The Voices of Baseball PDF Download

Author: Kirk McKnight
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538177021
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
An in-depth look at each of Major League Baseball’s thirty ballparks from the perspectives of the game’s longest-tenured storytellers—the broadcasters. With decades of broadcasting between them, 50 broadcasters share their fondest memories from the booth, encapsulating some of baseball’s greatest moments.

Author: Curt Smith
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496207394
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 613

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Book Description
The Presidents and the Pastime draws on Curt Smith's extensive background as a former White House presidential speechwriter to chronicle the historic relationship between baseball, the "most American" sport, and the U.S. presidency. Smith, who USA TODAY calls "America's voice of authority on baseball broadcasting," starts before America's birth, when would‑be presidents played baseball antecedents. He charts how baseball cemented its reputation as America's pastime in the nineteenth century, such presidents as Lincoln and Johnson playing town ball or giving employees time off to watch. Smith tracks every U.S. president from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump, each chapter filled with anecdotes: Wilson buoyed by baseball after suffering disability; a heroic FDR saving baseball in World War II; Carter, taught the game by his mother, Lillian; Reagan, airing baseball on radio that he never saw--by "re-creation." George H. W. Bush, for whom Smith wrote, explains, "Baseball has everything." Smith, having interviewed a majority of presidents since Richard Nixon, shares personal stories on each. Throughout, The Presidents and the Pastime provides a riveting narrative of how America's leaders have treated baseball. From Taft as the first president to throw the "first pitch" on Opening Day in 1910 to Obama's "Go Sox!" scrawled in the guest register at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014, our presidents have deemed it the quintessentially American sport, enriching both their office and the nation.

Author: Carrie Gibson
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 080214635X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
A sweeping saga of the Spanish history and influence in North America over five centuries, from the acclaimed author of Empire’s Crossroads. Because of our shared English language, as well as the celebrated origin tales of the Mayflower and the rebellion of the British colonies, the United States has prized its Anglo heritage above all others. However, as Carrie Gibson explains with great depth and clarity in El Norte, the nation has much older Spanish roots?ones that have long been unacknowledged or marginalized. The Hispanic past of the United States predates the arrival of the Pilgrims by a century, and has been every bit as important in shaping the nation as it exists today. El Norte chronicles the dramatic history of Hispanic North America from the arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th century to the present?from Ponce de Leon’s initial landing in Florida in 1513 to Spanish control of the vast Louisiana territory in 1762 to the Mexican-American War in 1846 and up to the more recent tragedy of post-hurricane Puerto Rico and the ongoing border acrimony with Mexico. Interwoven in this narrative of events and people are cultural issues that have been there from the start but which are unresolved to this day: language, belonging, community, race, and nationality. Seeing them play out over centuries provides vital perspective at a time when it is urgently needed. In 1883, Walt Whitman meditated on his country’s Spanish past: “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them,” predicting that “to that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts.” That future is here, and El Norte, a stirring and eventful history in its own right, will make a powerful impact on our national understanding. “This history debunks the myth of American exceptionalism by revisiting a past that is not British and Protestant but Hispanic and Catholic. Gibson begins with the arrival of Spaniards in La Florida, in 1513, discusses Mexico’s ceding of territory to the U.S., in 1848, and concludes with Trump’s nativist fixations. Along the way, she explains how California came to be named after a fictional island in a book by a Castilian Renaissance writer and asks why we ignore a chapter of our history that began long before the Pilgrims arrived. At a time when the building of walls occupies so much attention, Gibson makes a case for the blurring of boundaries.” —New Yorker “A sweeping and accessible survey of the Hispanic history of the U.S. that illuminates the integral impact of the Spanish and their descendants on the U.S.’s social and cultural development. . . . This unusual and insightful work provides a welcome and thought-provoking angle on the country’s history, and should be widely appreciated.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review, PW Pick

Author: Wislawa Szymborska
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544618858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
"Unquestionably one of the great living European poets. She's accessible and deeply human and a joy--though it is a dark kind of joy--to read. . . . She is a poet to live with." —Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World Wislawa Szymborska's poems are admired around the world, and her unsparing vision, tireless wit, and deep sense of humanity are cherished by countless readers. Unknown to most of them, however, Szymborska, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, also worked for several decades as a columnist, reviewing a wide variety of books under the unassuming title "Nonrequired Reading." As readers of her poems would expect, the short prose pieces collected here are anything but ordinary. Reflecting the author's own eclectic tastes and interests, the pretexts for these ruminations range from books on wallpapering, cooking, gardening, and yoga, to more lofty volumes on opera and world literature. Unpretentious yet incisive, these charming pieces are on a par with Szymborska's finest lyrics, tackling the same large and small questions with a wonderful curiosity.

