority.”

—ANDREW JACKSON, U.S. president

THE NEW CLASSICS

The exquisite Roxana Robinson—novelist, art historian, editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton—gives us a novel at once poetic and completely realistic. At the center is Professor Julia Lambert, who has come to the family house in Maine during summer break to check in on her parents. All around her are satellites with different gravitational pulls—her early-Alzheimer’s mother; her acid-tongued father; her ex-husband, Wendell; her two sons, responsible Steven and heroin-addict Jack. The gathering emotional storm brings an intervention for Jack and some relief to the others. But no mere synopsis can capture the pleasure of reading Robinson’s prose.

COST, by Roxana Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008; Picador, 2009)