Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Murray Chass weighs in on Terry Francona’s new memoir The Red Sox Years (written by Dan Shaughnessy). Russ Smith contributed this review of the same book on Baseball Musings. Speaking about managerial memoirs that raise an eyebrow, Mike Reuther, author the baseball novels Return to Dead City and Nothing Down, posts the occasional book review. […]
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Whenever I go to my local library, I enjoy the posters of celebrities urging kids to read. I fear it’s becoming a lost art form. So with that in mind, I refer you to this list from About.com of several highly recommended titles for younger readers.
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Sports fiction writer S.J. Crown posted this nice essay about “The Baseball Fiction Trailblazer You’ve Perhaps Not Heard About.” Lardner, a sportswriter from the first quarter of the 20th century, was famous for his stories about Alibi Ike and The Busher, among many others. Most dealt with a kind of fish-out-of-water rube who nevertheless overcame […]
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As opposed to fantasy baseball… Bruce Markusen over at Hardball Times posted this examination of “The Mighty Casey,” a classic episode of The Twilight Zone that originally aired during the series’ first season in 1960. The episode featured Jack Warden as the manager of the Hoboken Zephyrs and Robert Sorrels as the ballplayer of the […]
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The author of one of the most controversial baseball biographies died yesterday at the age of 62. Cramer published Joe DiMaggio : The Hero’s Life in 2000. Many fans of the Yankee Clipper were outraged as the author painted the legend in an unusually unflattering light. DiMaggio was cheap, ungracious, a womanizer (sometimes bordering on […]
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A few months ago Bob Costas and Jerry Seinfeld sat down to deconstruct the famous Abbot and Costello routine, Who”s on First. Jimmy Fallon recently took it a step further in this bit feature Seinfeld, Billy Crystal and a couple of other guys regular viewers of the show probably recognize. Of course this one, by […]
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Remember the school-yard insult, “I looked up (negative attribute) in the dictionary and there was a picture of you?” Rob Neyer over at Baseball Nation sort of does the same thing with the names of baseball players as culled from The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. Among the players who will live in infamy: John Anderson, who, […]
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Not to get political here, but judging by what’s been coming down the Internet, there’s a lot of connection between presidents and baseball. For example, The Hall of Very Good published this piece on “The Bond Between Baseball and the Presidency.” In addition, Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight fame, still gets kudos for his baseball work, […]
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Sorry for the sporadic posts, but still trying to squeeze in a few entries as I can. ♦ The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., posted this review of Bushville Wins. Upshot: “…Klima intersperses interesting details with an obsession to link the team with Miller Brewing, the Milwaukee-based company that helped finance the new enterprise. There were […]
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(To borrow The New York Times‘ motto) Marty Appel recently revised his helpful list of baseball titles that have appeared on the Times‘ best-seller list. The article appears on the Sports Collectors Digest website. As Appel, a former PR director for the New York Yankees, notes there are several familiar books that are conspicuous in […]
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♦ The Summer 2012 issue of Jewish Currents features a review by Cynthia Werthamer of Pitching in the Promised Land: A Story of the First and Only Season in the Israel Baseball League, by former IBL hurler Aaron Pribble. Upshot: “While Pribble’s book could do with less foreshadowing…, his retelling of the ups and downs […]
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A Documentary of the Game of Baseball, by Branch Rickey with Robert Riger. Simon and Schuster, 1965. I discovered this gem on the Facebook “Baseball Book” Group. Had I known about this beforehand, I probably would have included it in my forthcoming 501 Books Baseball Fans Must Read Before They Die. Rickey, who served in […]
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Some vacation. Actually it was no vacation at all. This is the first time since Aug. 1 I’ve been upright, pain-free, and clear-headed enough to post. Following my 11-seconds of fame as one of the first-pitch-throwers at a Trenton Thunder game, I’ve been suffering with a respiratory infection that had me feverish, coughing, and otherwise […]
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* The New York Times published this review about Ballplayer: Pelotero, a film documentary about baseball in the Dominican Republic. Upshot: “Forget feel-good boys-of-summer tales. This film shows a shady business in which scouts and the teams they represent try to manipulate teenage players, and to some extent the players do some manipulating of their […]
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Came across an interesting website recently: Forgottenbooks.com. I think it’s worth it to reproduce their mission statement in its entirety 1,000,000+ Free Books by Forgotten Books! You have reached the world’s largest online library of high-quality eBooks. Forgotten Books is an independent book publisher, boasting over 1,000,000 different titles, and offering all of our titles […]
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I often wonder why some of our most intellectual writers would want to do baseball. Perhaps, as Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock said in the episode “Shore Leave” (Geek alert!), “The more complex the mind, the greater the need for play.” So when a George Will or a Tom Olpihant or a Doris Kearns Goodwin starts […]
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Jacqueline Cutler at the Star-Ledger published this piece on the Chaim Potok novel. This slips under a lot of folks’ radar. Say what you will about the author (many years ago I worked with S.L. Schneiderman, a charming gentleman who translated AJCongress press releases for the Yiddish press), who knew him and loved to opine […]
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* A couple of reviews on John Grisham’s Calico Joe, one yea (“Calico Joe is his first baseball themed book and it didn’t disappoint.”), one nay (“Grisham’s work lacks the meat and potatoes to satisfy this reader’s appetite for page-turning substance. It’s a slim book that perhaps would have made a much better short story […]
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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
