Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
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The National Pastime Museum website offers a collection of essays on My Favorite Baseball Books. The list includes many of the best-known titles as assessed by writers, critics, and other baseball savants. Among them: Bang the Drum Slowly, by Joe Schuster, author of The Might Have Been: A Novel The Natural, by Ryan Swanson, author […]
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Since I posted the first of these on a Thursday, which is known on social media as a time of reflection, I thought to make it a regular thing under this rubric. These are kind of fun; it’s like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’re gonna get. (Actually, I never understood […]
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The Viva el Birdos blog, a St. Louis Cardinals-centric site, hosts a book discussion from time to time. Their first foray was Ed Achorn’s The Summer of Beer and Whiskey. The current selection is Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris. Intro here; discussion questions here. Bonus: Here’s a review from The New York Times […]
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Sorry to mix baseball titles, but the Henry Wiggen blog finally reviews Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly. Upshot: If “The Southpaw” is the baseball version of the Great American Novel, “Bang the Drum Slowly” is the classic American story. In an aside, the writer notes that Robert DeNiro, who played the dying catcher, Bruce […]
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Paul Newman has died at the age of 83. The blue-eyed heartthrob was one of those lucky performers able to enjoy his craft for decades. Newman appeared in Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly which was a production of the U.S. Steel Hour. You can watch the program here: Bang the Drum Slowly
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Mark Harris, author of Bang the Drum Slowly and other seminal works of adult baseball fiction, passed away a year ago due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 84. His 1956 novel about the relationship between star pitcher Henry “Author” Wiggen (think Tom Seaver combined with Jim Bouton) and his doomed catcher, […]
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I’m going out on a limb here, because there’s no description, but I’m guessing the Fiftybooksproject blog is a school assignment, which means these are young people writing the reviews. That’s kind of refreshing. The choice of The Southpaw strikes me as a bit unusual. For one thing, it’s a serious book that I don’t […]
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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 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
