‍Brian O’Leary returned to the show to help me answer a question the Wall Street Journal recently raised: is the “dad book,” that narrative-driven, mid-brow nonfiction men actually enjoy reading, a dying breed killed off by podcasts? We work through a list of categories, from books you can still find at the airport to the one your father handed you, and we make the case that good books are the antidote to doom-scrolling and hustle-culture signaling.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Lightly edited for clarity.

Richard Nixon, Farewell Remarks to the White House Staff, August 9, 1974

I remember my old man. I think that they would have called him sort of a little man, a common man. He didn’t consider himself that way. You know what he was? He was a streetcar motorman first, and then he was a farmer, and then he had a lemon ranch. It was the poorest lemon ranch in California, I can assure you. He sold it before they found oil in it. And then he was a grocer. But he was a great man, because he did his job, and every job counts up to the hilt, regardless of what happened.

THE DAD BOOK, DEFINED

Andrew Flattery:  The dad book. The image I have in my head is Nick Nolte in Warrior, if you’ve ever seen that movie. You’ve got Nick Nolte driving around with an audiobook on cassette. I think it’s Moby-Dick that he’s listening to on cassette tape. That’s the vibe here. This is more of a vibe than anything. Think about a grandpa mowing the lawn with some audiobook going. That’s the dad book.

Andrew Flattery:  The reason I bring this up: there was a Wall Street Journal piece saying the dad book is a dying breed. The way they describe it, the kind of nonfiction for men, the doorstop presidential biography, is on the way out. Publishers, according to the piece, are blaming it on podcasts. Men aren’t buying these books because they’re listening to Joe Rogan. So what we’re going to do is a podcast on that topic, not to be overly meta. What is a dad book? Brian O’Leary, who’s on the pod with me today, was just asking me this. I think of it as airport nonfiction that you actually want to read. Narrative-driven adventure, history, biography, exploration, a niche chapter of World War II, or something about the guy who built the thing. It’s not highbrow, but it’s good and it’s enjoyable to read.

Andrew Flattery:  My take is that it’s leisure reading. It’s an antidote to hustle culture, to binge-watching, to doom-scrolling. Maybe you feel like you learn something in the process. And these get no respect online. We’re celebrating something today that doesn’t have a lot of credibility online, probably because it doesn’t signal anything. There’s no high signal here. They’re not on the high-status, look-how-serious-I-am reading lists. This crystallized recently with a guy named Sahil Bloom, who’s on financial Twitter. He had his daily agenda, where every day he wakes up at 4:30 in the morning, and after his meditation and his yoga he reads what he calls “classic books.” He’s trying to signal his status. That’s not what we’re doing with the dad books.

Andrew Flattery:  It is the beach read, but it’s summertime, so it’s okay to have the beach read. I posted my own dad book list, and we’ll get to it in a minute. Brian O’Leary is back on the show. If you read Brian’s Substack or listen to his podcast, Brian knows the dad book. He’s had authors on who did a Larry Bird book, The Lost Chapter of Larry Bird, or a couple of my favorites, the Buss family dynasty with the LA Lakers, baseball in the barnstorming era. That’s very interesting to me. Brian keeps coming up with these new picks from new authors of these nonfiction books. So this is The Dad Book Review, this is Gentleman Speculator, and I’m happy to have Brian back on the show. Brian O’Leary, welcome back.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Thanks, Andy. When you told me about the dad book thing, I read your tweet, or maybe it was a Substack note, about the dad book, and I thought, “Oh, this is an interesting topic. I don’t know that I know about dad books.” And then, apparently, I’m all about the dad book.

Andrew Flattery:  I’m giving you that moniker. Does my explanation land with you at all?

Brian D. O’Leary:  It does. You sent me the Wall Street Journal article you probably reference here. My whole thing was that I figured the dad book was that huge presidential biography, some huge book by Robert Caro, or some James Michener seven-hundred-page deal. But that’s not what it is anymore.

Andrew Flattery:  I made up my own definition based on what I intuited the vibe being. When I threw out a list, I wasn’t saying it was definitive. You mentioned Robert Caro. Somebody said, “Hey, Robert Caro’s not on your list, this is not a serious list.” So, disclaimer up front, this is my list. I’m just giving you my taste. I’m not putting myself out there as the guy on the dad book. I did get retweeted by the Art of Manliness, the old blog. That guy retweeted me, so I figure he’s the dad book guy for sure. You kind of get it, but I’m proposing it as more of a vibe than a very explicit genre.

Andrew Flattery:  On my list it’s mostly nonfiction, but I did throw in a couple of pieces of fiction. Some of this has been well-trodden ground in recent years with the so-called decline of the male reader. So it fits into the story as well: men don’t read books anymore. If you’re a man and you’ve read more than one book in the last year, apparently you’re special. That includes me and you, Brian, because I know you’ve read more than one book in the last year.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Right. This whole concept is really neat. As a dad, Andy, you’ve got five kids now, I think. And we’ve got five kids. It’s hard to get the time to sit down with a book and just read. So what do I want to read? All these books with authors I’ve interviewed, those are the ones I want to read. So they are dad books, I guess. I had Mark Kurlansky on the show recently, and it gets to one of the points we’re going to talk about later. He wrote a book about thirty years ago now called Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. That’s not the book we talked about, but it turned me on to him, and then he wrote another book I thought was really great called The Eastern Stars.

Brian D. O’Leary:  You being a baseball fan, it was basically the biography of a town, San Pedro de Macorís, the cradle of shortstops in the Dominican Republic. Just wild things that I’m really interested in that nobody’s ever bothered to do the research on, and why these things are so important in our culture.

Andrew Flattery:  That’s cool. So are these guys independently published, or are they with a major publisher? Who’s still publishing these sorts of things?

Brian D. O’Leary:  Major publisher. I don’t have the book on me, but Cod has a thirtieth-anniversary edition coming out, I think, in October.

Andrew Flattery:  Some of these things I imagine are now documentaries. You can imagine any one of these books we’re going to talk about, if there isn’t a documentary already, it’s a documentary series on streaming. Maybe that’s part of it too. But there are just so many more great books than there is slop to stream, even though there’s a lot of slop. You can find better stuff if you’re willing to take the time to read something. You and I did a pod a few years ago with our reading recommendations, and that was actually very popular. A lot of the listeners liked it. So people still like to find good stuff to read. Or, shall I say, the Gentleman Speculator audience still wants to find it.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Indeed. It’s a fine, curated audience, and I love it.

Andrew Flattery:  So here’s what we’ll do, Brian. I could just give you my list, and if you’re a subscriber to the email list, you’ve already read it. By the way, you might not know I have an email list at gentlemanspeculator.com, but I did post my list. Today isn’t so much the list. It’s more that we’re going to go through some categories and fine-tune the list to give the audience picks for the various things they may have an interest in. Does that sound good, Brian?

Brian D. O’Leary:  Sounds great.

BOOKS YOU CAN FIND AT THE AIRPORT

Andrew Flattery:  We’ve laid out the concept of dad books. Everybody gets it, and we’re all dads here. I do think the majority of the listeners are at least men, and many of them are dads. If you have five children, you’re in the Brian and Andy club, so congrats on that. Categories, Brian. Part of the concept here is that sometimes people will, with some snark, throw out a picture of the airport bookstore, Hudson Books or whatever, and say it’s very cringe. It’s like, “What am I going to read in this bookstore? Is there anything on this shelf I could possibly read?” So today we’re not just going to black-pill. I actually want to ask, is there anything at the airport bookstore? This first category is books you can actually find at the airport.

Andrew Flattery:  Don’t check me on this, because I haven’t actually checked the airport bookstore lately, but I’d guess there’s a chance you could find these picks. The first one that came to mind was The Last Duel by Eric Jager, a popular nonfiction narrative book from a few years back that I didn’t think the movie did justice to. There was a Ben Affleck and Matt Damon movie called The Last Duel based on it. Did you ever see it?

Brian D. O’Leary:  No.

Andrew Flattery:  It’s not worth your time. The book is way better. The movie kind of turned it into a Me Too thing, whereas the book is much more nuanced and interesting. But I chose instead something a little more relevant that I think you’d also find in a bookstore. It’s relevant because you’re literally going to hear about this book on Rogan, so it ties into the idea that dads are just listening to the podcast instead. In my case, I listened to Rogan and then I went out and bought the book, and that is Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill. Have you seen this one, Brian?

Brian D. O’Leary:  No, just from you talking about it.

Andrew Flattery:  Rogan must have had the author on. It’s essentially about how the CIA in part created Charles Manson. It involves conspiracy theories, but it’s by Tom O’Neill, who was and still is a credible journalist. He went on a multi-decade journey to try to understand what happened with the Manson killings and Charles Manson himself. You get a little conspiracy theory, but it’s done in a legit, intelligent way. He doesn’t go full conspiracy. He tries to find the legitimacy of it. It’s his story, told in a narrative arc of him coming to the realization of what actually happened with Charles Manson and the CIA.

