ACES and Juiced review

I brought up in another in a previous post the book, ACES, written by Mychael Urban of MLB.com fame. Well I have read the book and I feel it's not that bad but it can be confusing at times. Urban likes to change thoughts in mid-paragraph which makes it very difficult to digest the starlings. Another issue with the book is that it wasn't as revealing as I would have liked. It would seem like the juiciest of juice stories should be in a book about the Big Three but it was pretty bland.

On the other hand, Juiced was a well-written autobiography of Jose Canseco's life. There is a misconception about this book that it is solely about steroid use and baseball but there is far more too it then that. You get to read about Jose's life from being a kid in Cuba to his various marriages and run-ins with the law. However, Jose did not write this book alone as former San Francisco Chronicle writer, Steve Kettmann, was his ghost-writer.

Overall both books were pretty good but Juiced is far more in-depth with Jose's life and ACES is far more encompassing with the A's Big Three. And if you are interested, try to pick up Glenn Dickey's Champions, which is a great lead into Moneyball.