Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
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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It’s been a long time since we’ve enjoyed a new baseball project from the pen/typewriter/computer of W.P. Kinsella. Well, the wait is over. Kinsella has recently released Name Your Link, which tells the story of Julio and Esteban Pimental, twins whose divine destiny for baseball begins with games of catch in the womb. They mature […]
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The New York Times has included The Art of Fielding as one of its “100 Notable Books of 2011.” Now there’s a shocker. Baseball Nation posted a two-part interview with author Chad Harbach, which you can read here and here.
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Someone who doesn’t think The Art of Fielding is Abner Doubleday’s gift to baseball. Or something like that; it’s all about the metaphors. Richard Peterson, an author and editor of books on the national pastime, published this critique in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which starts off The celebration of “The Art of Fielding” as the […]
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To me, at least. Amazon.com has selected Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding as Best Book of the Year. Seriously? I haven’t read any of the other top nine books, but I’m sorry — and with all dues respect — I can’t believe that TAOF is the best title, out of the hundreds that have […]
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Sometimes I wonder, with all the new books coming out every year, why anyone would want to read something they’ve already read before. So many books, so little time. But while working on the 501 Book project I came across several titles in my library that I had never read, which no doubt led to […]
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Okay, so I was wrong about the front page part, but The Art of Fielding got another review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review section. And it’s another glowstick. The Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal ran this, but the author is a local boy, so what else are they going to say? More: * The New […]
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Will this book every get a middling review? First The New York Times calls it “not only a wonderful baseball novel — it zooms immediately into the pantheon of classics, alongside “The Natural” by Bernard Malamud and “The Southpaw” by Mark Harris — but it’s also a magical, melancholy story about friendship and coming of […]
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They might as well just hand this guy the Pulitzer already and save the rest of the authors the time. But can anyone tell me of the top of his or her head what “chiaroscuro” means?
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A Critical Study, by Kathleen Sullivan. McFarland, 2005. Novels and feature films tend to find comfort in stock characters. Stories about celebrities in particular focus on two or three types of women. You have your temptress who, for various reasons, wants to keep the protagonist from succeeding at his mission. For baseball materials you have […]
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Actually, I take that back. If these authors had excelled on the diamond, they would have just been a few out of thousands. But as it turns out, baseball’s loss was literature’s gain. According a Mental Floss blog entry on “11 prominent authors who excelled in sports”: Prior to his career as New Journalist and […]
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While doing research for my project, I came across this list, published in 2002, of the 100 top sports books of all time as chosen by the editors of Sports Illustrated. Of those 100, “only” 32 were about baseball. The nerve. Anyway, here’s the SI piece, trimmed to just baseball titles, with commentary from the […]
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As long-time readers of the Bookshelf know, I feel awkward when it comes to reviewing fiction. It’s so subjective. I like dogs and you’re a cat person or I like vanilla and you can’t stand it. I’m also of a mind that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything (although that philosophy kind […]
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If Bernard Malamud’s The Natural was supposedly based on the shooting of Eddie Waitkus, where’s a similar volume on Billy Jurges? On this date in 1932 — 17 years before the Waitkus incident — Jurges, a 24-year-old playing for the Cubs, was shot by a “deranged” fan who threatened suicide and but for his lunging […]
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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
Analysis: The Art of Fielding
October 28, 2011
Not by me (at least not yet), but via a “book club” effort by the always thoughtful Pitchers and Poets blog. They started this “event” Sept. 21 (shows how long I’ve been out of circulation), so if you start from the beginning you’ll be working a bit awkwardly out of sequence, but it’s worth it. […]
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