The author has long been a media icon. His ability to entertain an audience with his easygoing, folksy style has helped maintain his popularity for decades. He is especially well liked by his “greatest generation” contemporaries, regaling them with nostalgic tales of shared experiences. As a sub-category of those stories, King wrote this paean to the national pastime. King narrates the audio version of this collection of anecdotes, in which he tells about following the Brooklyn Dodgers as a youth, meeting some of the most famous baseball personalities of the mid-twentieth century, and in general defending, like a graduate student, his assertion that the object of his adoration has all other sports beat, hands down. He is at his most charming when he discusses the arguments among his boyhood buddies—typical of baseball fans of any generation—over the best player or team. Listeners of a certain age will relate to the difficulties of growing up poor during the Depression, when even the paltry price of admission to a game was hard to come by. One of the most entertaining segments deals with King’s first interview with Leo Durocher, one of his heroes. One can imagine the sweat on the young newsman’s brow as he submits to “the Lip’s” inexplicable, explicit verbal abuse. But this unabridged two-tape set suffers from a dearth of material (the printed book is only 160 pages). A fair portion of it isn’t even original, although King always credits his sources. In one section, he quotes an entire article by sportswriter Thomas Boswell listing baseball’s virtues compared with football (reminiscent of a more comedic offering from George Carlin). King similarly employs quotes from numerous athletes and celebrities on the rich history of the game. King’s delivery is soothing, like a favorite uncle reading a bedtime story. At times he becomes especially animated, as when he describes incidents from his days in Brooklyn. In other sections he is slightly mechanical, somewhat disappointing from someone who is a long-time performer and is reading his own work. The raconteur gives his own impressions of certain events that differ slightly from long-accepted versions. This might seem picayune, but savvy baseball fans always know when something is amiss. All this said, Why I Love Baseball is a heartfelt veneration. Baseball literature is sometimes accused of being too sentimental, but when King speaks of how his young sons are developing their own interests, poring over the daily box scores and defending their own favorite ballplayers, he reinforces the oft-rhapsodized legacy of passing on the enjoyment of the game. RON KAPLAN (August 16, 2004)
Abstract [ 11 C]( R )‐(−)‐RWAY has been shown to be a promising radioligand for imaging brain 5‐HT 1A receptors with positron emission tomography in rodents and nonhuman primates. We now report the first use of [ 11 C]( R )‐(−)‐RWAY in six healthy human subjects, using kinetic brain imaging and serial arterial measurements of plasma parent radiotracer. At 80 min after radiotracer injection, activity ratios were about three for brain receptor‐rich regions compared with cerebellum. However, the washout from brain was unexpectedly slow relative to plasma clearance of the parent radiotracer. This disparity between brain and plasma activity was quantified with distribution volume calculated from increasingly truncated brain imaging data. In both receptor‐rich regions and cerebellum, distribution volumes were unstable and increased continuously from 90 to 150 min by about 30%. This increasing distribution volume was unlikely due to the variations or errors of plasma input at later time points, since a similar truncation of plasma time points from 150 to 90 min did not significantly affect the analysis of the brain data. When the metabolites of [ 11 C]( R )‐(−)‐RWAY in human and monkey were compared, a moderate lipophilic radiometabolite was present at a significantly higher percentage of total plasma radioactivity in human than in monkey. The relatively slow washout of activity from brain and the temporal instability of distribution volume likely reflect the accumulation of radiometabolite(s) in human brain. Although prior studies in rodents and nonhuman primates showed [ 11 C]( R )‐(−)‐RWAY to be a promising radiotracer, we suspect that a species difference in metabolism caused this serious deficiency in humans. Synapse 61:469–477, 2007. Published 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Purpose We aimed to fulfill a need for a radioligand that may be simply labeled with carbon-11 for effective positron emission tomography (PET) imaging of brain 5-HT1A receptors. Methods Racemic RWAY (2,3,4,5,6,7-hexahydro-1-[4-[1[4-(2-methoxyphenyl)piperazinyl]]-2-phenylbutyryl]-1Hazepine) has high affinity for 5-HT1A receptors. The enantiomers of RWAY and O-desmethyl-RWAY, synthesized from commercially available materials, were each labeled with carbon-11 by treating the respective O
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