Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Don’t you just love the Internet? It’s filled with all sorts of treasure. The latest nugget I’ve found is from Manybooks.net, a site for free e-books, available via download for several platforms, which include some rare baseball titles: The High School Pitcher, by H. Irving Hancock The Red Headed Outfield and Other Stories (1920) and […]
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Judith Regan Files Lawsuit Against News Corporation A report in today’s Publisher’s Weekly e-mail update states that Reagan, whose was working on Peter Golenbock’s 7: The Mickey Mantle Story, is suing her former employer News Corp. for $100 million “for a campaign to smear and discredit her….” Regan, whose self-named Regan Books was an imprint […]
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A while ago, I linked to this entry about why baseball and book publishing are alike. Here’s another take on the subject from the Issues in Publishing blog. In brief, the host, Fran Toolan remarks on : The analogy of authors as ‘players’. This fits on many levels. Authors have agents, players have agents. Authors […]
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From today’s Publisher’s Weekly e-mail: Simon & Schuster is committing to saving the Earth, or at least a few of its trees. The publisher has made a public commitment to use more environmentally friendly paper, a move which will, according to its calculations, save 483,000 trees every year. All of which means there will be […]
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From today’s e-mail Publisher’s Weekly: “Citing mounting costs from three libel suits, Barricade Books filed for bankruptcy earlier this month in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.” Barricade was the publisher for Shakespeare on Baseball: Such Time-Beguiling Sport, edited by David Goodnough, released in 2000. Here’s what Shakespeare knew about baseball, […]
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In the quarterly issue of The New York Times’ Play Magazine, Bryan Curtis, the supplement’s media columnist, opines on the genre of sports star memoir/autobiography. “Run your eyes over my bookshelf, and next to Melville, Stendhal and Colette, you’ll find Bouton, Meggyesy and Canseco,” he writes crediting them as “among the intellectually adventurous athletes who […]
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Rick Reilly, formerly of Sports Illustrated, will now be working for ESPN. This comes on the heels of the announcement that Dan Patrick, formerly of ESPN, will now be working fo SI, which will also receive a writer to be named later. Reilly will reportedly receive $2 million per year, but declined to elaborate. “I’m […]
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According to The Oregonian (Oct. 21). The book game is not unlike the system baseball uses to cultivate new talent. It’s called the minor leagues, and the objective is to discover who can “play” at a higher level and who can’t. If you substitute the word “sell” for “play,” you have the fiction business in […]
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by Mike Shannon (McFarland, 2007) As one who collects baseball books, I was happy to come across Mike Shannon’s latest offering. After reading it, however, I find myself depressed, contrary to the author’s philosophy. I — along with everyone else, according to the author — will never be a “completist,” that is one who acquires […]
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According to an article by Andrew Grabois on BeneaththeCover.com, a web site that deals with the book industry, …[W]e find, not surprisingly, that baseball is still king. With its rich history, sacred pantheon of heroes and records, and endless statistics, baseball should remain the anchor of the category for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, in the […]
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Apropos to yesterday’s post on The Babe Ruth Story, these are the only baseball books to make the top spot on The New York Times Best-Seller list, along with the dates of their “coronation”: The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn, May 28, 1972 (a total of 24 weeks on the list) Summer of ’49, […]
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They don’t make ’em like this anymore. At least not lately. The Whole Baseball Catalogue, edited by John Thorn and Bob Carroll (A Fireside Book, published by Simon and Schuester, 1990) has an excellent chapter on “Going by the Book: Baseball Between the Covers.” “You can have a complete library for approximately what it costs […]
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From Publishers Weekly, Sept. 4, 2007 With 2008 set to be the last year that the New York Yankees will play in the current Yankee Stadium, Pocket Books’ v-p and deputy publisher Anthony Ziccardi has acquired Yankee Stadium: The Official Retrospective. The book, acquired from Mark Vancil of Rare Air Media, will feature more than […]
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It never ceases to amaze me — and I’ll always be grateful — that the blogosphere has opened a new channel of communication and that there are celebrities willing to talk with, in many cases, with “just plain folks.” A good example is BrokenCowboy, “Sports views with a West Coast Bias.” The blogger, who chooses […]
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The Savvy Girls of Summer: Every Woman’s Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Baseball, by Deidre Silva and Jackie Koney, is due out in October by Skyhorse Publishing. According to the Web site, the book: will educate fans with a passionate interest in the game by offering information and an historical perspective that will add to […]
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Not that he’s been out of the media eye lately, but Barry Bonds’ recent achievement has given new life not only to books about him, but to the writing profession as a whole. You have the philosophical/scientific communities arguing about the ethical issues and whether or not performance enhancing drugs can actually help a batter […]
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I’ve long been interested in philosophy. Or rather the concept of philosophy, with all its thoughtfulness and intellectual pursuits. So I wondered what that community had to say about Bonds’ potentially questionable methods en route to 756. Herewith a sample: From Uselesstree: The un-Way of Barry Bonds When we try too hard to reach a […]
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I was listening to the Mets game today and came in the middle of a comment from one of their announcers. All I got was the suspicion by someone that Hank Aaron might have received payment for his congratulatory message to Barry Bonds following the record breaking home run. Now, coming in the middle of […]
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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
A call for sports journalism reform
October 30, 2007
From the Sept./Oct. 2007 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, this piece by Robert Weintraub on the changing face of sports journalism in a new technological age. The writer complains about the increasing incidence on the part of leagues, club owners, and players to control what is reported about them. Remember the movie Eight Men […]
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