Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
♦ Tom Hoffarth’s latest 30/30 entry: Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: True Tales of Breaking Barriers, Umpiring Baseball Legends and Wild Adventures in the Negro Leagues. ♦ Only a Game host Bill Littlefield offered his thought’s on John Grisham’s Calico Joe (scroll down about half way). Upshot: “some of the baseball elements of Calico […]
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♦ Tom Hoffarth’s latest two entries on his 30/30 feature: The Team That Forever Changed Baseball and America: The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, by The Society of American Baseball Research, edited by Lyle Spatz, Maurice Bouchard and Leonard Levin, and Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball, by Chris Lamb. Upshots: Dodgers […]
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There was an awful lot of bizzaro “news” following the death of baseball legend Ted Williams in 2002. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Williams’ son, Ted Jr., who, according to many accounts, was a no-account person with no discernible skills of his own who pushed his ailing dad hard in the memorabilia […]
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♦ The latest in Tom Hoffarth’s 30/30 feature: A People’s History of Baseball, by Mitchell Nathanson. Upshot: “The book jacket says Nathan writes with “passion and occasional outrage.” Sometimes it comes off as more bittnerness [sic] or misdirected anger. ♦ The Chicago-Sun Times posted this review of Grisham’s Calico Joe. Upshot: “In baseball terms, Calico […]
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♦ The Hardball Times posted this review of Mitchell Nathanson’s A People’s History of Baseball. Nathan was also a recent guest on Only a Game, which you can hear here. ♦ The Washington Post ran this roundup of kids’ titles, which I am passing along only because I’m for anything that gets the little buggers […]
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♦ Bill Jordan at Baseball Reflections on Tim Wendel’s Summer of 68. ♦ Tom Hoffarth kicked off his annual “30 book in 30 days” feature yesterday with Baseball Prospectus 2012. Today’s book is Trading Manny: How a Father & Son Learned to Love Baseball Again, by Jim Gullo. (Here’s another review from The Oregonian.) ♦ Sticking […]
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A roundup of a few stray items. • James Bailey posted a review of David Stinson’s novel Deadball. • My wife and I recently discovered Downton Abbey big-time. We watched both seasons via Netflix and PBS.org in less than two weeks. Pieces like this are kind of a stretch, but it suggests “Baseball and Downtown […]
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by David B. Stinson (Huntington Park Publications, 2011). They did build it, and they did come. The “build” part are dozens of old baseball parks and stadiums, now long gone. The “they” are the hundreds of athletes who played for various teams in the late 19th and early 20th century. Such is the focus of […]
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Don’t know how long this will last, but if you have a Kindle, I suggest you get over to Amazon and download Richard Doster’s novel Safe at Home for free ASAP. The story — about a young African-American trying to succeed on a minor league team in the deep South in the 1950s — is […]
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Where does the time go? This past Sunday, we celebrated the 500th episode of The Simpsons.(personally, I thought it was only meh). But Chris Jaffe over at Hardball Times noted that yesterday was 20 years since the softball-centric Homer at the Bat — with its own set of All-Stars — premiered. Among the athletes playing […]
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To the Perth Heat, for winning their second straight Australian Baseball League title. Good show, mates. Nicholas Henning has written a couple of novels about baseball down under in Boomerang Baseball and The American Dream: From Perth to Sacramento. Congrats also goes to Rusty Staub for his election — along with Doug Melvin and Rheal […]
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Haven’t done one of these in awhile, but I have a bit of backlog I’d like to clear, so here goes. * We’ll have to agree to disagree. One card collector can’t stand the new 2012 Topps series. Another calls it the best one yet. What do you think? * LibraryJournal.com posted this piece reviewing […]
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The veteran legal thriller author tales a shot at the national pastime in Calico Joe, due out on April 10 from Doubleday. from Doubleday’s website: Whatever happened to Calico Joe? It began quietly enough with a pulled hamstring. The first baseman for the Cubs AAA affiliate in Wichita went down as he rounded third […]
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After his interview with the veteran writer, Graham Womack at Baseball: Past and Present wonders if there isn’t some way for the Hall of Fame to recognize Creamer’s his contributions. What a great idea. There are several worthy scribes who didn’t work for newspapers (and therefore don’t qualify for the Spink Award, which “or meritorious […]
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W. P. Kinsella was awarded the 2011 Jack Graney Award, presented by the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame for a “significant contribution to the game of baseball in Canada through a life’s work or for a singular outstanding achievement.” The award is named for one of the first Canadian baseball players to enjoy success in the […]
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The author of everyone’s darling The Art of Fielding was interviewed on a recent segment on Talk of the Nation. You here it here:
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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
Spring cleaning, er, reading
March 7, 2012 · 2 comments
When my wife gave me a kindle for the Hanukka, it was with the understanding that I would bring fewer books into the house. Yeah, that’s not working out too well right about now, as new baseball titles just keep coming. I have been asking for them in Kindle format whenever possible, but it’s not […]
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