Author: Martin C. Babicz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442235853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
From its modest beginnings in rural America to its current status as an entertainment industry in postindustrial America enjoyed worldwide by millions each season, the linkages between baseball’s evolution and our nation’s history are undeniable. Through war, depression, times of tumultuous upheaval and of great prosperity – baseball has been held up as our national pastime: the single greatest expression of America’s values and ideals. Combining a comprehensive history of the game with broader analyses of America’s historical and cultural developments, National Pastime encapsulates the values that have allowed it to endure: hope, tradition, escape, revolution. While nostalgia, scandal, malaise and triumph are contained within the study of any American historical moment, we see in this book that the tensions and developments within the game of baseball afford the best window into a deeper understanding of America’s past, its purpose, and its principles.

Author: Barry Svrluga
Publisher: Doubleday Books
ISBN: 9780385517850
Category : Baseball
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Major League Baseball returned to Washington, D.C., in 2005 and created a bang that no one had anticipated. The Washington Nationals enjoyed astonishing success from the get-go; by midseason they were in first place in the highly competitive National League East. The team, composed mainly of former Montreal Expos and managed by one of the best players in the history of the game—the feisty, outspoken Frank Robinson—captured the attention of baseball fans not just in the nation’s capital but throughout the country. Barry Svrluga, beat reporter for The Washington Post, has followed the saga of the Nationals from the early, intense wrangling over bringing the team to Washington to the surprising success of their first-ever season. Granted exclusive access to the team, he brings the players to life in wonderful anecdotes about their lives on and off the field, interviews fans from around the city, and offers his own astute analyses of the team’s ups and downs throughout the season. A savvy observer of both Washington and Major League politicking, he covers the conflicts that undermined the existence of a D.C. team for more than three decades, including battles about financing the franchise and the building of a new stadium (now scheduled to be completed in 2008), as well as bitter opposition from the neighboring Baltimore Orioles and others inside the baseball establishment.

Author: Andy McCue
Publisher: SABR, Inc.
ISBN: 1933599642
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
The Baseball Research Journal is the flagship research publication of the Society for American Baseball Research. Founded in 1971, SABR now has over 6,000 members investigating every aspect of the sport, from statistical analysis to biographical research, to psychology, economics, physics, biomechanics, game theory, and more. In this issue: Leaving a Mark on the Game Allan Roth by Andy McCue The Creation of the Alexander Cartwright Myth by Richard Hershberger Stolen Bases and Caught Stealing by Catchers: Updating Total Player Rating by Pete Palmer New York Connections McGraw’s Streak by Max Blue Clyde Sukeforth: The Dodgers’ Yankee and Branch Rickey’s Maine Man by Karl Lindholm Identifying Undated Ticket Stubs: An Attempt to Recapture Baseball History by Dr. James Reese Outside the Majors “Many Exciting Chases After the Ball”: Nineteenth Century Base Ball in Bismarck, Dakota Territory by Terry Bohn The Great 1952 Florida International League Pennant Race by Sam Zygner and Steve Smith Aquino Abreu: Baseball’s Other Double No-Hit Pitcher by Peter C. Bjarkman Defiance College’s Historic 1961 Postseason by Roger J. Hawks Analytical Looks at the Game We Love The Twisting Model and Ted Williams’s Science of Hitting by Takeyuki Inohiza The Best Shortened-Season Hitting Performance in Major League History by David Nemec Was There a Seven Way Game? Seven Ways of Reaching First Base by Paul Hertz The Three, or Was it Two, .400 Hitters of 1922 by Brian Marshall What Do Your Fans Want?: Attendance Correlations with Performance, Ticket Prices, and Payroll Factors by Ben Langhorst Do Fans Prefer Homegrown Players? An Analysis of MLB Attendance, 1976–2012 by Russell Ormiston 2014 Chadwick Honorees Mark Armour by Rob Neyer Ernie Lanigan by Lyle Spatz Marc Okkonen by Dan Levitt Cory Schwartz by Christina Kahrl John C. Tattersall by John Thorn

