Review roundup, April 23

At Home Plate posted this review of Tom Dunkel’s Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line. Upshot: “This book is the story of those men and it’s a great story. One worthy of being read over and over by fans who truly love the game and understand what we all lost during the years baseball was segregated. It’s a story not just about baseball, but about hard times, about prohibition, gambling, juke joints and the double standards of the day. More than that, it’s a very good read.”

In recognition of the release of 42, AHP also posted this on Jackie Robinson’s 1972 autobiography, I Never Had It Made. Upshiot: “It’s a very good read and certainly is thought provoking and written to inspire.”

The Baseball Historian site published this one on Larry Ruttman’s American Jews & America’s Game: Voices of a Growing Legacy in Baseball. Upshot: “[The author] can also be proud of his sheer compilation of material. First-person or oral histories are an integral part of preserving the past and encapsulating the emotion and detail that cannot be extracted later on from artifacts and second-person written material. The connection of Judaism and baseball may be a broad and somewhat confusing thesis, but readers should be left with little doubt about the relationship once they are done with this book.”

April Whitman, one of those lucky ducks who gets to spend the season in MLB’s Fan cave, offered this list of her top five baseball titles, which I guess could be considered mini-reviews.

Likewise newly-acquired Blue Jays pitcher R.A. Dickey wants to teach those Canadians about the best baseball titles, which he discusses in this Q&A with the Toronto Globe and Mail.

In fact, I’m going to get more liberal and open up what gets included into these roundups. To start with, here’s Rob Neyer’s Hot Corner Book Club entry on Dennis D’Agostino’s Keepers of the Game: When the Baseball Beat was the Best Job on the Paper. No upshot here, as the idea behind these book clubs is to generate discussion from site visitors. So here’s another entry on Ruttman’s book and one for Robert Weintraub’s The Victory Season.

I’m still waiting for a call from Only a Game for a segment on 501, but in the meantime, here’s host Bill Littlefield’s take on Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club: Chicago and the Cubs During the Jazz Age by Roberts Ehrgott (as well as an interview).

James Bailey looks at Doug Wilson’s The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych. Upshot: “What a fun book, about a guy so refreshingly down to earth that you’d find his story hard to believe if this were a novel.”

And to wrap up, let’s catch up with Tom Hoffarth’s 30/30 feature: