Baseball and the Game of Ideas: Essays for the Serious Fan (Sporting Life Series)

Incisive essays by Stephen Jay Gould, Mark Harris, John Bowman, John Hildebidle, Thomas Altherr, John Holway and others on the game's social value, intellectual roots, mythic underpinnings, rites of manhood, baseball astrology, and more. Extensive baseball bibliogaphy.

Editor Bjarkman previously compiled a sparkling selection of short baseball fiction, Baseball & the Game of Life: Stories for the Thinking Fan (Birch Brook Pr., 1991). As with that work, the pieces here come from off the beaten basepath, and serve to introduce readers to material previously published in such periodicals as The New England Review , Bread Loaf Quarterly , and The Whig Standard Magazine , as well as some previously unpublished writing. Some of the pieces stray into foul ground; Merritt Clifton's essay on baseball as a fertility rite is a good example. However, the breadth of the collection is impressive, and subjects include the game's social value, its intellectual roots, the mythic underpinnings of the sport's legends, and the role of baseball fiction. An article by Stephen Jay Gould on the demise of the.400 hitter and John Hildebidle's piece on the importance of memory and imagination to the game's appeal highlight the collection. Recommended for most adult baseball collections.
- John Maxymuk, Rutgers Univ. Lib., Camden, N.J.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.