Some damn good reading

 Jon Huntsman hoisting the hardware at a New Hampshire gun shop.

One of the nice things about finding myself between books is that it gives me a little more time to catch up with magazines and other shorter forms of writing. Here's a quick roundup of what I've read and enjoyed lately:

Republican guy with chance to beat Obama. 
That would be Jon Huntsman, the twice-elected governor of Utah who officially nominated Sarah Palin for vice president in 2008, then served as U.S. ambassador to China. Unlike the rest of the minions scrambling to become the party's nominee in 2012, Huntsman is a rarity: a centrist Republican with legitimate business, political and foreign policy experience. He's fluent in Mandarin Chinese, smart enough to be asked to teach international relations at Penn and, if all the cards fall exactly right, could come out of New Hampshire with enough momentum to surprise Romney, Bachmann and the others.

Chris Jones, writing in Esquire ("Romney doesn't scare Obama. This guy does.") observes:

It's...hard to look at him and not wonder whether he might be coming along right on time. He'll be called a RINO [Republican In Name Only] and a traitor and a nobody in the coming weeks and months, but he'll also be called reasonable and practical and professorial and electable. Even today, so close to the start of everything, his path is clear. He needs to find a broader Republican base, drawing in those right-leaning voters who presently find themselves without a country, fiscal conservatives who don't much care whether two men get hitched or their candidate's wearing a pin in his lapel. His success or failure will be dictated by just how many people like him have been waiting for the storm of paranoid rhetoric to pass, waiting for the return of a party and a candidate who wants to govern rather than rage.

The enduring appeal of baseball.
For anyone who carries a soft spot for baseball -- despite the exorbitant salaries and the watered-down competition that's come with expansion to 28 major league teams -- this love letter by Joe Posnanski in Sports Illustrated is a satisfying read.

"What keeps the grand game great?" the headline reads. "Everything old is new again..."

In his essay, Posnanski says it's the quality of timelessness that explains the sport's appeal across the decades and our country's changing demographics. "What else but baseball connects us to America of, say, 1891?" he asks.

Here we are, 120 years later, in a very different America, and yes, all the time, we read that baseball can't keep up with the pace of our everyday lives, that television ratings are down, that football long ago took over as the National Pastime. But is that really the surprising part? Or is the surprising part that America still loves and breathes baseball, long after barbershop quartets stopped singing, long after couples stopped waltzing, long after boxers stopped hitting each other with their bare fists.

Why in the heck do so many of us still love baseball?

Sgt. Alan Beaty, Cpl. Patrick Myers, Sgt. Keith Hull, Cpl. Keith Beaty

Our wounded warriors.
A 2008 Rand Corp. study of 1.6 million American veterans who had served in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars found that 300,000 suffered from PTSD or major depression. That's nearly one in five. An astounding ratio. And as of 2011, the number of vets from those wars has now surged past the 2 million mark.

So what is anyone doing about it? Meet Alan Beaty, a former U.S. Marine sergeant who lives on the family homestead in Tennessee that was awarded to an ancestor for his service in the Revolutionary War. He's one of those with 100 percent disability and he has turned the spread into an unofficial, unfunded halfway house for fellow vets who've come back from the Middle East with physical and mental disabilities.

There, far away from the scrum of city life, they revive the camaraderie they forged on foreign lands, relive the memories, retell the stories that bond them in ways that civilians find difficult, if not possible, to understand. There, in stints from a few days to several months and even a year or more, they begin to heal.

The place is called "Vetville" and the story of the land and the men who gather there is told in compelling fashion by Mike Sager (yes, in Esquire, again). An excerpt:

Beaty scratches his head, resets his trucker cap. "When they teach you to be a Marine, they teach you to focus, because you can't be emotional in combat. You learn to be able to put things out of your mind. You learn to build walls. We've been trained to just keep functioning, to operate without emotion, without conscience. That's what you need in war. 

"But once you get back to society," Beaty continues, "the walls are still up. It's hard to have an emotional attachment to people. Because in your mind, you've been trained to know that this right here could be your last day on earth. So why allow myself to be connected to this woman? Why allow myself to be connected to my children? Lucky I got an amazing woman therapist now at the VA. It's only in the last few months that I'm learning how to take the walls down."

Politics. Baseball. The casualties of war. Take your pick. It's all good.


Photograph of Jon Huntsman by Peter Yang.
Photograph of U.S. Marines at Vetville by Jonathan Torgovnik.