Review roundup, May 28

May 28, 2014

The Clermont Sun (Batavia, Ohio) ran this review of Bill Madden’s 1954: The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Major League Baseball Forever. Upshot: “[T]his is not a book for casual ball-watchers or followers of modern baseball. No, it’s for fans who love the history of the game. For that kind of person, 1954 rules.”

This roundup of “manly books” (ostensibly for for Father’s Day gifts) from LubbockOnline includes two Nolan Ryan-themed titles, one a book about him the other a cookbook by him.

To be honest, I have not yet read the new anthology For the Love of Baseball: A Celebration of the Game That Connects Us All (a bit presumptuous, because the game does not, in fact, connect all of us). I wonder about the need for another paean to the game. After all, at least several of the essays have appeared in other volumes of this type. A. Bartlet Giamatti’s  “The Green Fields of the Mind,” for example, is practically a staple of anthologies published since his death. I think a lot of it — and a lot of the difficulties I have with a number of baseball books — is that I pretty much read them 20/5, so there’s not much that I find that’s really new. Anyway, here’s a review from the Tampa Tribune.

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Tagged as: anthology, Bill Madden, Nolan Ryan, Willie Mays

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