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_This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts._ Jerry Weintraub has been a music producer and a movie mogul,

but mostly he’s really good at being the guy behind the scenes. And he’s pulling back the curtains in his new memoir, ‘When I Stop Talking.’ RJ Smith, who talked to Weintraub at his desert

mountain home, writes that the book ‘is anything but a rote, let-the-record-show memoir.’ Smith writes: > For a fat tract of the last half of the last century, Weintraub was > the Man 

Behind the Man, whether the man was Sinatra, Elvis or George > H.W. Bush. Long ago, Weintraub realized that the guy who does favors > is never far from the guy who has favors done for 

him. One thing > parlays into another. His firm, Concerts West, revolutionized the > form in the 1960s. He managed recording artists and then moved on to > producing television, 

Broadway shows and movies. He became chairman > of United Artists. And he still works the phone. Baseball season starts this weekend; David Davis rounds up four new baseball books: ‘1921:

The Yankees, the Giants, & the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York’ by Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg; ‘Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball

Before Jackie Robinson’ by Timothy M. Gay; ‘High Heat: The Secret History of the Fastball and the Improbable Search for the Fastest Pitcher of All Time’ by Tim Wendel; and ‘The Empire

Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad’ by Robert Elias. Also in our pages, Anne Lamott’s new novel, ‘Imperfect Birds,’ is reviewed by

Samantha Dunn. > With the authority of an anthropologist, Lamott renders the very > current world of what it is to be an upper middle-class, progressive > parent in a place like the

 Bay Area. She’s practically the > Margaret Mead of the NPR-listening, sweat-lodge-going, > mint-tea-drinking, art-house-movie-watching, Alcoholics > Anonymous-attending, Schubert- 

and Bach-listening, > vegan-dinner-eating, Indian-smock-wearing world....In her > nonfiction, Lamott has written extensively with freshness and > insight about her own travails with

 addiction and the search for > spirituality and meaning in life. In this fictional world, however, > those same topics appear two-dimensional, handled by rote. Find all of our Sunday

books piece here. -- Carolyn Kellogg