Brian D. O’Leary:  A little different than Tarantino.

Andrew Flattery:  Exactly. It’s like modern folk art. Going into the sixties and the CIA and Charles Manson, these are our modern folk tales. If you think of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or the JFK assassination, this is modern folk art. So it’s super interesting, engaging to read, and you can put on your tinfoil hat to some extent. That’s Chaos. That’s my pick, Brian.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Okay. Depending on where we went, I had a list. A book that came out a few years ago by Mollie Hemingway called Rigged. It’s about how the media, big tech, and Democrats seized our elections. Mollie Hemingway’s a legit journalist. You see her on Fox News now. This was an interesting book. Talk about conspiracy theories, it’s not really conspiracy. It just lays out how it was almost a perfect storm of bad actors and people being ignorant and not catching the people doing these things. She did some pretty good investigation. I’m surprised, probably because she leans to the right, that this narrative didn’t catch on.

Andrew Flattery:  That Trump’s election was stolen? Is that what she gets into?

Brian D. O’Leary:  It was the 2020 election, more or less.

Andrew Flattery:  You had a buttoned-up pick, and then you had an unhinged one. You’re like, “Oh, Flattery’s going a little unhinged, so I’m going to throw that one out there.”

Brian D. O’Leary:  I’ll do it, no problem. Other than that, my next one would be a typical airport book. I don’t really go to the airport too much anymore, and in Portland, Oregon, where I’m from, there was a Powell’s bookstore. If you’re familiar with Powell’s, a bunch of used books too. So I just go find a really small book for three bucks instead of twenty-eight or thirty-five. Wouldn’t Atomic Habits by James Clear be one of those great ones you see at the airport that’s a seller no matter what? Here’s an interesting thing about Clear: we talk about how I publish a book, write a new one, a few years later write another about another subject. James Clear has been on Atomic Habits ever since he published it, and it still sells.

Andrew Flattery:  When I had Eric Jorgenson on the podcast for the second time, he said this exact same thing, and I was throwing a little shade at James Clear. I’ve never read it, so I should probably read it, because you’re the second person to say I should. I’ve always rolled my eyes, like, “Oh, James Clear, come on, I’m not going to read this pop-business book.” And Eric Jorgenson said, “No, no, James Clear’s the man.” He said, imagine treating your one book like your business. You sell that, and it’s your best effort. You’re going to sell it for ten years, and the reader gets the best of what you have in that one book. It’s kind of brilliant, because, like you said, most people just move on to the next thing and it gets discarded.

Brian D. O’Leary:  That’s one great way to run a business, particularly if you’re an author. In today’s media, even with your Substack or my Substack, it’s really hard to come up with brand-new ideas every time to write. So why not write about what we know and keep hammering on that?

THE BOOK YOUR DAD GAVE YOU

Andrew Flattery:  I love it. Next category. I’m calling this Dad Books. This is the Dad Book Review, but now we’re going to do the dad book your dad actually gave you, from your actual father. I have one, and it’s kind of perfect. The very first pick I would have thrown out anyway was also a book my dad gave me, which I think his twin brother gave him: Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, written in 1959 by Alfred Lansing. I kind of thought everyone knew this book, but when I mention it, a lot of people have never read it or heard of it. It’s an absolute slam-dunk classic. When you make a list of dad books, I do think this would be on every list. Have you read Endurance, Brian?

Brian D. O’Leary:  In a book club, yeah. I was in a book club for a number of years, and that was one of the books we read, ten or fifteen years ago. Solid, solid choice.

Andrew Flattery:  Shackleton is kind of a Teddy Roosevelt sort of personality of that era. A buddy of mine, Rick, also gave me a corresponding book, where Shackleton left his crew on the ice and they were there for two years, and that story is also interesting.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Maybe that’s the one I read. They’re both totally incredible. Shackleton’s journey still lives on in memes. Every now and then you see the ad he supposedly posted in a newspaper, something like, “Men wanted, little pay, chance of death,” and everyone responded to that.

Andrew Flattery:  That has lived on in meme format over a hundred years later.

Brian D. O’Leary:  The Shackleton story is pretty amazing. People know the name, or they know there was a guy who went to the South Pole, but they don’t know much about the story. And the story is remarkable. It is endurance, through the elements. A testament to what could be done with virtually zero technology.

