Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
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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The first of what will probably be several lists/suggestions: Linda Holmes, over at Monkey See, the pop culture blog for NPR, offered a selection of five sports books for the summer, including Stan Musial: An American Life by George Vecsey. And, what the heck, there’s enough info to consider Scorecasting a baseball book, too. This […]
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My annual Spring Baseball Book Roundup was recently posted to the Bookreporter.com site. Titles include: 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella Uppity: My Untold Story About the Games People Play The House That Ruth Built: A New Stadium, the […]
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Another in a series of futile attempts to catch up. Because you can keep minutiae on your bookshelf, here’s a new community baseball site that looks like it’s going to be fun: Eephusleague.com.It has a cool design and icons that take the visitor to a host of categories, including uniforms, rules, articles, photos, scorekeeping, etc. […]
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Some additional baseball book roundups: The Chicago Tribune: Willie Mays: The Life , The Legend; Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards; Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride through Baseball and America in the Swinging ‘70s; and Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the Golden Age of Baseball The Cleveland […]
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Traditionally, this is the time of year when newspapers (remember those?) run round-ups of baseball book reviews (like this one by yours truly on Bookreporter.com). They’re good for those with short attention spans, since they tend to cover multiple titles briefly (but then, if that’s your problem, how will you get through the books themselves?). […]
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My annual Spring Baseball Roundup appears on the current edition of Bookreporter.com: 2010 Spring Baseball Roundup In a baseball era when much of the discussion has centered on who may have taken shortcuts to superstardom, it’s refreshing that 2010 sees several titles harkening back to a simpler time and heroes who won their glory through […]
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Alan Gratz’s Brooklyn Nine, the story of a young Jewish boy’s love for baseball in the early 20th century, is featured on the cover of the September issue of Booklist, the publication of the American Library Association. The issue highlights a sports theme and includes a number “top 10” choices in several categories, such as […]
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Richard J. Tofel, author of A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939, published his choices for the five best baseball business books in the July 31 Wall Street Journal. The list includes, in bis order: As They See ‘Em, by Bruce Weber Past Time, by Jules Tygiel Moneyball, by Michael Lewis […]
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AskMen.com, Canadian version, recently posted this entry on summer reading, including Moneyball Juiced Baseball Prospectus 2009 The Catcher Was a Spy: The Msyterious Life of Moe Berg Ball Four (at number 5? You kiddin’ me?) Bang the Drum Slowly Perfect I’m Not (I’d like to meet the marleting genius who decided that changing the title […]
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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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Greg Prince, who heads up the Faith and Fear in Flushing blog, recently came out with a book that collects all the love for the Mets he can muster. In this entry, and in honor of the Passover holiday, he uses the “Four Questions” approach to discuss five new titles, not all of which are […]
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The Globe featured several titles in this roundup, including Bruce Weber’s As They See ‘Em, Charles Fountain’s Under the March Sky, and Peter Morris’ Catcher: How the Man Behind the Plate Became an American Folk Hero, as well as a few Sox-centric books.
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In addition to Opening Day, this is the time of year when the media jumps on the baseball book review bandwagon. Here’s a batch of the best, according to SFGate.com, including: As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires, by Bruce Weber (Simon and Schuster; 341 pages; $26) Under the March […]
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Dermont McEvoy of Publishers Weekly published the magazine’s annual baseball roundup. No surprise, but this year’s selections are heavy on the “bad boy” books, including Selena Robert’s A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (April, Harper Collins). PW contacted Roberts’s editor at HarperCollins, senior v-p/ executive editor David Hirshey. Hirshey, who in the past has […]
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From our friend Greg Spira comes this link to LibraryJournal.com’s annual baseball feature. Among the usual share of biographies and memoirs, histories, and social commentaries are such themes as: Yet another biography about Yogi Berra, this one by homonymic author Allen Barra, and one on Walter O’Malley by Michael D’Antonio Ira Berkow’s bio of Lou […]
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And no, we’re not advocating burning them. This piece from the Pride of the Yankees blog on NJ.com features 101 Reasons to Love the Yankees, Babe Ruth: Remembering the Bambino in Stories, Photos & Memorabilia, and Remembering Yankee Stadium: An Oral and Narrative History of “The House That Ruth Built”
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A regional title announced in the pages of The Telegraph-Herald of Dubuque, Iowa. I’m including it just as much for the audio rendition as the brief story itself. For one thing, how could a visually-impaired person be able to find the link? And, at the risk of being un-PC, the computer-generated voice sounds like Stephen […]
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From one of my “competitors,” the GreatBaseballBooks blog, this brief item on David Surdam’s The Postwar Yankees: Baseball’s Golden Age Revisited. Upshot: Surdam’s writing is straightford [sic] but not boring. If you need to read something by an economist, you could do much worse.
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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 Fab Five
June 23, 2009
books on baseball, that is, at least according to this blogger. The list includes: The Kid from Tomkinsville The Southpaw The Glory of Their Times Stealing Home The Bill James Historical Abstract
Tagged as: baseball books
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