Review roundup, March 18

The AZ Snakepit, a Diamondbacks’-centric blog, posted this about John Sexton’s Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game. Upshot: “Overall it’s a fine baseball book that is interesting most because it examines baseball in a manner more critical than most. The average baseball book is no better than a collection of trivia, a fairly straightforward historical story, or hagiography of some beloved player. Sexton is willing to look beyond these basic approaches, and brings a refreshing set of references.”

The Wall Street Journal published this review of John Rosengren’s Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes. Upshot: “A new biography of Greenberg, written by John Rosengren, offers much interesting information admixed with hyperbole. The book’s subtitle, The Hero of Heroes, is characteristic of the approach. The English call exaggerated expression ‘over-egging the pudding’; of Mr. Rosengren’s biography, centered on Greenberg’s Jewishness, we might more accurately say that he over-eggs the kugel. ‘Hank had not bettered Ruth and he had not stopped Hitler, but he had single-handedly succeeded in changing the way Americans saw Jews. . . . A single word that could stand up to any form of prejudice: Greenberg.’ Wouldn’t it, as Jake Barnes says in The Sun Also Rises, ‘be pretty to think so’?”

Here’s another review of Greenberg from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Upshot: “Rosengren has researched and written a first-rate biography of a professional athlete who was also an interesting human being off the playing field — and interesting in part because an entire religion looked to him to ameliorate its unhappy history of persecution.”

The Buffalo News ran this review of Buzz Bissnger’s paean to another baseball hero, with The Classic Mantle. Upshot: “Even if you’re a Yankee hater, you can’t help but love this book.”