Andrew Flattery:  Sort of like the end of the age of exploration. You’re learning about this era, the very end of the age of exploration, through a story. I guess that’s part of what the dad book is. You’re getting a story of something you’ve never heard about, but you’re also getting the broader context of what’s going on at the time. So from my own dad, Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Brian, what do you have?

Brian D. O’Leary:  I’ve got two. My dad read a bunch of what you called beach books, the hardcovers, not pulp but close to it. He never really gave me books. We had a few around the house, but I remember one Christmas somebody gave him, brand new when it came out, The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump. I saw it on our bookshelf at home forever. Back in the eighties or early nineties, Trump was a star, but we all had our opinions on him even then. Sometime after 2016 I ended up with the original book in my stack, and I read it. It’s an interesting book, but it’s one of these things that was given as a present, as a dad book, to so many dads in the eighties.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Another book we had around the house that I really liked, because I was super into sports as a kid, was an old beat-up paperback from probably the seventies called They Call Me Coach by John Wooden.

Andrew Flattery:  Oh, yeah.

Brian D. O’Leary:  I probably read it in fourth or fifth grade for the first time, and I learned a lot. I never thought of myself as on the path to being a coach. I wanted to be a player. After I hung up the sneakers and the spikes, about ten years later I got back into coaching, and all those lessons really resonated. You can learn a lot from John Wooden. The late Bill Walton would always talk about Wooden and all the aphorisms Wooden gave him. Walton actually was a supporter of the first podcast I did. So that was pretty nice. God rest his soul, Bill Walton.

Andrew Flattery:  I think I read the one called Wooden, which is full of his aphorisms. “Make each day your masterpiece” is the one I remember. John Wooden’s terrific.

Brian D. O’Leary:  It was an autobiography, so it tells about him growing up, and how at UCLA they won ten championships, eight in a row at one point. He was there for fifteen years, and they didn’t do a whole lot before that. He didn’t even want to take the job originally, moving out to some outpost in California in the late forties or early fifties. He wanted to stick around the Midwest.

SPORTS

Andrew Flattery:  So what was that one called again, Brian?

Brian D. O’Leary:  They Call Me Coach.

Andrew Flattery:  They Call Me Coach. Got it. Awesome, good picks. On that note, my next category is sports. I grew up with sports, as you did, Brian, and as we just mentioned on your show, you’re on the beat with a lot of sports writing, even modern sports writing, which you don’t see a lot of anymore with the demise of Sports Illustrated. I don’t know if ESPN is still doing long-form sports writing. I hope they are. I’m not as clued in as I used to be. For sports, I considered doing Football by Chuck Klosterman, which is a great book, just because you recommended that author to me on our first podcast. After you recommended Klosterman, I’ve now read three of his, including Football. I love Chuck Klosterman. But with Klosterman, he’s almost more philosophical. It’s Gen X pop-culture philosophizing, dorm-room stuff, but some of it is actually very brilliant. It’s more about ideas than stories or narrative, which I think is more in the dad book vein. So it’s borderline dad book.

Andrew Flattery:  Instead, to be a little more on the nose, I chose something I think probably fits the definition and could be on a lot of lists: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown. Great book. Super enjoyable to read, super interesting, inspiring characters. I have a whole stack of books about America in the 1930s, and there’s a certain spirit, a positivity about that time that’s very cool. The movie was not half bad. The adaptation was a little made-for-TV, but the actor was really good. The book was better. The Boys in the Boat, Brian. I imagine you’ve read this one.

Brian D. O’Leary:  I have not read it. I got it recommended so long ago, and I said, “Oh yeah, I’ll put it on my list.” I have the book, I just haven’t read it yet. But you mentioned the 1930s. I’ve had a couple of authors on the show recently. The most recent is The First All-Star Game by Randall Sullivan. He weaves together the attempted assassination of the incoming president, FDR, which ends up killing the mayor of Chicago, and this is in 1932.

Andrew Flattery:  This sounds great.

Brian D. O’Leary:  It’s called The First All-Star Game. What ends up happening is that the Chicago World’s Fair is coming up, and they need something to get it going. This is in the Depression. What is this culture like, what are these people doing, what keeps them going? It ties in Al Capone, corrupt Chicago politics, the Black Sox scandal, which I know you’re familiar with, being in Iowa, where they come out of the corn every so often. It’s not just a baseball book. It uses baseball as a backdrop for what’s going on in the culture. So that’s The First All-Star Game, Randall Sullivan. Another fella I had on the podcast last year, Thomas Wolf, wrote a book about the 1926 baseball season. He had written a book a few years prior, but because of COVID, getting him on the show didn’t work out. It was called The Called Shot, about the Babe Ruth called shot in 1932. Then 1933 is when the first All-Star Game comes. FDR, it turns out, was at the called-shot game, I believe, with the Chicago mayor. These books dovetail together, is what I’m getting at.

