Product Details

Publishers Weekly

With the current malaise surrounding the sport, the time is ripe for this excellent collection chronicling more than a century of America's love affair with baseball. With an all-star cast of writers drawn from various eras and genres, Staudohar (Labor Relations in Professional Sports) demonstrates how thoroughly the game permeates American life-its psychology, sense of drama, mythology and moral code provide archetypes familiar even to those who have never set foot in a ballpark. The tales dramatize the conflicts between youth and experience, pride and humility, skill and luck, team loyalty and personal ambition. Master storytellers like Ring Lardner (author of three entries here), Zane Grey, Damon Runyon, P.G. Wodehouse, Robert Penn Warren, James Thurber, Garrison Keillor and T. Coraghessan Boyle celebrate the national pastime in 27 memorable tales and one poem, some poignant, some uproarious, each introduced by a brief editor's note. Baseball and literary fans may debate whether these are indeed the ``best'' baseball stories (where's George Plimpton's ``The Curious Case of Sydd Finch''?). So many good writers have felt the need to write about baseball that compiling a good anthology of baseball fiction isn't the hardest of tasks. Still, even if this project is a bit of a hanging curveball, Staudohar has hit it out of the park. (Dec.)

Library Journal

Any collection of baseball stories that fails to include examples from W.P. Kinsella's work is leaving out some of the finest short stories ever written; at the very least, "K-Mart" and "The Thrill of the Grass" should have been included here. So should one or two of the short stories in Jerry Klinkowitz's Short Season and Other Stories (Johns Hopkins, 1988). This said, editor Staudohar (coauthor of Labor Relations in Professional Sports, Greenwood, 1986) includes some of the classics from Ring Lardner (The Annotated Baseball Stories of Ring Lardner, LJ 4/1/95), James Thurber, and Damon Runyon, as well as a few unexpected treats from P.G. Wodehouse and Garrison Keillor. But there's a lot of dreck here, too, stories that were born in men's magazines and should have been allowed to rest in peace there. Only comprehensive collections need consider.-Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia.

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents