Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.3570973075
EAN num: 9780395586686
ISBN number: 0395586682
Label: Mariner Books
Manufacturer: Mariner Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 144
Printing Date: April 08, 1991
Publishing house: Mariner Books
Sale Popularity Level: 678724
Studio: Mariner Books
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Rated by buyers -
This is one of the greatest of all Baseball Books. It is an unforgettable book. I very first owned a paperback copy waaaaaaay back in 1975 when I was in the Sixth grade!!!
Those that have read this masterpiece will NEVER forget it,I guarantee it.
It is not only a book about Baseball or Baseball cards but about LIFE and about the America we wish to remember.
Buy it! You won't be dissapointed.
And...Goodnight Sibby Sisti,wherever you are......
Rated by buyers -
I received the book as a Christmas present in 1973. I love, loved, and will love baseball. I was at Yankee Stadium when Mantle hit his 500th HR.
I watched the Yankees go from a dynasty to the cellar. I was at the double-header in June 1970 when Bobby Murcer hit 4 consecutive home runs.
($1.75 for general admission). From the very first word to the last, this is a great book. I lost the original, found a soft-cover version which proceeded to fall apart, and then found a hard-cover that I have surrounded by barbed-wire and rabid pit bulls. I recognized many of the players, never heard of quite a few, but it didn't matter. If you are a baseball fan, new or old, buy the book.
Rated by buyers -
Here's a little time travel for you. I very first got my hands on this book when I was a little baseball-loving kid, back in 1974. This book scared the hell out of me back then.
Thirty years later it turned up again, and this time it blew my mind. It's one of the most creative, touching, thoughtful, mildly mean-spirited works of literature I've ever come across (And I read books for a living.)
Here's the backstory on the book. It's the early 1970's in Boston, and two witty, profound, slightly geeky local bookstore employees decide to rummage through their childhood baseball-card collections and write a book about their love of the game. Please note: this book **isn't** about baseball or even about baseball cards (here I'm citing the authors in their preface), it's a book about childhood as recalled through the prism of baseball cards.
This book isn't for everyone. It's for grown-up men who loved baseball as boys, weren't very good at it (as the authors admit about themselves), and were probably picked near the end in gym class when teams were being chosen.
This book is probably best (and most mind-blowing) for people who grew up during the late 1950's and early 1960's, as the authors did. But the generations of childhood baseball fans ever since will also find great pleasure in this entirely irreverent and clever book.
"GOOD NIGHT, SIBBI SISTI, WHEREVER YOU ARE." When I read this line in the book back in 1974, it gave me the willies. Now I just grin.
Rated by buyers -
Each of us occasionally has experiences that are so vivid that they make immediate and permanent imprints upon the memory. For example, I can still remember my excited very first day of kindergarten, as well as my very first glimpse of Three Rivers stadium, as our family car approached it along the jumbled, congested streets of the North Side.
Believe it or not, I can similarly remember my very first experiences reading this book, as though they were yesterday. I was in grad school in California, and a friend was visiting me with this book in tow. As he spread out a sleeping bag and nodded off to sleep, I curled up with his magnificent book. I can still picture that entire scene, my old apartment as it was then, and even one particular page on which I lingered in fascination (the Joe Fornieles profile.) The feeling of reading it was that electric, that hyper-engaging.
A book has got to be good if reading it is remembered as a formative experience.
Let me try another way to explain how much I loved this book. When I couldn't find this book anywhere (it being out of print), I directed a nationwide book search to try to find it for me. They did, a flawless hardback edition that I still treasure, and still maintain in carefully guarded, pristine condition. Mind you, I was a starving grad student when I did this, and could hardly afford such luxuries.
As you can see from the other reviews below, this book takes that type of hold on those who love it.
There are three major sections in this book; one covering the sensory atmosphere of a 1950s suburban childhood, one on the baseball card industry as it existed in 1973, and one a series of profiles of players as depicted on samples from the authors' baseball card collection. The very first and third of these are the great ones.
I adore the opening chapter, which brought childhood back to me even though I didn't grow up in the same era as the authors. But some things are universal I guess, including the way that childhood memories exist as scraps and floating debris of the odd popular cultures through which we guide our children.
Boyd and Harris's childhood world will be recognizable to anyone who grew up in America -- a world of advertising jingles, cap guns, yo-yos, Pez, and of course, baseball cards. A time cycle in which the kids learn to break down the interminable flow of their school year according to the changing weather, the holidays and favorite activities of each mini-season. And even those of us whose childhoods weren't so innocent nevertheless cling to those small fragments of memory of a time when we had no responsibilities and the world was a fascinating and wondrous place. I once wrote a newspaper review of this book in which I referred to this opening chapter as Marcel Proust in Levittown, and I think it still fits.
But the real core of the book is the "Profiles" section. This is a procession of baseball cards, one after another, two per page, each of which triggers a particular set of memories from the authors. Many of these, if not most, are really funny. But others are poignant.
Not all of the little capsule profiles are about the players themselves. Sometimes the authors take the opportunity to laugh over the baseball card itself -- a goofy pose, a bad airbrushing job, an inexplicable caption, an ill-considered description on the back.
It's an exquisite feeling, thumbing through their card collection with them. You feel the pang of reverence for the Ted Williams card. You snicker over Choo-Choo Coleman and the lousy catchers collected by the New York Mets. You ponder how it could be that Charlie Smith was traded straight up for Roger Maris. You nod knowingly over the author's continual confusion of Mike de la Hoz and Bob del Greco.
The visual design of the book is central to its power, which is why I particularly treasure my hardback edition. One page of umpire cards has a colored backround on which is stamped,simply, "Boo, Boo, Boo, Boo. . ." A page with the cards of Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente contains no commentary, just a respectful grey background (each had recently passed at the time of the book's original publication.)
Somehow it all seems to mean something, even without seeming to try to mean anything. And therein lies the book's genius.
I know of no other baseball book like this one. It defies categorization, and despite my poor effort above, it really defies description. Buy it, hide it, shut the door and turn out the world, savor it, ponder it, laugh at it, love it.
Have a good time. It's meant to be fun, you know. Let's play two.
Rated by buyers -
I received this as a Christmas gift one year and was initially disappointed. I had only heard of a few of the guys that were showed on the cards and I set it aside, figuring on sticking it up on my bookshelf with the other boring books that I had and never bothered with. Several days after Christmas we went on the annual family gift return, a day I truly hated. In desperation I grabbed this book off of my pile and took my accustomed place in the back of the station wagon. For the rest of that day and night the only time I put the book down was to eat, and then only briefly. This is a completely irreverent look at baseball as a whole, and the thing that really sealed the deal for me was the card of Whammy Douglas and the comments made by the author. I tried to get my dad to read it because I figured he would get more out of it than I did, (I'm 41 and consider myself to be on the trailing edge of those who might "get it",) but he wasn't interested. Maybe I'll try again. This book might have a limited range of interest, but if you have fond memories of baseball in the 50's and 60's, I think you'll fall right into that range.
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