Andrew Flattery:  I love it. I listened to the episode you did, Brian. A little local history from where I grew up in Iowa: Babe Ruth did a barnstorming tour through Iowa. He did a hitting exhibition and played golf at this little place called Twin Lakes, a tiny little course, maybe in the late twenties or the thirties. As you pointed out on your show, that was what the All-Star Game kind of was before it became the All-Star Game. You’d have these players do barnstorming tours on their own. Certainly in the case of Babe Ruth, that’s what happened.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Right. Another book along those lines is The Big Fella by Jane Leavy. It’s a biography of Babe Ruth. It came out a few years ago and reveals a few things about his early life that were never talked about or maybe even discovered. Randall Sullivan talks about that a little more, since it’s out now. Babe Ruth would barnstorm from New England through the Midwest and South out to California. He’d film some movies, but they’d play baseball the whole way. There was a place in San Jose, California, the next town over from where I live, where supposedly Babe Ruth hit the longest home run he ever hit. I thought, “Well, where is this field?” It was up against a creek. I found out on Google Maps. It’s a local version of a Home Depot now, where the parking lot is, and I believe they still have the home plate painted in the parking lot. This job I was working a number of years ago, we got some equipment from that store when it closed down. I’m like, “This is exactly where Babe Ruth slugged this legendary home run.” So neat.

Andrew Flattery:  So did you just give me your sports pick, or do you have another for the sports category?

Brian D. O’Leary:  We’ll put The First All-Star Game by Randall Sullivan for sports. And I’ve got a podcast about it too, so you can find out more.

Andrew Flattery:  That’s great. It’s on my list.

BIOGRAPHY

Andrew Flattery:  Moving on. The Wall Street Journal article used the presidential biography as its example of the dad book on the decline. So I have a category just for biography. To me, the most interesting biographies are of someone you don’t know about, with an interesting story you’re unaware of, or someone you do know about, where it unveils something you had no knowledge of. You just mentioned Babe Ruth. The one I picked is by an author who, when I did my dad book list on the internet, had maybe three titles come up. The one I picked is The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Anything McCullough’s great.

Andrew Flattery:  Somebody else told me the Roosevelt one he did was great.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Mornings on Horseback, yeah.

Andrew Flattery:  I’ve read a couple of his. One of my takeaways with this one was that the father was interesting. The way the Wright brothers became the Wright brothers was very much part of the way they were raised. Their father was very intentional about cultivating their creativity and inventiveness. It’s sort of the end of the age of great tinkerers and the beginning of the twentieth-century growth of bureaucracy. Sadly, I think it was the older brother, Wilbur, who spent the latter part of his life in and out of lawsuits, suing people for patent infringement. It’s kind of a sad story. He had all these patents, people were obviously infringing, and it ruined the latter part of his life and career. It’s a great American story, but it has a sad ending. So, The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.

Brian D. O’Leary:  My turn. Last time we were on, Andy, I think I talked about Empire of the Summer Moon.

Andrew Flattery:  Oh yeah, I read that, thank you for that pick. It was good. That’s essentially a biography of Quanah Parker, but it gets into a lot more history. So we’ll leave that be, just go read it, put it on the list.

Brian D. O’Leary:  The one I thought of when you described this category is a book called The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie. If you’re familiar with the Russell Crowe movie, The Insider, the tobacco settlement one with Al Pacino.

Andrew Flattery:  I’ve never seen it, but I’ve heard of it.

Brian D. O’Leary:  That’s about the tobacco settlements. There was this lawyer, Dickie Scruggs, the main lawyer for all these states that brought lawsuits against the tobacco companies. He became insanely wealthy taking commissions from the state settlements. You even see him in the movie at his own house, on the Gulf of America now, I guess you’d call it, in southern Mississippi. They called him Zeus. He’s an Ole Miss grad from the sixties, an Air Force or Naval fighter pilot, Vietnam era, an alpha guy. He was an ardent Democrat, like a lot of Mississippians were back then. Relatively Southern conservative, but a Democrat. His brother-in-law is Trent Lott, who was Senate leader for the Republicans forever.

