Thanks to our friend Greg Spira for his list of links to baseball book reviews, interviews, and features.
One of the hot titles this year is As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires, by Bruce Weber of The New York Times. In addition to two (!) reviews in his own paper (as well as an excerpt on nytimes.com), Weber’s gander into this brotherhood of blue is included in the Christian Science Monitor and on Bloomberg.com (along with other sports books including Donald Honig’s The Fifth Season: Tales of My Life in Baseball). Weber also discussed his project with the folks at the Chicago Tribune. He also talks about his work in this clip from Amazon.com.
Outlets carrying reviews of the new Yogi Berra bio by Allen Barra include the Dallas Morning News, the Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Berra is a native of the city), and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Salon ran this interview with author Allen Barra, who also had a few thoughts on Joe Torre’s much-hyped The Yankee Years.
The New York ball clubs are always good for a few books each year. NJ.com, the online presence of several Jersey papers, offered this take on Faith and Fear in Flushing. Former Met Ron Darling — a member of the ’86 champions — has a well-received book of his own, with reviews in the NY Daily News and the Toronto Star. And the ever-busy Peter Golenbock penned George: The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Built the Yankee Empire, a new bio on papa Steinbrenner, which was reviewed by the NY Daily News.
The Louisville (KY) ran this double review of Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training, by Charles Fountain, and Baseball and the Baby Boomer: A History, Commentary and Memoir, by Talmage Boston. As a professor at Northeastern University professor, Founatin also merited discussion as part of a broader review of sports books in the South Washington County (MN) Bulletin. He’s given the treatment in the Post-Dispatch and contributed this article to the Boston Globe.
Over on the West Coast, Michael D’Antonio’s Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O’Malley, Baseball’s Most Controversial Owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles, is the subject of multiple critques, including the Los Angeles Times, the Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise, The Brooklyn Eagle, and the Canadian Press (via Google), with a Q&A with the author on NJ.com tossed in for good measure.
Two of this season’s more unusual titles consider non-household names. Chasing Moonlight, is a surprising treatment of a minimal major leaguer made famous in the pages of W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (and later, of course, Field of Dreams), from the Wilmington (NE) StarNewsOnline. And Pulizter Prize-winning sports columnist Ira Berkow tells the story of a WW II veteran in The Corporal Was A Pitcher: The Courage of Lou Brissie. The Augusta Chronicle ran this profile of Brissie, who now makes his home in that Georgian city.
is available on Amazon.com,
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