The Exchange – John Grisham
Fifteen years after his unfortunate business in Memphis, Mitch McDeere is living in New York, a partner at one of the world’s biggest law firms. When a beloved colleague in Rome falls ill, Mitch agrees to take over his prized case: suing the Libyan government for money owed to a Turkish firm who built a bridge in the middle of the desert. Things quickly go south, though, when an associate, the daughter of Mitch’s Italian colleague, is kidnapped while attempting to visit the bridge. When Mitch’s wife is contacted about the ransom demands, they are reminded of the trouble they faced fifteen years prior, quickly putting their kids into hiding. Can Mitch work with his firm and the involved governments to raise the money needed to save his associate? Or will she suffer the same fate as her male bodyguards: killed and beheaded?
Back in 1993, I read The Firm, my first John Grisham novel. 30 years later, we finally get a sequel in The Exchange, though there isn’t much of a throughline aside from the McDeeres and the trauma the suffered in the earlier work. I enjoyed most of it, though the ending felt a little anti-climatic and seemed to wrap everything up too quickly. I’ve been in and out on Grisham since the early days in the 90s, and it feels like I’m heading towards out again, at least for the foreseeable future.
On Thursday, the White Sox announced that John Schriffen, a 39-year-old from New York, had signed a multi-year deal to become the team’s new television play-by-play announcer. He replaces Jason Benetti, who, due to growing frustrations with the White Sox front office, left in November to fill the same role with the Tigers after seven years in the White Sox booth. Schriffen, who is biracial, becomes the second Black television play-by-play announcer in MLB, joining Dave Sims of the Mariners.
In June of 1954, a new sports magazine hit the shelves. Sports Illustrated quickly became the bible of the sports world, becoming the place to find long-form, in-depth articles about the games that Americans followed, or were about to follow. In 1964, they published their first swimsuit issue, helping to keep interest in the magazine in the down time between the end of football season and the start of baseball season. The magazine continued to be the leader in sports journalism until the late 1990s, when the type of stories long associated with the print world moved to the internet. In 2018, the magazine was sold and then sold again, to a venture capital firm that then licensed the brand name to a publisher that only wished to wring whatever value was left. Today, it all came to an end, as the licensing agreement was terminated and the entire staff of Sports Illustrated was informed they would be laid off.