Veteran Sportswriter Jack Curry Gives Readers a Behind-the-Scenes Look at ‘The Greatest Team Ever’

When Jack Curry, FCRH ’86, began interviewing players for a book about the Yankees’ 1998 season, he asked Hall of Fame shortstop Derek Jeter to describe the team. “Greatest team ever,” Jeter told Curry. “That’s what comes to mind.” And that’s how the subtitle of Curry’s latest book, The 1998 Yankees: The Inside Story of the Greatest Baseball Team Ever (Hachette, 2023) was born.

Curry has been covering the team for decades. He co-wrote Jeter’s 2000 book, The Life You Imagine: Life Lessons for Achieving Your Dreams, and he’s also written books with former Yankees Paul O’Neill and David Cone. Since 2010, he’s been an analyst on the YES Network, and for more than two decades prior to that, he was a sportswriter for The New York Times, including during the 1998 season.

Now, 25 years later, he takes readers through the team’s incredible 125-win season, from a sluggish 1-4 start through an impressive postseason run that culminated in the Yankees’ 24th World Series title (they’ve added three more since then). And while Curry recounts all the big moments fans know so well, he also peels back the curtain so readers can appreciate the back stories and see how the players—and a dramatic season—came together.

Curry shares how the night before David Wells threw a perfect game, he was out drinking until the wee hours with then-Saturday Night Live star Jimmy Fallon; how a connection General Manager Brian Cashman made the season before helped the Yankees sign a contract with pitcher Orlando “El Duque” Hernández, who defected from Cuba on Christmas Day, 1997; how closer Mariano Rivera came across his signature cut fastball during a game of catch; and how Scott Brosius went from “a player to be named later” in a trade to World Series MVP.

For Yankees fans and baseball fans alike, Curry’s latest book offers a front-row seat to the team’s journey from a heartbreaking playoff loss in 1997 to the top of the world just a year later.

—Kelly Prinz, FCRH ’15

Jerry McGill Explores Family Dynamics, Betrayal, and Forgiveness in The Color of Family

In his latest novel, The Color of Family (Little a, 2023), Jerry McGill shares a portrait of the Paynes, an upper-class, African American family that lives in suburban Connecticut. Despite appearances, the Paynes aren’t quite as happy as people assume—made all the more evident when twins from France, the result of one of patriarch Harold Payne’s extramarital affairs, arrive on the family’s doorstep.

One fateful night, brothers Devon and James are in a car accident that leaves Devon paralyzed. James eventually goes off to college and excels at the sport they both loved. When Devon is moved into a rehabilitation center across the country, the distance between them—wrought by their explosive, sports-fueled rivalry—is no longer just figurative.

Years later, as Devon travels around the world over the course of a decade to visit his seven siblings, he sees how the traumatic accident of his youth has affected—and connected—them all. They each may have moved on, but it’s only through forgiveness and coming to terms with the past that they’ll be able to live freely in the present.

Though Devon is at the center of the novel, McGill weaves in diary entries and first-person narratives from the other characters, giving readers a chance to examine the relationships, events, and heartbreaks from multiple perspectives. The novel is fewer than 300 pages long, and that, coupled with the shifting points of view, makes it a great, page-turning summer read.

McGill is the author of two other novels, including Bed Stuy: A Love Story, and a memoir, Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me. Read our 2012 profile of McGill and review of his memoir.

Award-Winning Novelist Andrew Krivak Evokes the Effects of War on Four Generations of a Pennsylvania Family

The title and epigraph of Andrew Krivak’s century-spanning new novel come from the Book of Joel. Warning of ecological disaster, the biblical prophet compares a plague of locusts to war horses: “Their appearance is like the appearance of horses, and like war horses, they run.”

The proverbial war horses run through each generation of the family at the heart of this lyrical, moving book. Homecomings are both longed-for and fraught, as each generation is haunted by the moral complexities of war, and by their own struggles to survive battles intensely physical and psychological.

