The 3 best books by José Antonio Ponseti

From the sportiest radio waves to paper, like one of those surprising narrative incursions that breaks into the fictional or the documentary, depending on what happens. It was a surprise for me to discover a first novel like "Flight 19" by that friendly voice that usually brings us his sports vision, whether it is the USA version, all motor, or adventure mode more towards the epic than towards the merely sporty.

Because in every journalist you can guess the writer. Recent cases like those of Julia Navarro, already a veteran writer or Carme Chaparro with his recent landing in noir. But it is more difficult to see, surely due to prejudice, a sports journalist telling you a story of the type that is beyond some sports investigative book.

But in Ponseti his journalistic performance was awakening the same taste for the in-depth narrative of the journalist in essence. Writing is composing a chronicle, of real or fictional events or spaces where the journalist appears to let his characters do it, interviewing them through dialogues or presenting them with the freest strokes that literature allows. And yes, Ponseti that final effect of the journalist convinced of wanting to tell something more than reality adjusted to the corset of the 5 W of language at the service of the media.

Top 3 recommended books by José Antonio Ponseti

flight 19

In a straight line from Puerto Rico to Miami and reaching a third vertex that reaches the Bermuda Islands in the jaws of the North Atlantic. The roughness of the sea, the unpredictable weather and some probable phenomenon of terrestrial magnetism have ended up establishing the myth about the incidents of maritime and air navigation.

In this book of Jose Antonio Ponseti we faced, with the natural tension that this mythical area generates, an expedition of simple training for first-time pilots. World War II has already ended. 5 Grumman Avenger planes leave with 14 men in total. They leave well equipped with fuel and with all the planes in perfect condition.

It is December 5, 1945. The young people did not set foot on the ground they had left at 14:10 p.m. that day.

Nothing more unpleasant and disturbing than having to make the death of the disappeared official. Ponseti has been in charge of narrating a story about what could have happened and how it could have happened. Perhaps the reicent opening of classified files by the US administration has made the task easier. Something like this already happened with the enigmatic Area 51, about which Annie jacobsen wrote a documentary work that also makes your hair stand on end.

In the case of Ponseti, this story is even more shocking when presented as a vivid, intense, enigmatic story with the appearance of a telegram in which a missing person informs his family that he is still alive. It is then when the myth of Flight 19 grows and intensifies. And it is from that turning point between dramatic and fascinating where Ponseti unfolds all his knowledge about the subject, brushing it off as the best setting for a mystery novel that gets lost among the jokes of a recent true story.

The reading of the plot leads us between questions that jump from the plane of fiction to reality, that pass from the restlessness of the characters that inhabit the story but that also disturb our own conception of the world.

Undoubtedly one of those novels based on real events that are balanced between the great significance of the truth and the narrative opportunity about so many outstanding threads. With this story Ponseti finds a place at the table next to himself JJ Benitez, At least on this occasion.

flight 19

the blue box

Posts to tell a good story, sometimes you don't have to go to very remote or completely foreign approaches. Contributing the prism of the omniscient narrator is more convincing when that intrahistorical side that encompasses one's own existence is contributed. Then there is already that sifting made up of a bath of time, touches of idealization and the entire will to novelize to give more life to characters so close to the author himself. The result is endearing and epic. I don't know how heroic it is to survive in difficult times, facing pettiness and hiding secrets if it is necessary to conjure up a better future for the one who collects the legacy.

I don't know how to begin to tell you this story, the one about the blue box. My mother had a secret life that only my grandmother and Aunt Teresa knew about, no one else in the family. For years they searched for my grandfather Antonio, father, husband and brother, a soldier of the Republican army who disappeared in combat in the Battle of the Ebro. This search was so secret that only a couple of days before she died my mother dared to share it with me, to talk about my grandfather and the blue box.

There I was, at the foot of his bed, receiving a blue cardboard box. I promised him he wouldn't open it for a few weeks, after her death. Two days later he left me an orphan. It was a long time before he plucked up the courage to remove the lid. Inside, letters, newspaper clippings, prison camp documents, photographs, Red Cross notes... The work of three single women during the postwar period looking for the man they wanted... That's where this novel was born.

the blue box

100 stories 100 yards

Numbers are pure magic. Everything can be collected at a distance, in a calculation. Strange as it may seem, everything fits from 0 to infinity as in the mythical progression of chess squares. On this occasion, everything happens in those 100 yards that represent the horizon of glory in rugby. The measure that, as an analogy, any American citizen must trace in order to one day reach the other side and achieve his American dream. Only along the way one must struggle against forces for insurmountable moments.

100 yards is the official measurement of an American football field. A rectangle of grass divided into sections that mark the path to glory. In 100 yards there is room for passion and emotion, victory and defeat, epic and tragedy... and 100 essential stories like the ones in this book.

The party that discovered to the Patriots who Tom Brady was; Kaepernick's knee on the ground, a universal political icon; the best catch in history; the emergence of Patrick Mahomes or personalities such as Whitney Houston, Mohamed Ali and John F. Kennedy are intermingled in these pages with the bizarre trips of The Four Horsemen to each Super Bowl. Without forgetting stories of street gangs, navy seal missions, descents into hell... A magnificent portrait of the United States through its star sport.

100 stories 100 yards
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