From TheHardBallTimes, this review of Bill Reynolds’’78: The Boston Red Sox, a Historic Game, and a Divided City.
Upshot: Despite many faults, HBT reviewer Chris Jaffe concludes, “I enjoyed this book far more than I expected to because of its considerable strengths. Though it couldn’t quite fuse its elements, Reynolds didn’t try to force fusion to occur.”
Just to put in my two cents. Jaffe seems to have liked this one a lot more than I did. In concept, it is an interesting idea, but I frequently find the “marriage” of baseball and anthropologicial/socieological history a bit forced, as though the author can’t decide which story on which to focus, and in trying to use both topics, comes up doing neither great service. Jonathan Mahler sought to do the same in Ladies and Gentlemen: The Bronx is Burning, but the ultimate focus was on baseball. I agree with Jafee in his observation that “These are very dangerous waters to enter. For every successful attempt to do sports-as-social-history, there are numerous abject failures.”
He continues:
The ones that flop simply note that while A happened in The Particular Sport, B happened in Society At Large, therefore A and B are related and perhaps even helped cause each other. Such approaches badly overestimate the importance of sports in the real world and also show an inability to distinguish coincidence from meaningful correlation.
Using athletics to enlighten us about the values and attitudes of society can be done, but the analogies have to be earned, not merely spouted.
At the risk of offending some, books such as these allow non-sports people to feel good about themselves for reading a sports title, and those not interested in politics to do the same for fulfilling some sort of civic obligation.
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