Review roundup, April 30, Part One

April 30, 2012

This deserves an entry all of its own.

The last books in Tom Hoffarth’s 30/30 feature include:

  • Willie Mays Aikens: Safe at Home, by Gregory Jordan. Upshot: Hoffarth’s title for the piece — Aiken’s journey from a prison sentence to a whole lot of paragraphs, correctly punctuated — belies his wrap, in which he describes the book as “A gritty, fascinating and disturbing pieced-together story about — again — how an athletic career was taken down by drugs, but built back up by the forces of forgiveness.”
  • Out of My League: A Rookie’s Survival in the Bigs, by Dirk Hayhurst. Upshot: “Not the tell-alll some may still want, but more a tell-it-like-it-is, which may have led to his being somewhat blackballed by the big leagues. We deeply appreciate the risks he took to get this done.” (Hoffart also ran this Q &A with the author; this is Hayhurst’s second publication, following The Bullpen Gospel.)
  • Just A Minor Perspective: Through The Eyes of a Minor League Rookie, by Eric Pettis. Upshot: “Major-league material for a Little League price tag.” (It’s available as an ebook for $2.99 on Amazon.) Hoffarth writes about the risks players tale while they’re still active here.
  • Fenway: A Fascinating First Century, from the editors of Sports Illustrated. Upshot: “Crank it up to 100.” Again, my feeling is that there’s no excuse for a publication like SI to put out a bad book, given all their resources.
  • Hoffarth cheats a little on this entry, which features three books about Californian baseball.
  • He wraps up the series with Calico Joe: A Novel, by John Grisham. Upshot: “As a long-lasting piece of Grisham-esque literature, this can’t be in his top 20 list. But for marketing and book-sales purposes, it must be acknowledged as a fine novelty item.” He said some other things too of a non-complimentary nature.
  • Bonus: an end-of-series recap, ranking the titles. Top of the heap: Hayhurst’s Out Of My League: A Rookie’s Survival in the Bigs. Bottom-feeder (my uncharitable words, not Hoffarth’s): Trading Manny: How a Father & Son Learned to Love Baseball Again, by Jim Gullo

 

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