Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
[Note: My spring baseball roundup appears on Bookreporter.com and is reposted here as individual reviews for your convenience.] Former Sports Illustrated executive editor Rob Fleder assembled his own literary All-Star team for Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team. The roster includes such “players” as Roy Blount Jr., […]
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[Note: My spring baseball roundup appears on Bookreporter.com and is reposted here as individual reviews for your convenience.] It’s somewhat unusual for an active player to write a book. Such things are often left to the relative safety and reflection of retirement. But no one ever said R. A. Dickey was your run-of-the-mill athlete. You […]
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[Note: My spring baseball roundup appears on Bookreporter.com and is reposted here as individual reviews for your convenience.] In Turning Two: My Journey to the Top of the World and Back with the New York Mets, Bud Harrelson, a staple of the pennant-winning Mets of 1969 and 1973, offers a “throw-back” to the days when […]
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♦ Bailey’s Baseball Book Reviews posted this one on Grisham’s Calico Joe. Upshot: “We’ve now had baseball tales from two of the literary world’s heavyweights in the past three years. Both have failed to live up to expectations.” [The other one is Stephen King’s novella, Blockade Billy.] ♦ Bailey also offers this on Just a […]
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My annual spring baseball book roundup appears on Bookreporter.com. Titles include: Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball, by R.A. Dickey and Wayne Coffey Turning Two: My Journey to the Top of the World and Back with the New York Mets, by Bud Harrelson and Phil Pepe Driving Mr. […]
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John Grisham’s Calico Joe was number one on The New York Times Bestseller list two weeks ago; now it’s number three, (It has been explained to that the list as printed in the Sunday book supplement is two weeks behind the on-line version, but I can’t say it makes much sense to me.) Needless to […]
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Sheesh, what’s going to be left? The New York Times sports media writer Richard Sandomir wrote this story about sports cartoonists joining the endangered species list last week. In my attic I have pages torn from the NY Daily News from 1969, when Bruce Stark drew a series of Mets, including Gil Hodges, Tom Seaver, […]
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Not much today, boys and girls. ♦ BosoxInjection, a Red Sox-centric blog, posted this review of Extra Innings, Bruce Spitzer’s novel about the “reanimation” of Ted Williams in the year 2092. ♦ The Washington Times offers this review of Calico Joe. Upshot: “With Father’s Day approaching, “Calico Joe” is a book guaranteed to make Pop […]
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Ben Reiter wrote this piece on the newest hot team in baseball, the Washington Nationals, while Tom Verducci provides this on Phil Humber’s perfect game.
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♦ I don’t usually look at e-books if they haven’t been published on paper as well, but David H. Martinez (The Book of Baseball Literacy: 3rd Edition: Nearly 700 People, Places, Events, Teams, Stats, and Stories – Everything You Need to Know in One Massive Book) has enough of a track record for me to […]
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♦ Recently “discovered” At Home Plate, a nice little baseball site that posts the occasional review. Recent titles include Long Taters: A Baseball Biography of George “Boomer” Scott The Greatest Minor League: A History of the Pacific Coast league, 1903-1957 Hit By Pitch: Ray Chapman, Carl Mays, and the Fatal Fastball Wherever I Wind Up: […]
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♦ Bill Jordan posted this review of Paul Dickson’s Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, on Baseball Reflections. Upshot: “Anyone who considers themselves to be a fan of baseball history should pick this work up. Whether you were familiar with Veeck or not before reading the book, you stand to learn a lot about this interesting […]
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♦ Tom Hoffarth’s latest 30/30: Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers from the Team at Baseball Prospectus, edited by Steven Goldman, editor-in-chief of BaseballProspectus.com. Upshot: “The top-qualify writing, and heavy-duty thinking, you’ve come to expect from the Prospectus staff is worthy of this heavy-duty bounded hardback (no more paperbacks this time around). The stuff […]
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Well, maybe just two mags. South Jersey Magazine ran this cover-story profile on the Phillies’ new closer, Jonathon Paplebon. And with the Hofstra University program on the Mets rapidly approaching, the April 30 cover of New York Magazine teased with a refer to what turns out to be a very small item about the team’s […]
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These come from the New Books Network which features news on several different genres, including sports. These two, both by Bruce Berglund, feature interviews with Robert Fitts, author of Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan; Lee Congdon, author of Baseball and Memory: Winning, Losing, and Remembrances of Things […]
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♦ The Knoxville News published this review of native son R.A. Dickley’s Wherever I Wind Up. Upshot: “t is rare to find a baseball book by an insider that dishes no dirt. It is even rarer to find a professional athlete willing to acknowledge his own mistakes. In “Wherever I Wind Up,” R.A. Dickey reveals […]
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is available on Amazon.com,
In a former life, I was the sports and features editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper, where I hosted an award-winning bog about Jews and Sports.
I did a profile piece on the legendary cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was very generous in immortalizing me in this caricature.
My article on Sandy Koufax in the 1965 World Series appears in
My article on the later biographies of Babe Ruth appears in
My article on the Mets’ 1969 postseason appears in
Profiles of several Jewish baseball figures appear in
Review roundup, April 30, Part One
April 30, 2012
This deserves an entry all of its own. The last books in Tom Hoffarth’s 30/30 feature include: Willie Mays Aikens: Safe at Home, by Gregory Jordan. Upshot: Hoffarth’s title for the piece — Aiken’s journey from a prison sentence to a whole lot of paragraphs, correctly punctuated — belies his wrap, in which he describes […]
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