Bookshelf Review: Quick Takes

These days, authors are called upon to take on more of their own publicity work that would normally go to the publisher, so I get a lot of requests to take a look at their books. Many of these are for self-published titles. I always advise them that I can’t guarantee a review or a mention and they accept that.

I tend to not want to spend time on these because one of my biggest pet peeves is the lack of proofreading, which might strike some as too picayune. And goodness knows I’m guilty of a typo or two (or three). I’m big on punctuation, so when I see something like a period or comma outside the quote, well, that gets me off to a bad start. Same thing for factual errors, because once I come across one of those — especially early on in the book — I wonder what else is wrong and what the reader might be missing.

And I get it: it’s a tough job, handling everything yourself; and most authors simply can’t afford services that might catch these things.

Having said that, and without pointing out individual issues, here are a few that have been sitting on my to-do pile. Note that some of these have been self-published while others have not.

Ballpark Therapy: Why We Go, Why It Matters, by George Falkowski

In two dozen-plus essays, Falkowski tells what it means to go to the ballpark, whether on the Major League level or the sandlot. I know when I was in my 20s, I could barely wait for the car to stop to jump out and run to the diamond for my pickup games which consisted of at least a doubleheader. Seems I’m not the only one to whom these games served as some form of “therapy.”

This is a nice cross-section of stories, because everybody has one and it could be very different from yours. Time and space inhibit me from going into further detail, but in a world of “serious” baseball, it’s a refreshing look at what nevertheless binds us as a community of fans.

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Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic, by Charles Holdefer

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a W.P. Kinsella, offering a variety of short stories on baseball. I’m not saying Holdefer — who now makes his home in Brussels — is on a level with the man who gave us Shoeless Joe, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and Baseball Fantastic (one of my favorites and more on the science fictiony side). But I haven’t found anyone yet who even approaches that level of imagination and range.

Holdefer’s stories are in a somewhat chronological order, beginning with old Ivan in 1569. They are a mix of funny and sad and even tragic. One of them — “Wild West Show” — has me reconsidering my own fantasy of moving overseas to try to market baseball to a traditionally uninterested country.

Like many collections of short stories, there is an unevenness, but that could be said about Kinsella’s work, too.

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Diamond Duels: Baseball’s Greatest Matchups, by John Nogowski

When  think of matchups, I think “head to head,” as depicted by the cover of Nogowski’s latest book which pits Hall of Famers Greg Maddux against Tony Gwynn. But in fact, such meetings account for only a part of Duels.

While a few of the chapters do go mano-a-mano between pitchers and batters, a large part compares hitters and pitchers with each other, such as the question of which lefty was better, Grove or Koufax? The consensus is that while Koufax was dominant for a few seasons before being forced to retire because of arm trouble, Grove’s longevity gives him the nod. And then there are the cases of Joe D. vs. the Splendid Splinter and Rose vs. Cobb.

Some chapters seem to be filler: Al Simmons vs. Harry Heilmann? You have to be a serious fan of x-amount of years old to know who these guys were. There’s also one that is a follow-up on Nohgowki’s first book, Last Time Out: Big-League Farewells of Baseball’s Greats.

Duels is a fun book, not necessarily to be read straight through given there’s no narrative that binds these stories beyond an overarching theme.

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The Fenway Effect: A Cultural History of the Boston Red Sox, by David Krell

Aside from the New York franchises, I would venture to guess that more books have been written about the Red Sox than any other team. Perhaps being home to such elite schools as Harvard and MIT allows for a more intellectual gravitas. And Fenway, being the oldest of active ballparks, has a special aura to it. Both ideas lend themselves to a grander, more nuanced look than just the legends of the game that have donned the uniform such as Ted Williams, Carlton Fisk, Cal Yazstremski, David Ortiz, and Pedro Martinez.

Krell has written a number books on off-the-field topics such as 1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK; The New York Yankees in Popular Culture: Critical Essays (with other volumes about the Mets and Brooklyn Dodgers); and 1978: Baseball and America in the Disco Era and continues his interest in bigger-picture issues with his latest.