Baseball, I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life PDF Download

Author: Richard Grossinger
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 9781556430831
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This book includes Donald Hall, Jack Kerouac, Robert Kelly, Bill Lee, Paul Metcalf, Anne Waldman, Tom Clark, and Bernadette Mayer. The quality of the work in this anthology varies widely, but the sheer unlikeliness of a volume of neo-beat baseball poetry and new-age-inflected essays cannot help but inspire generosity. The photography is remarkable, and the photo essays of baseball stars of the 1950s and 1960s have this awe-inspiring sense of the mundane about them.

Author: Mike Shannon
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476617724
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
Each work, chosen with exquisite care by an expert, is analyzed and summarized. Its greatness as baseball literature, its place in the genre, its peculiarities, weaknesses, strengths, how the critics went for it--all are discussed in such a way, with quotations, that reading or browsing Shannon's book is equivalent to absorbing a rich history of the sport.

Author: William McPheron
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9780916583675
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The trajectory of Gilbert Sorrentino's literary life can be tracked in this bibliography, from his first short story in a 1956 issue of his college literary magazine, through his involvement with the New York publishing scene in the 1960s and 1970s, and finally into the 1980s and early 1990, when his work, as at the beginning, once again is being published by small presses. The bibliography treats writings both by and about Sorrentino, uniting in one volume exhaustive descriptive analyses of primary works with annotated treatment of secondary sources. It thereby serves the needs not only of scholars and collectors interested in the physical production of Sorrentino's books but also of literary critics concerned with matters of reception and interpretation.

Author: Richard Grossinger
Publisher: Frog Books
ISBN: 9781583942055
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
No baseball team has captured America's imagination like the Mets. Alternately the "Lovable Losers" and the "Miracle Mets," New York's other team offers fascinating fodder for writer Richard Grossinger in this thoughtful collection. The New York Mets is a series of probing essays on the best and most interesting years of the team, particularly 1969, 1973, 1986, and last year's abbreviated run. A pivotal essay chronicles the lives of a professional athlete and a die-hard fan to create a well-argued, deeply felt meditation on the ways in which franchise baseball has come to fail not only the fans but the players. This centerpiece presents a poignant narrative of Mets pitcher Terry Leach and author Grossinger's own experiences playing and tracking the sport. Taken together, these powerful essays alternately take the poet's, the alchemist's, and the player's perspective to paint a composite portrait that brings all the stunning highs and dispiriting lows together to show the ways in which America's favorite pastime has changed. Grossinger reflects on the salad days when teams were happily homegrown and laments the current money-ball scenario some call baseball today.

Author: Ron Kaplan
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496209885
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
Propounding his "small ball theory" of sports literature, George Plimpton proposed that "the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature." Of course he had the relatively small baseball in mind, because its literature is formidable--vast and varied, instructive, often wildly entertaining, and occasionally brilliant. From this bewildering array of baseball books, Ron Kaplan has chosen 501 of the best, making it easier for fans to find just the books to suit them (or to know what they're missing). From biography, history, fiction, and instruction to books about ballparks, business, and rules, anyone who loves to read about baseball will find in this book a companionable guide, far more fun than a reference work has any right to be.

Author: John Billheimer
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786429062
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Most baseball fans know what links Fred Merkle, Fred Snodgrass, Mickey Owen and Bill Buckner. It's a pantheon of public failure. They would be harder put to say what links Eric Byrnes, Tony Fernandez, and Babe Ruth, though these players made misplays every bit as egregious. In this smart, highly readable history of scapegoating, John Billheimer identifies the elements that combine to condemn one player to a life sentence while another gets a wrist slap for the same offense. As it turns out, the difference between a lower-case e in some forgotten box score and a lifetime of ignominy can hinge on a number of factors, including timing, geography, reputation, misunderstanding, media bias, and just plain bad luck.

Author: Brooke Horvath
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809324392
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
"We wait for baseball all winter long," Bill Littlefield wrote in Boston Magazine a decade ago, "or rather, we remember it and anticipate it at the same time. We re-create what we have known and we imagine what we are going to do next. Maybe that's what poets do, too." Poetry and baseball are occasions for well-put passion and expressive pondering, and just as passionate attention transforms the prose of everyday life into poetry, it also transforms this game we write about, play, or watch. Editors Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles unite their own passion for baseball and poetry in this collection, Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, providing a forum for ninety-two poets. Line after line, like baseball itself game after game and season after season, these poems manage to make the old and the familiar new and surprising. The poems in these pages invite interrogation, and the reader--like the true baseball fan--must be willing to play the game, for these poems are fun, fresh, angry, nostalgic, meditative, and meant to be read aloud. They are keen on taking us deeply into baseball as sport and intent on offering countless metaphors for exploring history, religion, love, family, and self-identity. Each poem delivers images of pure beauty as the poets speak of murder and ghost runners and old ball gloves, of baseball as a tie that binds families--and indeed the nation--together, of the game as a stage upon which no-nonsense grit and skill are routinely displayed, and of the delight experienced in being one amid a mindlessly happy crowd. This book is true to the game's long season and to the lives of those the game engages.

Author: Mike Shannon
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
ISBN: 0071612610
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Batter up--here comes the most memorable collection of anecdotes about the national pastime ever assembled. Tales from the Dugout brings together never-before-told stories from baseball personalities such as Roger Maris, Ken Griffey Jr., Pete Rose, Phil Rizzuto, and Gaylord Perry in this illustrated, one-of-a-kind compendium.

Author: Mike Shannon
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476610924
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
It is widely, and wrongly, assumed that books are never so valuable as when they lie unopened before us, waiting to be read. Good books bear multiple readings, and not merely because our memories fail us; the desire to repeat a good reading experience can be its own powerful motivation. And for bibliophiles, books can also be works of art, physical objects with an aesthetic value all their own. This guide for the book-loving baseball fan is written by one of the most knowledgeable collectors in the country, author and editor Mike Shannon. Beginning with a history of baseball books and collecting, it also identifies the most sought-after titles and explains how to find them, what to pay, and how to maintain their condition.

Author: David Quentin Voigt
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271038306
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
"How did "America's National Game" evolve from a gentlemen's pastime in the 1850s to a national obsession in the Roaring Twenties? What really happened at Cooperstown in 1839, and why does the "Doubleday legend" persist? How did the commissioner system develop, and what was the impact of the "Black Sox" scandal? These questions and many others are answered in this book, with colorful details about early big league stars such as Mike "King" Kelly and pious Billy Sunday, Charles Comiskey and Ty Cobb, Napoleon Lajoie and "Cy" (Cyclone) Young. The author explores historically the four major periods of transformation of the game: the Gentlemen's Era, the Golden Age, the Feudal Age, and the incipient Silver Age. Attention is given to the changing face of the major league spectacle, the evolving style of the game, and the changing interests of players, fans, and owners, along with influential innovators and their innovations. There are a number of surprises in the book. For instance, several black players made the big leagues in the 1880s, only to be driven out by a rising tide of Jim Crowism. For three generations black players were to be confined to their own clubs and leagues. American baseball history reflects the nation's economic and social history, as author Voigt graphically demonstrates. On the fans' side, mass attendance at ball games reflects the rise of cities and the dilution of a work ethic with pursuit of leisure; on the owners' and players' side, organized baseball reflects the developing tension between big business and skilled employees. The result--despite ups and downs--is a typical American success story." --