Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Remiss in my blogging, as you might have notice. One of the big regrets was not following Tom Hoffarth’s excellent annual project of reviewing 30 baseball books in 30 days. Hoffarth no longer plies his trade for the LA Daily News, but he still posted the series on his refurbished blog. Here’s a quick recap […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
No, not Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men (or, heaven forfend, the wall on the Mexican border). I’m talking about Tom Hoffarth, late of the Los Angeles Daily News (he’s the one in the middle, above). While he joins me in the ranks of the recently “released” journalists, he continues his excellent “30 baseball […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
I looked at a lot of video clips when writing about the recent passing of John Mahoney, the actor who played Kid Gleason, manager of the 1919 Chicago White Sox, in the film version of Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out. I was specifically looking for the courtroom scene but couldn’t find it. I did find […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
I always get a kick out of finding reviews of baseball books in unlikely places. In this case, it’s actually kind of a natural, since this title cross multiple genres. Even though it touts itself as “The Essential Guide to Movies of the ’60s and ’70s,” CinemaRetro offers this piece on Richard Sandomir’s The Pride […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Seems that for the time being, thee quick updates will do until the new releases come out. Still planning on getting back to the Bookshelf Conversations as soon as possible. The first two will feature Rich Cohen, author of The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse, and Sridhar Pappu, author of The Year of the […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Haven’t done one of these in awhile, but here we go… This whole unpleasant business with Charlottesville has opened a can of worms when it comes to deciding which people who had previously been recognized by way of statues, parks, and roadways should have those honors stripped. Case in point: Tom Yawkey, former owner of the Boston […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
They say the former Prime Minister and British icon read a book a day, even during the War. So I’m guessing, if he were still alive and had developed an interest in our national pastime, he would have enjoyed Tom Hoffarth’s 10th annual “30-for-30” baseball book feature. A pox on me for not keeping you […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Sorry, don’t know how to make a backwards “R.” People love lists, so websites and blogs give the people what they want. Sometimes the lists come in one long page, other times you have to scroll through slide shows, thereby increasing your time on the site which helps their analytics. Don’t get me started on […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing you can count the number of baseball books that get a review in Scientific American on one hand. But here you go: their take on Brian Kenny’s Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution. Since baseball is a metaphor for life, writer Steve Mirsky compares some […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
As good as these baseball books are, they wouldn’t be my first choices for gift-giving — I lean more towards coffee-table volumes — but Will Leitch, writing for the Wall Street Journal, offers his considered opinion in this piece.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
As you might have noticed from my weekly posting about baseball best-sellers, I’m not overly happy that Lenny Dykstra’s new memoir, House of Nails, is doing well. It came in at No. 11 on the most recent New York Times best-seller list for non-fiction. This isn’t a case of schadenfreude. It’s that people are more […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
NOTE: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So on […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The Christian Science Monitor posted this piece recommending six baseball titles including: Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life, by Ron Darling and Daniel Paisner Dodgerland: Decadent Los Angeles and the 1977-78 Dodgers, by Michael Fallon I’m Fascinated by Sacrifice Flies: Inside the Game We All Love, by Tim […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
is available on Amazon.com,
In my most recent "day job," I was the sports and features editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper, where I hosted another blog. Busy, busy, busy.
I did a profile piece on the award-winning cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.
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
