Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
From Mopupduty.com. Up-shoot: “All in all a slow read but deeply investigates the people and forces that have made baseball in the last 15 years a Juiced Game.”
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A sad reminder of a man cut down in the prime of life, the only major leaguer to die as a result of an injury sustained on the field. Chapman was hit in the head by submariner Carl Mays on August 16, 1920. His story was chronicled in The Pitch That Killed, written in 1989 […]
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From sox1fan.com. The book’s official site.
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Haven’t seen too many reviews on this one, which is statistics/ computer-oriented, so I thought to include it for those who are into this genre. From Blogcritics.org. In fact, most of the book seems to be available online, thanks to Google Books.
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From the Columbia (MO) Daily Tribune. Columbians might remember when Mr. Rickey collapsed on Nov. 13, 1965, as he was being inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame at the Daniel Boone Hotel and when he died on Dec. 9 at Boone County Hospital without regaining consciousness. Upshoot: “The reader does not have to […]
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From Delaware Online, this list of five good reads to keep a fan warm during the off-season. The subjects range in “age” from the early 1900s to the mid 1990s, with, mercifully, no mention of cheating or steroids. The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence Ritter John McGraw, by Charles C. Alexander The Era, by […]
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The excellent Bizofbaseball Web site features several reviews of books pertaining to its charter, including In the Best Interests of Baseball? and May The Best Team Win, by Andrew Zimbalist; The Last Commissioner: A Baseball Valentine, by Fay Vincent, and Lords of the Realm, by John Helyar, among others. As mentioned in the previous entry […]
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It’s not so much the review itself, but where it comes from. This appeared on the American Journal of Psychiatry Web site. I kept looking for a psychiatric “hook,” to see why it would be printed on such a scholarly medium. Couldn’t find one; maybe I’m blocking. My assessment of the book, along with more […]
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Another team-devoted Web site, BleedingCubbieBlue.com, offers these reviews of The Cubs, by Glenn Stout, and First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson, edited by Michael B. Long. Stout’s latest is much more entertaining, a coffee table book just meant for holiday giving. First Classis more scholarly. I’m reading that one now (or […]
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Read the review from the Washington Post here. Ha, Ha. You thought it was a book a Ted Williams, didn’t you? The author must have been a baseball fan with a sense of irony.
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From Gelf.com, this review on the ongoing lust for a little piece of old cardboard. “In the last 15 years, sports-card collecting has been pulled in two opposite directions. The mainstream fan has lost interest in The Hobby, as it’s known. But the hard-core collectors have kept bidding up the most-valuable, rarest memorabilia. And nothing […]
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From a review of Steve Almond’s (Not that You Asked) Rants, Exploits and Obsessions appearing on dailycampus.com, the University of Connecticut’s on-line edition There’s a chapter on baseball, which attempts to both invoke and criticize the obese creature that is American sports fandom, but it’s limited to the predictable critiques of fanaticism and the idiotic-but-charming […]
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From the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, as the Indians prepare for the American League Championship Series against the Boston Red Sox, one writer’s opinion about the best books on the game. I always find it interesting how faux fans crawl out of the woodwork at this time of year, especially when FOX broadcasts the World Series, stocking […]
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NINE is a scholarly journal published twice a year by the University of Nebraska Press that “studies all historical aspects of baseball, centering on the societal and cultural implications of the game wherever in the world it is played. [The] journal features articles, essays, book reviews, biographies, oral history, and short fiction pieces.” Included in […]
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The Babe Ruth Story, by Babe Ruth and Bob Considine, was the first baseball book to make the prestigious NY Times‘ Bestseller List (July 4, 1948), debuting at #15. Read the original review, which appeared 0n May 2, 1948 together with Walter Johnson, King of the Pitchers, by Roger L. Treat; Jackie Robinson: My Own […]
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John Marshall, book critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, recently offered this list of his favorite baseball titles for 2007: Crazy ’08, by Cait Murphy The Psychology of Baseball, by Mike Stadler Senior Year, by Dan Shaughnessy Tales From the Seattle Mariners Dugout, by Kirby Arnold Baseball Haiku,edited by Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura […]
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From Oneminutebookreview, this piece on Phillip Hoose’s memoir of growing up in the 1950s and discovering a connection with an improbable Yankees hero. Perfect, Once Removed is the rare baseball book that has something for fans at all levels. In this lively memoir Phillip Hoose tells how his cousin once removed, Don Larsen, pitched a […]
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This list includes more than 125 reviews. Some are the books are duplicated by different reviewers.
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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