Brian D. O’Leary:  The biography goes into how he was at the top, and then he lost it all because of a couple of missteps. He’s still around. You can find him on Twitter. I think I mentioned this book on Twitter, and I believe he still follows me. I thought, “Holy cow, this is amazing.” Curtis Wilkie was an Ole Miss grad about the same time, the author. He worked for years as an investigative journalist at places like The Boston Globe, then moved back to Oxford, where they were both living, and wrote this book. It came out maybe 2008 or 2010, and I bought it immediately. Then it sat on my shelf, and I read it eight or ten years ago. It also goes into a lot of weird connections in politics, talks about Joe Biden’s brother, who was not important back when he wrote it. The point is, it’s a great tale of what I’d call a great man, not necessarily a good man, but a great man, an outsized personality. He’s some obscure figure in a Russell Crowe movie who was a real-life deal. So that’s The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie.

Andrew Flattery:  Very interesting. And just to point out, we are now recommending The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump on this podcast, and we’re still calling it the Gulf of America. You don’t hear that a lot these days, so thank you for that, Brian.

HIDDEN GEMS

Andrew Flattery:  Hidden gem. I’m calling it hidden gem because I don’t want to get into the Sahil Bloom lane, where you have to signal your status with something super niche and obscure that no one’s heard of. The way I came up with my hidden gem: this is an author you mentioned earlier who was super popular back in the day. At one point I assumed everyone had heard of him, but when I recommend him, no one has. His popularity has declined. This is James Michener, a best-selling author in the seventies. When I was living in Colorado, his name was on the building at the University of Northern Colorado. He was highly successful, made tens of millions of dollars, and now you’ve never heard of the guy. He was a victim of his own success and wasn’t well-liked by literary folks. But his books were so good, and to me they’re a perfect example of a dad book. He’s a real historian writing history in fiction format.

Andrew Flattery:  The one people may know is a great one called Centennial, about the history of Colorado, a sweeping, multi-generational epic. My hidden gem is maybe lesser known: Chesapeake, a sweeping history of the Chesapeake Bay, multi-generational, going through the different groups of people who settled it. It starts with the Native Americans. If you’re an American Catholic, it’s very interesting, because it pays homage to the Catholic roots of Maryland, and there’s a multi-generational Catholic family it follows throughout. It’s great history and a fun, enjoyable read. It’s probably 1,200 pages, quite long. Chesapeake by James Michener is my hidden gem. Sounds like you’ve heard of Michener, Brian.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Oh yeah. You mentioned Centennial, and my dad loved that miniseries.

Andrew Flattery:  People say that. I have not seen it. I imagine it’s on streaming.

Brian D. O’Leary:  My dad moved to Vegas around 2000 or 2001. I went down there with two of my buddies. We were in our early twenties, and we won a bunch of money, a few hundred bucks in my pocket, for that time. We went to this mall, and back when VHS was still played, there was a ten-or-so tape set of Centennial, and I got it, went over to his house, and said, “Here you go, here’s Centennial.” He really enjoyed that. I’ve not read Chesapeake, but I’ve read some of the other Michener stuff. He actually had a pretty good book of essays on sports from the seventies. I don’t know why Michener is not the guy anymore. He certainly was up through the eighties.

Brian D. O’Leary:  My hidden gem: I got this on my Kindle years ago because I couldn’t find a hard copy for a decent price. I was really into what really happened in the Spanish Civil War. Growing up in the eighties and nineties in America, you just don’t get the story. Nowadays, particularly with podcasts, you get a better idea. Stanley Payne is a historian, probably the preeminent historian on twentieth-century Spain, and probably the best English-language historian on the whole Iberian Peninsula. He has books on Spain and Portugal that recount mostly the entire history, and a ton on Spain and fascism, what it is and what it isn’t. He has a book called Fascism, but the one I’m talking about is The Franco Regime. It’s essentially a biography of Francisco Franco, and then it goes through his entire regime. This is a dad book only if you’re interested in the minutiae and really getting into the story, because there are so many players involved. The tough thing about it, why it might not be a dad book, is all the Spanish names that we’re probably not familiar with as English speakers.

Andrew Flattery:  I don’t know if my dad would go for that.

Brian D. O’Leary:  As a dad myself, I’m really interested in the Spanish Civil War, because I see a lot of parallels to today.

