Bookshelf review: Baseball and Memory

Winning, Losing, and the Remembrance of Things Past, by Lee Congdon. St. Augustine’s Press

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one. A) I’m on vacation and working as much as possible on my own project, and B) I was fairly disappointed with the book.

When I scanned the upcoming titles earlier in the year, Baseball and Memory stood out. Memory has always been of interest to me, made moreso by a watershed event regarding former Major Leaguer Moose Skowron, NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and Rob Neyer. So when I saw Baseball and Memory, I put it towards the top of my list of things I wanted to read.

Sorry to say, I was a bit disappointed. That’s not to say it’s not a good or not an interesting book, it just seems not to have been as advertised. Congdon is described on the dust jacket as “one of our finest intellectual historians,” and he presents his narrative in a fairly conventional manner as he discusses important events during the 1950s (although the introduction and closing chapter do address the topic of communal memory, albeit quite briefly giving the title of the book).

As such, I’m afraid I found Baseball and Memory somewhat unmemorable.

Bruce Berglund at New Books in Sports conducted this interview with the author. In Berglund’s introduction to the conversation, he write

As a scholar of European intellectual history, Congdon takes a somewhat different approach to baseball, and names like Ricoeur, Kundera, and even Nietzsche figure into our conversation. Certainly, this is a baseball book, and Lee revisits many of the well-known and lesser-known moments and characters of baseball history. But it also a more philosophical, personal reflection on how Americans view the nation’s pastime and the nation’s past.

I guess that part went way over my head.