Customer Reviews

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

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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.