Reviews from other sources

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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A fairly uncomplimentary review of David Ortiz’s book appears on the Lucid Cultre blog. It seems unfair to hold such books up to standards of other biographical titles. After all these are increasingly written by and about younger people whose accomplishments , for all the glitz and attention, are relatively unimportant on the grand scale […]

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Two items on Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line, by Adrian Burgos Jr. ( University of California Press). The San Francisco Giants had several distinguihsed Latinos on the roster since they arrived in California in 1957, including Juan Maricahl, Orlando Cepeda, Jose Pagan, and the Alou Brothers, so it is fitting that the […]

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From Bob Timmermann at Griddle.baseballtoaster.com, a review of American Pastime, a film about baseball as played by Japanese Americans who were confined to internment camps during World War II. His bottom line: “it cover[s] a worthy subject and it avoids being preachy, even though the topic of Japanese internment could easily be covered that way.” […]

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<p><a href=”http://www.newsday.com/sports/ny-spbest085163079apr08,0,7841122.column?coll=ny-sports-mezz”><em>Newsday</em>’s Neil Best</a> joins the ranks of critics who seem to hate this book.</p><blockquote dir=”ltr” style=”MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px”><p dir=”ltr” style=”MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px”>What this sordid, 286-page mish-mash really is is a biography. But the author has eschewed that term to rationalize an inconvenient truth: He doesn’t have the journalistic goods to back up his content.</p></blockquote><p dir=”ltr” style=”MARGIN-RIGHT: […]

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<p>Richard Sandomir, sports media columnist for <em>The New York Times, </em><a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/sports/baseball/05mantle.html”>opines on Peter Golenbock’s new &quot;salacious&quot; novel on Mickey Mantle</a> which includes sexually explicit descrpoiotns of his brief fling with Marilyn Monroe.</p> <p>&quot;What is it about Mantle that makes him fascinating enough to have become <a onclick=”window.open(this.href, ‘_blank’, ‘width=190,height=240,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false” href=”http://baseballbookshelf.mlblogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/05mantle_1_190.jpg”><img title=”05mantle_1_190″ height=”189″ […]

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<p>Former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent contributed <a href=”http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/fivebest/?id=110009881″>this editorial</a> to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>, in which he gives his considered opinion on the five best books on the national pastime. They include:</p> <ul><li><em>Men at Work</em>, by George F. Will (1990)</li> <li><em>Eight Men Out</em>, by Eliot Asinof (1963)</li> <li><em>High Pockets</em>, by John R. Tunis (1948)</li> <li><em>The […]

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(This one got a little lost in the shuffle)  With the start of the season imminent, newspapers and magazines (as well as a few websites and blogs) select, by dint of their choices, what they consider the most prestigious baseball titles of the year. As I come across such selections, I’ll be posting apporopriate excerpts […]

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<p>Bob Andelman, aka Mr. Media, posted this in-depth <a href=”http://www.mrmedia.com/2007/03/fridays-with-mr-media-peter-golenbock7.html”>interview with Peter Golenbock, author of 7</a>, the already-controversial-though-not-yet-released novel about Mickey Mantle.</p> <p>A veteran of such notable baseball titles as <em>Dynasty; The Bronx Zoo</em>, which he wrote with Sparky Lyle; <em>Balls</em>, (Craig Nettles); <em>Guidry</em> (Ron Guidry); <em>Number One (</em>Billy Martin); and <em>Wild, High, and Tight</em>, […]

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As a rule, I don’t critique kids’ books. I just find it too difficult to write more words in a review than are contained in the book itself (especially for the 4 to 8-year-old crowd), and writing about illustrations will only go so far. So here’s a roundup of five children’s titles from the Ocean […]

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That’s one of the nice things about baseball: it’s sense of history can reach out to all age groups. This set of four capsule reviews by a student at Swarthmore includes titles — Lardner on Baseball and The Bad Guys Won — that are obviously out of his contemporary memory.

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