Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Baseball in Folklore and Fiction, by Tristram Potter Coffin Rvive Books, 2010 Originally published as The Old Ball Game in 1971, The Mudville Heritage considers the hugely different way in which baseball was portrayed in the early to mid half of the 20th century. Coffin, emeritus professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, takes […]
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This from the Associated Press: Dorothy Seymour Mills has been added by Oxford University Press as co-author of an acclaimed three-volume history of baseball originally attributed solely to her husband. Harold Seymour was long credited as author of Baseball: The Early Years, Baseball: The Golden Age, and Baseball: The People’s Game. The books were published […]
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At least when it comes to baseball reading. Lapham’s Quarterly, “a magazine of history and ideas,” devotes its Summer 2010 issue to sports through the centuries with articles, poems, and illustrations both old and new (mostly old). Among the baseball items: This list of do’s and don’ts for members of the All-American Girls Professional baseball […]
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Ron Kates/Middle Tennessee State University (rkates@mtsu.edu) This scholarly multidisciplinary anthology examines the intersection of baseball and class in American and global cultures. While embracing the rich history of themes of class and class conflict in baseball fiction, poetry, and drama, this collection also seeks to extend the discussion throughout other disciplines, some even far afield […]
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George Will put in an appearance on The Brian Lehrer Show in April (how did I miss that), to discuss the re-release of Men at Work, first published 20 years ago. Say what you will about Will’s politics, he loves his baseball and can discuss it without engaging in overly vainglorious verbosity. You can hear […]
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Former NY Times reporter Claire Smith will be the keynote speaker at the 22nd Annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, which kicks off (pardon the football metaphor) on Wednesday, June 2 and runs til Friday, June 4. Having attended one of these, I can tell you that it’s great fun, despite the scholarly […]
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How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad, by Robert Elias. (The New Press) As per SFGate.com (Elias teaches law and politics at the University of San Francisco). Upshot: Elias has written both fiction and nonfiction about baseball and his love for the game shines through. But he also doesn’t hold […]
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Here’s an interesting post from TheYankeeU.com about two American pop culture icons: Baseball and the cinematic western, in this case Bernard Malamud’s classic The Natural juxtaposed with John Ford’s classic, The Searchers. Nice work, even if it does employ Jacues Barzun’s dreaded quote about baseball, a.k.a., “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of […]
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Alan Gratz’s Brooklyn Nine, the story of a young Jewish boy’s love for baseball in the early 20th century, is featured on the cover of the September issue of Booklist, the publication of the American Library Association. The issue highlights a sports theme and includes a number “top 10” choices in several categories, such as […]
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Enjoyed many an interesting conversation at the recent SABR get-together in Washington, DC. Spent a lot of down time in the vendors room where publishers hosted some of their authors. The first interview is with Gary Mitchem, acquisitions editor for McFarland, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Mitchem discovered the processes he goes through […]
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For me, as a freelance writer, anyway. My first major published piece was a review of Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball, by Harvey Frommer for Elysian Fields Quarterly in 1993, which you’ll find after the break. I wax nostalgic because I learned at the recent SABR Convention that EFQ might be forced to ceases publication […]
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Taking a few days off to head down to our nation’s capital where I’ll be conventioning at the annual Society for American Baseball Research get-together. Looking forward to finally meeting so many good people I’ve only known through the Internet and e-mail. Talk amongst yourselves ’til I get back next week.
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and I’ll be grateful for about 2 1/2 extra years, according to this piece from The Wall Street Journal. … researchers at Wayne State University, major-league players who have nicknames live 2½ years longer, on average, than those without them. On the other hand, I can absolutely refute further findings that “players whose first or […]
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Thanks to the NY Times’ Freakonomics blog, I came across FlipFlopFlyball, an off-shoot of flipflopflyin.com, which offers some unusual charts regarding the national pastime. In one, we see just how many Native Americans actually live in Cleveland (which gave me a few ideas for future charts)*, an unusual representation of when teams broke the color line, […]
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Thanks to Gabriel Schechter, author of This Bad Day in Yankees History, who delivered the following poem at the recent Cooperstown Symposium. Baseball’s Glad Lexicon These are the gladdest of possible words: Dickson has done it again. Trio of volumes each jam-packed with gems From “A-ball” to “lulu” to “zurdo.” Re-shaping his lexicon into the […]
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For those of you who don’t know who he is (and I must admit I didn’t either), the late Dr. Scully was the first to apply labor economics to sports, said former colleague Philip K. Porter, now professor of economics at the University of South Florida. Sports economists refer to his groundbreaking work as “the […]
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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
* Shameless self-promotion for a good cause
January 27, 2010
I was honored by the request to pen the foreword for Jews and Baseball, Vol. 2: The Post-Greenberg Years, 1949-2008, by Burton and Benita Boxerman and published by McFarland. The first volume, subtitled Entering the American Mainstream, 1871-1948, was published by McFarland in 2007. Like its predecessor, this new “must-have” serves as a thorough resource […]
Tagged as: Jews and baseball
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