Author: Curt Smith
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 044655698X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 629

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Book Description
Funny, moving, and each one a diamond in the rough of the American consciousness, the essays in this book are the ultimate baseball conversation that pays homage to the perfect sport, in this perfect companion for all our personal baseball journeys. For some people baseball means a memory-of a certain dusty ball field on a certain summer day, or the first time they walked into a major league park and saw the perfect emerald playing field. For some, baseball means one heartbreaking or heroic moment. And for others, it means a father, a friend, or an old flame who shared a game for a day or for a lifetime. To create this marvelous book, more than 150 writers, athletes, celebrities, politicians, presidents, and pundits were asked what baseball means to them. The answers came back with richness, wonder, insight, and poetry. A fascinating portrait of baseball's beautiful nuances, What Baseball means to me marks the greatest collection of original essays ever written about the game. Accompanied by more than 200 classic baseball photographs, the voices in this book bring alive the game in all its venues-in the past and present, in wartime and hard times, in Cuba, in Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium. We meet players in a different light: including Paul Molitor returning a baseball to a trusting boy named Dan Jansen, Derek Jeter as depicted by his dad, the Toledo Mud Hens as seen through the eyes of Christine Brennan, and Pedro Martinez talking about baseball as a way of life in his native Dominican Republic. Most of all, we meet ordinary Americans, like the kids Rudy Giuliani grew up with in Brooklyn, or the man in Philadelphia who transforms himself for every home game from mild-mannered Tom Burgoyne to the Phillie Phanatic.

Author: Robert B. Parker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101546522
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
The most personal and revealing Spenser thriller of all, Pastime is Robert B. Parker's electrifying masterpeice of crime fiction--a startling game of memory, desire, and danger that forces Spenser to face his own past. Ten years ago, he saved a teenage boy from a father's rage. Now, on the brink of manhood, the boy seeks answers to his mother's sudden disapearance. Spenser is the only man he can turn to. This time, it's more than a routine search for a missing person--Spenser must search his own soul...

Author: Stephen M. Ross
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820313757
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
William Faulkner recognized voice as one of the most distinctive and powerful elements in fiction when he delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, describing the last sound at the end of the world as man's "puny inexhaustible voice, still talking." As a testimonial of an artist's faith in his art, the speech raised the value of voice to its highest reach for man, as "one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Stephen Ross explores the nature of voice in William Faulkner's fiction by examining the various modes of speech and writing that his texts employ. Beginning with the proposition that voice is deeply involved in the experience of reading Faulkner, Ross uses theoretically grounded notions of voice to propose new ways of explaining how Faulkner's novels and stories express meaning, showing how Faulkner used the affective power of voice to induce the reader to forget the silent and originless nature of written fiction. Ross departs from previous Faulkner criticism by proceeding not text-by-text or chronologically but by construction a workable taxonomy which defines the types of voice in Faulkner's fiction: phenomenal voice, a depicted event or object within the represented fictional world; mimetic voice, the illusion that a person is speaking; psychic voice, one heard only in the mind and overheard only through fiction's omniscience; and oratorical voice, an overtly intertextual voice which derives from a discursive practice--Southern oratory--recognizable outside the boundaries of any Faulkner text and identifiable as part of Faulkner's biographical and regional heritage. In Faulkner's own experience, listening was important. As he once confided to Malcolm Cowley, "I listen to the voices, and when I put down what the voices say, it's right." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Ross conducts a careful analysis of this fundamental source of power in Faulkner's fiction, concluding that the preponderance of voice imagery, represented talking, verbalized thought, and oratorical rhetoric and posturing makes the novels and stories fundamentally vocal. They derive their energy from the play of voices on the imaginative field of written language.