The novel begins in 1933, when a teenage Bexhet “Becks” Konar flees fascist death squads in Hungary. He appears at the Dardan, Pennsylvania, homestead of Josef Vinich, who saved his infant life at the end of World War I. Vinich, now co-owner of a roughing mill, treats Becks like a son. Eventually, Becks and Vinich’s daughter, Hannah, fall in love, marry, and have two children, Bo and Samuel, before Becks is sent to fight for his adopted country in World War II.

He returns from the war a shell of his former self, and in 1949 he’s killed in a hunting accident—shot through the chest by Paul Younger, whose father had been forced to sell his land to Vinich years earlier, and whose family becomes even more intimately linked with the Konars.

In the 1960s, Samuel enlists in the Marines, becomes a prisoner of war, and develops a heroin addiction. Both he and Bo eventually learn about their father’s battles in World War II, which include a charge of desertion, imprisonment, and a bloody stint as part of the Romani resistance.

From one generation to the next, peace is elusive. And while Krivak depicts the violence of war with frightening intimacy, he’s also attuned to the persistence of beauty and grace in nature and in what love endures.

In 2012, when Krivak received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, which recognizes “the power of the written word to promote peace,” he dedicated the award to the people who shaped him, including his immigrant grandmother, whose stories about life in what is now Slovakia continue to inform his fiction.

“They’ve all done their work. They’ve all found their peace,” he said in an acceptance speech. “What remains is for us to keep telling of it as well as to keep praying for it, to keep insisting upon it as well as to keep hoping for it, and to keep listening so that we’ll know when to act, whether it’s out in the world … or at work on a sentence, alone in a room with words.”

Like the Appearance of Horses (Bellevue Literary Press) is the culmination of Krivak’s Dardan Trilogy, a saga that began with his 2011 debut novel, The Sojourn, which focuses on Josef Vinich’s experiences as an Austro-Hungarian conscript in World War I. Each book in the series, which also includes 2017’s The Signal Flame, can stand on its own.

Krivak is also the author of the 2020 novel The Bear (read an excerpt), a collection of poetry, and A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, a 2008 memoir about his eight years as a Jesuit.

—Ryan Stellabotte

There are bears still, said the man. They come and go, but keep to themselves.

I like that the mountaintop looks like one. And that it will always stay right where it is, said the girl.

That’s why I put her there, the man said. The bear is a companion to her while she sleeps. I hope one day I’ll sleep there, too.

The girl was quiet for a moment, then asked, What are they really like?

Bears?

Yes. Are they nice?

They’re shy, the man said, if that’s what you mean.

I mean will they roar at us and come eat our food if they’re hungry? The real ones?

No, said the man. They don’t roar unless you bother them. Or threaten their young. My father once told me they will travel a long way to do good, for their own or another. It’s a promise they make when they are very young, whispering it to their mothers even before their eyes are open.

The girl swung slowly in the hammock, wondering what a bear’s whispered promise might sound like, until the man asked, Would you like to hear the story my father told me about a bear who saved an entire village by keeping that promise?

Yes, the girl said, and sat up so quickly that the hammock almost overturned them onto the pine-needle floor. The man grabbed hold of the tree just in time, and after a good laugh, he began to tell this story to the girl.

Once upon a time, in a place along a wide and winding river, there lived a king who demanded the villagers in his kingdom give him all of the silver and gold they possessed. They were good farmers on fertile land, but he was the king. So they gave him their silver and gold and went out to their fields to grow the food they would eat, thankful at least for the fruit of their labors. Summer went by peacefully and the villagers were about to take in one of their best harvests ever, when the king demanded they give him all of the grain they had grown.

They resisted, asking, Why would you do this to us? What will we eat? But the king answered none of their questions. He sent his soldiers and took everything the people had harvested, so that they had to live on what they could glean from the dust on the floor.

That winter, not long before the calendar said it was spring, and with the people on the brink of starvation, an old but affable bear came through the village on his way to the fair. When he saw what a state the villagers were in, he asked them why. So they told him.

And after our children die, the village elder said, we will die, and then, of whom will that king be king?

The bear scratched the hair under his hat and asked for a small wagon, a bundle of hay, and a large coat. He put the hay in the wagon, threw the coat over the pile, and set off with the wagon in the direction of the king’s palace.