Andrew Flattery:  We talk again about the 1930s. This is right in the middle of the thirties, when things were crazy: how Franco got to power, what the real politics were. The more history I read on the Spanish Civil War, the less I like Hemingway.

Brian D. O’Leary:  The Franco Regime by Stanley Payne. Any Stanley Payne book is really good. It’s academic history, but in a pretty decent narrative form, unlike a lot of bland college history textbooks.

THE ANTI-RECOMMENDATION

Andrew Flattery:  Never heard of it, so indeed a hidden gem. My next one is a little negative. Let me say that the fact this category exists is a celebration of books too, because if we can hate on a book, it means it’s worth hating on. It means it’s popular enough that you can crap on it. So I’m calling this the anti-recommendation, or the overrated. For me to even say this is giving a little credit to the author, because he’s rated highly enough by enough people that I can at least say it. If no one’s ever read the book, because men don’t read anymore, how could you possibly say it’s overrated? The one I have is not a perfect dad book, because these are works of fiction, but I think it fits the vibe because guys are into it: Bernard Cornwell. I’m going to piss some people off, because a lot of people love Bernard Cornwell. He’s best known for the series that starts with The Last Kingdom, which became a Netflix series called The Last Kingdom.

Andrew Flattery:  I read a couple of these in college. It’s been a long time, so I can’t tell you exactly why I hate Bernard Cornwell, but he’s the most cartoonish example of everything I hate about certain types of historical fiction. It’s essentially telling a modern story about a modern character, usually a modern anti-hero or a modern feminist, whatever the trope is, and just putting a costume on them, with a few correct details about the historical era so you feel like you’re getting history. I hate-read these books. He’s probably telling the great men’s adventure fiction, which is why people like it, because it’s fun adventure. But I can’t get past some of the quirks of this author. It’s anti-clerical to the extreme, in a cartoonish way. You can be anti-clerical but nuanced and intelligent about it. He clearly has an ax to grind against the medieval church. I think The Saxon Stories is the name of that chronicle. I wonder if there’s a version of the John Oliver effect here: “Oh, the guy’s British, he’s got an accent, he must know what he’s talking about.” With the American audience it’s like, “Oh, we’re getting British history, this is highbrow.” So I’m not a fan of Bernard Cornwell. I know that might rub some people the wrong way.

Andrew Flattery:  To end on a positive note, I do like a lot of historical fiction. There’s a Swedish book called The Long Ships, written in the fifties, about medieval-era Norsemen, and it’s just so great. I love historical fiction that attempts to appreciate the people of that time at their level. You’re not just judging people for their actions back then. You’re trying to put yourself in their shoes, and The Long Ships does that. So, anti-recommendation, Bernard Cornwell, not a fan.

Brian D. O’Leary:  This is a good one. I went back to sports: Jeff Pearlman. Anything by Jeff Pearlman is just awful. He’s a mean guy. He’s written some incredible bestsellers about all sorts of topics, the ’86 Mets, the Dallas Cowboys, Roger Clemens. He used to be a writer at Sports Illustrated, and he pissed a lot of people off because he’s a jerk. He wrote the famous John Rocker piece that got Rocker in all that hot water. One of his books would be Sweetness, about Walter Payton. The way Pearlman works, he doesn’t really talk to the primary subjects. He talks to people around the edges and crafts a narrative around that. He knows a lot of stuff. He wrote a USFL book that was pretty interesting, because I loved the USFL as a kid. We had a team in Portland for one year. Whether his books are accurate or honest, that’s not the case. He wants to take people down, like Walter Payton. We all have flaws, but the man was very respected by his teammates. He was the leading rusher in the NFL at one point, until Emmitt Smith took that over. It was a total character assassination. I don’t think there’s a huge need for that, particularly if you don’t get the story right, if you tell it the way you want just to sell more books or create controversy. That’s what he does. So stay away from Jeff Pearlman. I’ve read a few of his books, but no longer.

