Baseball I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life: Fifth Edition [Paperback]

Richard Grossinger (Editor), Lisa Conrad (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1993

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This book contains fact and fiction so far out it must have been written on Mars.
-Art Spander, The Sporting News

This is a wonderful huge anthology filled with everything from the mythic to the particular, the outrageous to the sublime.
-Joel Oppenheimer, Village Voice

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: North Atlantic Books; 5 Sub edition (January 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556430833
• ISBN-13: 978-1556430831
• Product Dimensions: 0.5 x 8.2 x 11 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #518,690 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hypnotic and deeply strange, December 17, 2001

By 

Chris Green (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Baseball I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life: Fifth Edition (Paperback)

It's as though Allen Ginsberg and Dave Concepcion co-fathered nine children, made a baseball team out of them, and had them record their experiences in free verse, essays, and photography.

The quality of the work in this anthology varies widely, but the sheer unliklieness of a volume of neo-beat baseball poetry and new-age-inflected essays cannot help but inspire generosity. The photography is actually pretty remarkable, and the photo essays of Baseball Stars of the 1950s and 1960s have this awe-inspiring sense of the mundane about them.

I would have liked to see a better balance between navel-gazing and insight, and a little more willingness to see baseball as a commercial and culturally determined construct, rather than a source of personal spirituality. But still, I treasure this book because it cuts against the grain so completely.

I have no doubt that if you put Richard Grossinger in an announcer's booth with Jon Miller and Tim McCarver, the result would be total genius of the highest order.