(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 and/or links.
So, to start.
The New York Times features two reviews in its April 1 Book section. George F Will writes about Crazy ‘08 by Cait Murphy, while Jim Bouton spends his page on Derek Zumsteg’s The Cheaters Guide to Baseball, an unlikekly choice for such an august publication as the Times. As mentioned in a previous post, Murphy has a nice website about her project. Both reviews are featured in the Times on-line edition, and include each book’s first chapter, (Zumsteg here, Murphy here).
While Will hails Murphy’s accomplishment, Bouton, whose Ball Four is “credited” with opening the literary door for the sports tell-all, knock-the-hero-off-the-pedestal style (see below), doesn’t seem enthralled by Zumsteg’s “how-to.”
In the last chapter, in a relative handful of pages, Zumsteg finally addresses steroids. And what does he have to say about the drug that’s had a more adverse effect on the integrity of the game than all the other cheating combined? “Steroids themselves aren’t evil,” he writes. “They don’t load themselves up into syringes in excessive doses and inject themselves into someone’s innocent butt.” I wonder if he owns a gun.
Bouton also wonders
How does a book like this occur to someone in the first place? Once again, a clue can be found in the acknowledgments. “Thanks are due,” Zumsteg writes, “to my agent, Sydelle Kramer, who was willing to help me figure out which book idea I could do well with, whip up a good proposal and find it a home.”
*****
In recognition of the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major league debut, Jonathan Eig, author of Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, has written the apt-titled Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. I’ll be posting my own review and author profile shortly, but in the meantime, Newsweek/MSNBC.com posted this “web exclusive” on the lasting effects of the event.
Staying on the Dodgers/Robinson theme, Lee Lowenfish has published a massive biography of Branch Rickey, the man who signed the major’s first African-American player. One review appears in the LA Times Book Review of April 1. (The Times also has a review by Jules Tygiel of the Black Sox-inspired Dreaming Baseball: A Novel, by James. T. Farrell.)
On the flip side, this article from InsideBayArea.com notes that not every artistic depiction of the game is all sunshine and lollipops. Among the works that the piece cites as “touch[ing] on the darker side of baseball, and of the country that loves, warts and all, are:
- The Bad News Bears — “gleefully (and viciously) lampoons hyper-competitive Little League parents and the messed-up, foul-mouthed kids they produce.”
- Ball Four — “paved the way for countless myth-busting sports and celebrity tell-alls that followed.”
- Bull Durham – “a deeper story of those who dwell in the remote, small-town world of minor league baseball, where few stars are born and fewer still are remembered.”
- Eight Men Out — “a riveting look at the dark side of the great American pastime.”
- The Fan “considering how athlete-obsessed we’ve become the past few decades, thanks to the Internet and multiple 24-hour cable sports channels, and considering how stalkers have managed to torment every branch of the celebrity world, it’s fairly timely.”
The article offers similar musings on Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashborard Light”; the films Major League, The Natural, Fever Pitch, and HBO’s *61; the theatrical presentation Take Me Out; and Don DeLillo’s Underworld. The article has no by-line, which is disappointing in that it means no individual will be able to defend his or her rationales. Is this meant as a joke, or just a curmodgeonly rant?
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