Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Don Amore from the Hartford Courant published this piece, pursuant to all the hubbub about the release yesterday of the Rodriguez biography. I have absolutely no quibble with his selection of Ball Four as his pick for the Babe Ruth/Hank Aaron/Cy Young of baseball books. But when he includes Spakry Lyle’s The Bronx Zoo among […]
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WickedLocal.com, a New England outfit, ran this piece on Ernest Lawrence Thayer, creator of the classic “Casey at the Bat,” which has spaened dozens of editions and collections of parodies. This one isn’t read very well, but the video is kind of cool.
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I may have done this one before, but I came across it in my Google alerts, so here we go. Tim Morris of the University of Texas at Arlington, has compiled this massive list: This Guide to Baseball Fiction is a combination of bibliographic checklist and evaluative critical guide to over 1,000 works of baseball […]
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The Henry Wiggen Blog (“Sports, Journalism, Kansas City and everything in between”) features several review of classic baseball titles. Among them: Prophet of the Sandlots, one of the best books about the scouting system The Celebrant, Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s novel of the New York Giants of Mr. McGraw Shoeless Joe, by W.P. Kinsella, the basis […]
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This one comes from the Fredericksburg Times.
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The Chicago Blog posted this brief piece considering a couple of off-the-beaten-path baseball titles, including Professor Baseball and Veeck as in Wreck, both of which present the game as belonging to the common man, rather than elite athletes and multi-millionaires.
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Here’s one way to do it: Reprint something from your archives and call it a “classic.” That’s what the Christian Science Monitor does with this 1985 review of The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball.
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The back page of The New York Times Book Review features a full page advertisement from Bauman Rare Books. I usually don’t pay attention because as much as I lvoe ’em, they’re out of my league, to borrow from a famous title. But a photo of Joe DiMaggio caught my eye and sure enough there […]
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It’s hard to believe it’s been almost 25 years since we first heard about Sidd Finch, the promising Mets hurler who threw in excess of 160 miles per hours, played the French horn, and wore one combat boot on the mound. It may have been nothing but a very elaborate April Fool’s joke courtesy of […]
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From mentalfloss.com: If there’s one author who bridges the cultural divide between the United States and Japan, it’s Haruki Murakami. The 60-year-old Kyoto native started writing relatively late in life, at age 29, and it was America’s national pastime that inspired him. While attending a baseball game in Tokyo, Murakami saw American Dave Hilton hit […]
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From The Henry Wiggen Blog, this review of the W.P. Kinsella classic and Eric Role Greenberg’s novel.
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From SharedReveiws.com, this item on the classic Baseball Encylcopedia,published by Macmillan.
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I went looking online to see if I could find an audio rendition of Updike’s essay, “Hub fans bid Kid adieu.” I know it was recorded during a Symphony Special performance of stories and poems about the national pastime (the recording was released in 2006), but wouldn’t you know it: the two portions of the […]
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It’s nice to know people are still reading the classics. This review of the Malamud novel comes from BaseballReflections.com
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Seeking to make the most from the opportunity, Columbia University Press posted this little update after Charles A. Alexander, author of Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era (published by CUP in 2002), was interviewed the other day in The New York Times. I inadvertently omitted his book from a brief listing of others […]
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Baseball GB posted this review of Roger Angell’s 2004 collection. An amazing amount of the book can be read here, thanks to Google Books. Like any master storyteller, Angell’s work translates well to audio. This sample from audio.com comes from The Summer Game, another collection of his essays that appear mostly in The New Yorker […]
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From Weaver’s Tantrum, a blog that concentrates on the Baltimore Orioles, this review of Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s classic title.
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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
* The joy of sections
April 6, 2009
One of the major complaints from fans and (especially) non-fans is that the games take too long. Don’t look at it as a lot of down time; instead perceive it as a chance to catch up on your reading. That’s why I love compilations such as those published by The Washington Post‘s Thomas Boswell and […]
Tagged as: Roger Angell, Thomas Boswell
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