Times-ly reviews

Marc Tracy of Tablet.com contributed reviews for the NY Times Sunday book supplement on

Shawn Green’s The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 MPH. Upshot: “Those who do not share Green’s earnestness — or fondness for “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” “Siddhartha” and other namedropped works of dormitory Buddhism — may nonetheless find it fruitful to suspend their unbelief and read Green’s slim book…for its technical discussions of hitting and its satisfying three-act tale of early success, midcareer setback and ultimate triumph.”
When The Dodgers were Bridegrooms:Gunner McGunnigle and Brooklyn’s Back-to-Back Pennants of 1889 and 1890. Upshot: “Shafer’s a priori focus on McGunnigle…prevents him from more fully exploring other topics that could perhaps better fill a volume….”
56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports. Upshot: “[T]he best parts of Kennedy’s book are the series of interludes in which he goes meta, exploring the psychology required to maintain a streak, for example, and recounting challenges to the record.”
Bill White’s Uppity: My Untold Story About the Games People Play. Upshot: “[T]he highlights of the book (written with Gordon Dillow) include portraits of White’s hopelessly lovable broadcast partner Phil Rizzuto and of A. Bartlett Giamatti, who was, in White’s view (and many others’), “the actual ‘last true commissioner.’ ” To White the players are the real professionals, while the owners, executives and journalists are the ones routinely engaged in juvenile pettiness.”

Greenberg and DiMaggio

Bill Scheft wrote this review-essay on brief bios of a couple of Hall of Famers: Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil, by Jerome (The Seventh Babe) Charyn, and Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One, by Mark (The Eastern Stars) Kurlansky.

Upshots: “Both books are remarkably economical biographies, but Mark Kurlansky’s scholarly slice of Hank Greenberg is always winning, while the novelist Jerome Charyn’s earnest attempt to restore Joe DiMaggio to his former untouchable perch falls in the final innings.”

Finally, there’s Jonathan (Luckiest Man/Opening Day) Eig, who covers Times‘ sports columnist George Vecsey’s Stan Musial: An American Life. Upshot: “While he reports the story diligently and has written it with flashes of the panache and insight his newspaper readers have come to expect from him, Vecsey, in the end, can’t make up for the shortage of dramatic material. Musial’s greatness on the ball field is never in doubt. Off the field, and on the printed page, however, this Hall of Famer comes across as a decent but passive figure” and “In Vecsey’s account, Musial seems to be the kind of guy you’d like to have for a teammate, a next-door neighbor or a business partner. But these days, for better or worse, we want our baseball legends bigger, bolder and sexier.”