Prose

For Ravens bloggers including Derek Arnold, writing about Baltimore's football team this season has been a joy they did not expect. "Everything about being a Ravens fan is more fun this year than last, and blogging is no exception," wrote Arnold, who writes at bmorebirdsnest.com, in an e-mail. "The turnaround by the team has been incredible to watch, and a blast to cover compared to the dismal season last year. Now if only we could get those 'orange birds' to do a similar 180 ..." Ravens blogs come and go, but there's at least a half-dozen or so dependable ones that post regularly.

Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou Random House / 176 pages / $25 Larger than life in a quintessentially American way, Maya Angelou has taken self-reinvention to a level that other American writing legends, like Hemingway, only wished for. Reading her latest collection of vignettes and extrapolations from her incredibly full and vivid life, Letter to My Daughter, one cannot help but be struck by how much Angelou has overcome and how far she has...

It's been quite a week for the document dump. Fanciers of raw, unexpurgated information - read journalists - are probably cross-eyed by now, or at least reaching for reading glasses 0.5 above their usual magnification. First, the Justice Department unloaded 3,000 pages worth of e-mail, memos and such on a congressional committee investigating the Bush administration's firing of eight U.S. attorneys. I had barely mined that data - which the committee put online - when along came an even richer lode, at least for Marylanders, from a bribery and public corruption case against a former state senator.

Bill Armstrong has patrolled the woods and waters for 40 years, protecting wildlife from poachers. You might think that would make him a little grumpy about his fellow two-legged critters, but somehow it hasn't. Instead, Armstrong has written a delightful book about the people with whom he crossed paths as a wildlife law enforcement officer with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources and now as the game and environment officer at Aberdeen Proving Ground. It is his affinity for the common man that makes When Whip-poor-wills Call ($22; 208 pages; McClain Printing Co.)

Just because a book is popular doesn't mean it's good - and by good I mean gracefully written, logically plotted and peopled by believable characters who speak in believable ways. But mega-gazillion-sellers like the The Da Vinci Code prove a book doesn't need literary quality to score big in the quantity department. Although Dan Brown's theological thriller boasts a fast-paced, cinematic style, intriguing puzzles and controversial theories about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the Roman Catholic Church and women, and the symbolism of major artworks, its prose is pedestrian, bordering on painful, and the plot doesn't make much sense.

A Changed Man Francine Prose Harper Perennial / 421 pages / $14.95 Prose's satire concerns a purportedly reformed white supremacist who wants now to lend his services to a human rights organization. Prose "delivers a well-crafted, ironic and insightful tale of the darker side of human nature," we said last year.

In Rockville yesterday morning, hours before he would officially announce for governor, Mayor Martin O'Malley was already in full campaign mode. He spoke of hope, opportunity and faith in the future. He said he wanted a state "in which no one is left behind." He said the people of Maryland "can do great things together." So far, so good. But then O'Malley detoured into the bizarre. He closed his speech by saying, "I leave you with the words of the poet who was from Rockville: And `so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

WASHINGTON -- Granted, it is not the sexiest subject in the world, not the kind of thing that gets people het up enough to write letters to the editor. Yet there are few things more vitally important to understanding the world and our role in it. I'm talking about history and the teaching thereof. And if you keep rolling your eyes, your face is going to freeze like that. Not that I'm surprised. We are a historical people, a nation of short memories and cherished myths. For us, history doesn't matter -- right up until it does.

Brandi Chastain's teammates called her "Hollywood" long before she ripped off her jersey to celebrate her 1999 World Cup-winning goal and kicked her own marketing potential into a new gear. Initially, the cheerfully self-promoting Chastain was ambivalent about the attention generated by a gesture she insists was unpremeditated. "So many other things were happening," she said of the soccer team's sudden ascension to pop-star status. "Why do we have to focus on this?" Five years later, Chastain acknowledges the bra is ... well, still a good hook.

THE WAY Anthony Banks sees it, he's been Living 2 Many Lives. It might not be that he's living too many lives. It's just that, in the span of his 21 years on this earth, there's been more pain, misery and drama than any one person should have to endure. Banks remembers the life he had as a 5-year-old. His belly racked with hunger pains, Banks watched as his mother ignored him, walked across the street and took her place in line on the drug corner, waiting with dozens of others for the crack man to show up. "I think she was a crackhead all my life," Banks recalled last week as he sat in the kitchen of his uncle's South Baltimore home.