THE GOAT

Andrew Flattery:  Well said. That brings me to my penultimate category, and this one is just the GOATs. You get one pick, probably for a dad, because this is the Dad Book Podcast. What’s the one book you can recommend? You can’t categorize it in any particular way. It’s just, what’s the one thing I’m going to love to read? For me this is easy. When I threw my list out there, this is probably the author most people responded to, like, “Yeah, this guy is the best.” And he’s newer, so you could probably find his works at an airport bookstore. The author’s name is Robert Kurson. The book I’m going to pick is Shadow Divers, and it’s a joy to read. It’s about a group of independent divers on the East Coast who find a German U-boat sunk at the bottom of the Atlantic just off the coast of the US. It’s thrilling, interesting, a kind of rewrite-history story, and a story about male friendship. My brother Tim gave me this book, and he also recommended Pirate Hunters, another Robert Kurson book. Tim is on the beat of Robert Kurson, and I imagine my brother Tim cried reading this book, because it’s that good. It’s got it all. So, Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Okay, I’ve got one. It might be a hidden gem too. I found this book lying around, picked it up, and started reading it. I’d never heard of the author. This is probably close to twenty years ago now. Turns out you may have heard of him: Richard Ford. He’s a novelist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for the sequel to this book, a book called Independence Day, and he’s now made a series based on this character. The original book was from 1986, called The Sportswriter. It only came out in paperback. It didn’t come out in hardback, though you could probably find reprints now. It tells the story of a man who’s a sportswriter having a midlife crisis. One of his sons had just died, he’s got another son, and I believe he’s just divorced.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Richard Ford, at a certain point in his life, in the early eighties, wrote for a magazine called Inside Sports. It was like the kid brother of Sport Magazine and Sports Illustrated. It only lasted a few years, but it was good and had some good journalism. He’s a trained novelist. You know Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and that bunch of guys from the seventies. They all palled around together at one point. A tremendous novelist, Richard Ford. He has this series now, three or four books and a couple of novellas, about a character named Frank Bascombe. I’d recommend it. It’s a hidden gem. I liked it better than Independence Day, but that’s because I read it first.

Andrew Flattery:  I’ve heard of it, heard of the author, never read the book. So that’s your GOAT, The Sportswriter by Richard Ford.

Brian D. O’Leary:  If we’re talking dad books, about fatherhood and being a dad, yeah.

WHERE TO FIND BRIAN

Andrew Flattery:  Good stuff, Brian. What’s new with you these days?

Brian D. O’Leary:  Doing a lot of substacking. Not as much podcasting as I want, but over the last several months I’ve tried to do an interview with an author every few weeks about a new book. Like you mentioned, Andy, it’s been a lot of sports or sports-related books. I’ve got a few more coming up over the summer. There are a lot of interesting people talking about interesting things, and somehow they come over the transom and I get them on the show. My Substack is at olearyreview.com. We write about all sorts of stuff, but primarily I’ve been trying to hone it down to sports and culture.

Brian D. O’Leary:  In the past I just talked about everything and anything, but the stuff that resonates is the sports. As I said on the show a while back, I don’t really care what happened in the Cubs game last night, or what the Red Sox bullpen did, or how the Sabres did on their power play. The day-to-day about sports has no interest to me anymore. But I’m really into the history, what sports can tell us about our culture. Where were we, where are we headed, how do sports apply, how do they not apply?

Andrew Flattery:  Interesting. I love it. That’s a really interesting beat. As you’ve pointed out, we’re getting less of that with the demise of Sports Illustrated, which is sad. But it’s good to see you’re still on it.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Yeah, and there’s not a ton of what I’d call great sports writing anymore. There are a lot of people who write about sports, and it bothers me, because it’s a lot about fantasy sports and gambling, really tuned into their team. The ultra-fan who knows everything about the team. I was into that for a while, but not anymore. I was never really into fantasy sports or gambling. When I got into independent media, I started out as a sports podcaster. That’s all I wanted to do, a radio show or a sports podcast. Then the whole COVID thing, and the way the leagues and players and fans reacted, I got sick of it. I didn’t want to do it for a long time. But absence makes the heart grow fonder, I guess, so I’m back into doing a lot more sports stuff than I ever planned. I still don’t want to talk about what happened in some event all the time. But there are a lot of stories we can dig into from our past.

Andrew Flattery:  Well, good. Brian, thanks for coming on and sharing your picks for the Dad Book Review on Gentleman Speculator. I’d invite everyone to subscribe to olearyreview.com, as have I. Good to chat with you, Brian.

Brian D. O’Leary:  Thanks, Andy. We’ll have to get you on to talk about The Adventures of Leo and Henry. Speaking of books.

Andrew Flattery:  Sure, absolutely. I’m working on a second book. When I get a little closer, maybe I’ll send you one and you can take a look.

Brian D. O’Leary:  You got it.

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Brian D. O’Leary writes The O’Leary Review and interviews authors about new books on his podcast, with a focus on sports, culture, and history. You can find his work and subscribe at olearyreview.com.

Gentleman Speculator is produced by Flattery Wealth Management.

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