When the bear arrived, he asked for an audience with the king, and when he stood before him, he asked the rich king if he would like to see a dance.

The king said yes, because he was lonely, and so the bear danced.

And when the bear had finished with the performance, the king was so delighted, he asked the bear if he would dance for him again in the morning.

Yes, said the bear. If you give me some food from your stores.

The king agreed, and this was how the bear found out where the king kept the grain he had taken from the villagers. That night the bear filled his wagon and left in the storeroom the hay he had brought.

In the morning, after the bear had danced again for the king, he said that he would come back the next day if the king let him retreat to the other side of the river so that he could practice a new dance. The king agreed, and the bear wheeled his wagon out of the castle grounds, with the grain piled high beneath the cover of the large coat. The palace guards saw the same wagon leaving as the one that had arrived, and so they suspected nothing.

The bear did this from the first quarter moon to the full, leaving only large piles of hay in the king’s storehouse. In that time, he gave all of the grain back to the villagers, without so much as the king’s cook knowing that it was gone, for he thought the bear had simply eaten his fill and the hay had been there all along.

Now, when the full moon was waning and the villagers could feed themselves again, they asked the bear if he had seen their silver and gold. He said he had, for it was kept in the same row of locked storehouses where the king kept the grain. With their money back, the villagers said, they could raise an army and overthrow the king. And yet, they despaired of ever seeing their fortunes again.

The bear had missed the fair by now and had become fond of the villagers. He scratched his head again and said, I will get your silver and gold back. I ask only that you wait to overthrow your king until I return with my own army to help you.

The villagers couldn’t believe their luck.

You have an army? they asked.

Of course, said the bear. It’s made up of every animal and tree in the forest.

So the villagers agreed and the bear left for the palace.

The king was overjoyed to see the bear, for he needed cheering up. All of the food he had stored away from the harvest was gone and he didn’t know what he could offer.

A piece of silver will do, the bear said, and then I will be on my way.

The king agreed, and the bear danced his best dance ever, after which the king bade the bear to follow his guards to the storeroom and take whatever amount of silver he thought was a fair price for the dance. The bear, true to his word, took one piece of silver and placed it in his pocket. Then he asked if he could sleep there, as it was late and, with the moon on the wane, there would be robbers in the forest.

Now, while the king and all of his court slept, the bear bribed the blacksmith with a silver piece to start his forge, after which the blacksmith could go back to sleep. And when the forge was hot and the blacksmith was snoring away like flabby bellows, the bear melted down all the silver and gold in the storehouse. Then he poured the silver into four molds of four wheels, and the gold into the mold of a wagon.

In the morning the bear took ashes from the forge and blackened the silver wheels and the golden wagon, then wheeled his pile of hay covered with the large overcoat away from the palace, through the forest, and into the village, giving back everything the king had stolen from his subjects in the form of the wagon.

The villagers were beside themselves with joy. They wanted to melt down the silver and gold right away and get to work on their army, when the bear reminded them, Wait for me before you go into battle. Otherwise, it will not go well.

The villagers all agreed. The bear waved good-bye and walked off along the road that led into the forest.

One season went by, then another, and another, and the bear did not return. In time, the villagers went back to their farming, the old king died, and his daughter ascended to the throne. This young woman was intelligent and kind, forgiving and fair. She treated her subjects well, and they worked for her in return. And no one in that village ever again set eyes on the bear.

After the man had finished the story, the girl sat in the hammock, rocking still, and stared off in the direction of the forest.

Have bears ever really talked to people? she asked her father. I don’t mean in the stories. I mean when there were people to talk to.

I’ve never heard one, the man said. The bear we saw was quiet, but maybe he didn’t see us, or didn’t have anything to say. So I don’t know.

He saw us, said the girl.

Well, there’s your answer, said the man.

Excerpt from The Bear. Copyright © 2020 by Andrew Krivak. Published by Bellevue Literary Press: www.blpress.org. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Andrew Krivak, GSAS ’95, is the author of three novels, including The Sojourn, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2011. He is also the author of A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, a 2008 memoir about his eight years as a Jesuit. He lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in the shadow of Mount Monadnock, which inspired much of the landscape in his latest novel.