♦ Tom Hoffarth’s latest two entries on his 30/30 feature: The Team That Forever Changed Baseball and America: The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, by The Society of American Baseball Research, edited by Lyle Spatz, Maurice Bouchard and Leonard Levin, and Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball, by Chris Lamb.
Upshots: Dodgers –“There may be no “i” in team, but now there’s a team I know much more about, and the dymanic under which Robinson had a support system (mostly) as he made his debut.”
Conspiracy — “It’s not a read for those looking for something that won’t tax their brains, as the Robinson annual celebrations are fresh in our minds. But it’s worth the time and effort to learn more about the social context of what was at stake, and how there was never a simple answer.”
♦ Note to authors: Please stop using the same titles over and over again; it gets too confusing. Case in point: Bruce Spitzer’s Extra Innings vs. Baseball Prospectus’ Extra Innings, which is the subject of this review from AZ Snakepit, a Diamondbacks-centric blog. Upshot: “I would give a hesitant recommend for the book. I enjoyed it, and read it fairly quickly. Even disregarding some of my problems with the book, there’s a lot to enjoy in it. It’s a nice little book (or as little as a 500 page book can be), but I also have a hard time imagining this volume will change much in baseball thinking. It isn’t the game-changer that Moneyball was, or even Baseball By the Numbers [BP’s previous collection of essays on the topic]. ”
♦ The St. Louis Post-Dispatch posted this review on The Might Have Been, which seems to be this year’s The Art of Fielding, but without the prepublication buzz Chad Harbach’s first novel received. Upshot: “It’s a lovely, poignant, heartbreaker of a baseball novel, as good as last year’s hyped The Art of Fielding and more literary than Grisham’s Calico Joe.”
A couple of sidebars to the above feature “familiar” vs. “alternate” themes within the baseball genre (e.g., Ball Four (familiar) vs. The Long Season (alternate)) and six new non-fiction titles that have links (metaphorical) to St. Louis.
♦ And speaking of Calico Joe, here’s the review, also from the SLPD. Upshot: “Given his perennial best-seller status, Grisham obviously knows how to spin a winning tale. “Calico Joe” shows that he doesn’t have to be in a courtroom or a law office to tell it.
♦ And another from a British concern — the website for the London Daily and Sunday Express. (You just gotta love the Brits trying to get their heads around baseball.) Upshot: “The result is a superbly written book which, though fewer than 200 pages long, deserves a place on any family bookshelf.”
http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/webster-groves-professor-s-baseball-novel-is-sad-but-still/article_6eb41549-23e1-584e-a23a-7a848d58503d.html
is available on Amazon.com,
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