Summer 2025 Book Reviews
Update 8/18/2025 7:16 PM
(To make it easy for you to buy any of these books if you are interested, I made each image linked to buying the book right on amazon.com or bookshop.org. I do get a commission if you use the links in this post.)
By Bud Withers
Lighthouse24 (2025)
If you are an alum of Washington State or Washington, or you are a follower of Cougar or Husky football, or you just like good writing, this is a book for you. It is a history of the “Apple Cup” football rivalry, the state of Washington’s version of the “Civil War” staged annually in Oregon.
Bud Withers was a must-read in Northwest newspaper sportswriting circles for 45 years, beginning at the Eugene Register-Guard in 1970, three days after his graduation from Washington State. Withers moved to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1987, then to the Seattle Times in 1999, where he spent the rest of his career, retiring in 2015.
In Seattle, he served as beat writer for the Huskies until 2002, when he broadened his role to more of a Pac-10/12 writer and columnist. A resident of Woodinville, Wash., he covered 28 Apple Cups and has attended 31 in his lifetime.
This is Withers’ sixth book, including recent ones on Gonzaga basketball and Oregon’s “Kamikaze Kids” under Dick Harter in the 1970s. It features clear, creative prose and paints the picture of a rivalry on the gridiron that began with a 5-5 tie back in 1900, but has mostly been dominated by Washington.
There is a year-by-year review and analysis that goes all the way through to 2024, a 24-19 upset win by the Cougars at the Seahawks’ Lumen Field. That was the first meeting between the schools since Washington bolted for the Big Ten, leaving Washington State high and dry with Oregon State as the only remaining members of the Pac-12. Hence the clever book title. Even while not in the same conference for the first time since 1962, the U-Dub-Wazzu rivalry is too good to be through.
Through the years, the Huskies hold a 73-33-6 edge in the series. They have the advantage of being a richer university and athletic department based in a metropolitan area, compared to the rural Cougars being located in remote eastern Washington, a place to which is much more difficult to recruit.
But that is what has made every Washington State victory all the more sweet for Cougar fans. Withers chronicles them here in detail over the final three-quarters of the book, providing back stories and the perspective of many of the coaches and players who took part in each of the games in the 125-year rivalry.
“The initial plan was to do a straightforward historical, year-by-year game detail type of thing,” says Withers. “I realized pretty early it didn’t make a lot of sense to just give readers game detail. They needed a sense of where the game stood in relation to a particular season, to have it put it in context to a season or a period if seasons.”
The first 57 pages are from interviews with a collection of coaches, players, athletic department officials and fans of both schools, providing color to the content of the rivalry.
“I wanted to convey the relationships across the state of Huskies and Cougars in the workplace,” Withers says. “What I had envisioned was getting into a lot of side bets and funny, quirky wagers that fans put on games. I couldn’t flesh out a lot of that stuff, so it morphed into how Huskies get along with Cougars, and how they may have helped each other and conversely, how neighbors might have jousted with each other.”
There is a story about how rival quarterbacks Brock Huard and Ryan Leaf became friends. And one on how attorneys who were both members of the same fraternity in college — one a Husky, one a Cougar, one a prosecutor, one a public defender — found common ground to forge a strong personal relationship over the years.
“The idea of them going against each other in the courtroom but becoming friends should appeal to readers,” Withers says.
Withers got the idea to write the book while covering UW football in the ‘90s.
“Somebody said, ‘There has never been an Apple Cup book written,’ ” he says. “I filed that away in the back of my mind, that it would be cool to do that someday.”
In 2005, Withers started researching newspaper stories on microfilm, mostly at the UW school library. He did a few early interviews, including a long one with legendary Husky coach Don James, and then got into the project full bore in 2022 just after the Covid pandemic.
Readers will recognize a plethora of names who meant something to the Apple Cup through the years. Coaches such as James and Jim Owens and Rick Neuheisel and Chris Petersen on the Washington side, Mike Price and Jim Sweeney and Jim Walden and Mike Leach with Washington State. Players such as Napoleon Kauffman, Steve Emtman, Sonny Sixkiller, Corey Dillon, Joe Steele and Cody Pickett from the Huskies, Mel Hein, Reuben Mayes, Drew Bledsoe, Steve Broussard, Alex Brink and Jayden de Laura from the Cougars.
I got an early review copy, so I have read “Too Good to be Through.” It is scheduled for release on Sept. 1 and will be available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
And (shameless plug coming) if you are interested in a book detailing the Oregon State-Oregon gridiron rivalry, go to here and place an order for “Civil War Rivalry.” Both will make an excellent gift for Christmas.
Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life
By Bill Madden
Simon & Schuster (2020)
This book is an offshoot of a 2019 documentary for which Madden — a long-time sportswriter for the New York Daily News — interviewed Seaver, the Hall of Fame pitcher.
It is a nice book — not great, but a good read — by Madden, who also wrote two books about George Steinbrenner and one with Lou Piniella. Madden covered the Yankees before becoming a columnist for the Daily News and never covered Seaver’s Mets teams, but developed a strong relationship with him and gained his confidence somewhere along the way.
Seaver was perhaps the premier pitcher in the major leagues in the late 1960s and ‘70s on his way to a 20-year career in which he compiled a record of 311-205 with a 2.86 ERA. The Fresno, Calif., native was National League Rookie of the Year in 1967, won three Cy Young Awards and was a 12-time All-Star and a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Seaver won 20 games only four times but was a model of consistency, winning 14 games or more 15 times. He is one of two pitchers to win 300 games, record 3,000 strikeouts and finish with an ERA under 3.00, joining Walter Johnson.
“Tom Terrific” was a workhorse even for that era, throwing more than 200 innings in 16 of his 20 seasons, including the first 13 in a row. He pitched more than 250 innings in each of his first 12 campaigns. (Last season, Seattle’s Logan Gilbert led the majors with 208 2/3 innings pitched. It’s a new world.)
Seaver contracted Lyme disease, a bacterial infection, in 1991. He fully recovered and it lay dormant in his body until the last decade of his life, when it returned in full force and greatly affected his memory and equilibrium. He died in 2020 at age 75 from complications of Lewy body dementia and Covid-19.
The author got much of his information of Tom’s latter years from his wife of more than 50 years, Nancy. Tom’s good qualities are emphasized, but Madden doesn’t sugar-coat his deficiencies. He quotes former teammate Ed Lynch as saying, “Tom had a huge ego, and he was not the friendliest guy, especially with the younger players … he could ‘big-time’ players and writers he didn’t know as well as anyone I have ever known.”
And particularly as he got older, and the dementia began to take hold, Seaver could be difficult, walking out in the middle of autograph signing events, for instance.
But he comes off as a good man, an organizer, a leader, an extremely hard worker, loyal to his childhood pals as well as his teammates in New York and Cincinnati. He may not have been one of a kind, but there haven’t been many like him.
NEW: The Dean of Portland Sports is now on BlueSky.
By Steve Gleason
Alfred A. Knopf (2024)
Unless you’re a fan of Washington State football or the New Orleans Saints, the name Steve Gleason may escape you. Gleason was a football/baseball standout at Wazzu, a starting linebacker on the 1998 Rose Bowl team and a four-year starter in centerfield. He then played eight years as a balls-out special teams star for the Saints, the guy who in 2006 blocked the punt that led to victory over Atlanta in the first game in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina.
In 2011, Gleason was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at age 33, just four years after he had retired from the NFL. It was a low blow to a young man who was an adventurist on steroids, traveling the world and putting his body through every physical test (backpacking, surfing, sky-diving, bungee jumping, cliff-diving, raw-pig-intestine-eating — no kidding on the last one).
Gleason takes the reader through a detailed explanation of his life since, including his marriage with Michel, whom he had wed in 2008. As you can imagine, it hasn’t been easy for either as Steve lost the ability to walk, talk and breathe on his own. It takes hours for a team of caregivers to get him ready for each day.
But Steve has survived and, in many ways, thrived. He and Michel have two sons — both born after he was diagnosed. The marriage, as Steve describes in explicit terms, has been a rocky road, but it too has survived.
A documentary film of the first five years after diagnosis (called “Gleason”) premiered to strong reviews at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. The crew even filmed Michel giving birth for the first time. “I watched myself lose the ability to talk, scream in agonizing frustration, weep and have poop pulled out of my ass,” writes Gleason, who watched with Michel at Sundance. “It was a terrifying, exhilarating adventure for the both of us.”
With the help of technology, Gleason has given many motivational speeches since and done what he can to help raise money for ALS community life. He founded “Team Gleason,” now the leading ALS service organization in the country. In 2019, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal at a ceremony in Washington D.C.
Gleason bares his soul in this very unusual autobiography, written with New Orleans Picayune sports columnist Jeff Duncan. The reader is left to laugh and cry and be moved by the depth of this very special man who has been struck by an awful disease, but has never given in to it.
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