Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
♦ From the Tulsa World, this on on Robert Fitts’ Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan. Upshot: “It is very well-researched and a balanced account, but it occasionally threatens to sag under the weight of such details. Readers need not be fans of baseball to appreciate the sport […]
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♦ Bill Jordan posted this review of Paul Dickson’s Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, on Baseball Reflections. Upshot: “Anyone who considers themselves to be a fan of baseball history should pick this work up. Whether you were familiar with Veeck or not before reading the book, you stand to learn a lot about this interesting […]
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♦ The Knoxville News published this review of native son R.A. Dickley’s Wherever I Wind Up. Upshot: “t is rare to find a baseball book by an insider that dishes no dirt. It is even rarer to find a professional athlete willing to acknowledge his own mistakes. In “Wherever I Wind Up,” R.A. Dickey reveals […]
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For April 29 (yes, April 29, according to the website) Imperfect: An Improbable Life, by Jim Abbot and Tim Brown stands at #16. Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift, by Harvey Araton is at #20. Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball, by R.A. […]
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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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In honor of opening week, The New York Times posted this piece in its Arts Beat blog in which several of their writers and editors pick their favorite baseball titles. Among them: George Vecsey, The Southpaw and The Boys of Summer Michiko Kakutani, Chief Book Critic, Underworld Tyler Kepner, Ball Four and Men at Work […]
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This list appeared on a SABR post and it seemed like a good resource, so I’m recreating it (sans links) here, FYI: Bloom, John, A House of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture (Univ. of Minn. Press, 1997) Boyd, Brendan and Harris, Fred, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book […]
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Tom Hoffarth’s third installment in his 30 books/30 days series: The Greatest Show on Dirt, a novel by James Bailey. The Rafu Shimpo, Los Angeles’ Japanese daily newspaper, published this review of Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War, by Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch […]
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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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Actually, apologies to the office manager, who had to schlep these books to my desk. Four titles from the University of Nebraska Press arrived today (full disclosure: UNP will be publishing my 501 book next year). In order of interest to me (with all due respect to the authors and which probably means the order […]
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Richard Johnson, curator of The Sports Museum in Boston and author, co-author, or editor of several baseball titles including: The American Game; Baseball. Ethnicity, and The American Dream, Red Sox Century, DiMaggio, An Illustrated Life, and Ted Williams, A Portrait in Words and Pictures, posted this piece on Facebook today. I have taken the liberty […]
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James Baily published his list of top ten baseball books on Baseball America. His choices include, in order: The Art of Fielding: A Novel, by Chad Harbach (currently ranked #18 on Amazon) Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game, by Dan Barry Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of […]
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In an effort to cull out the weighty tomes that threaten to cave in our attic floor, my wife is giving me a Kindle for Hanukka with the hope that any new book I acquire will be in that format. I have long been opposed to e-books for aesthetic reasons. I like the tactile “interaction,” […]
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The good news: More than half way to the goal of 501 books. The bad news: it takes me away from the blog. Oh well, hang around. It will be worth it in the end. In the meantime, here are a few items for your consideration: Out of Left Field, Rebecca Alpert’s history of Jewish […]
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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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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
Bits and pieces
August 30, 2012
Time for the occasional declutter of the accumulated links and stories, so here goes. “Dan Barry’s Bottom of the 33rd has won the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, which honors a nonfiction book on the subject of sports.” More here. From the Yogi Berra Museum: Former Yankee star second baseman Bobby Richardson, a cornerstone […]
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