Customer Reviews

Extra Innings: WRITING ON BASEBALL (Sport and Society)

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The problem with most academic writing isn't that the ideas are too complex for the general reader to grasp; the problem is that most of it's too poorly written for the general reader to grasp what's being written about. Academic Richard Peterson, however, has defied the odds and written a highly accessible collection of essays in which he analyzes baseball literature -- the baseball short story and baseball novel, in particular. The book opens with a personal essay about a trip to Cooperstown with his wife, and this sets the tone of the book, which is, even in the analytical parts, personal. Here is a man who clearly loves both literature AND baseball, and in an age when so many literature scholars seem to hate the literature that they write about, Peterson's love of both is one of the great pleasures of this book. If reading about the art of writing baseball interests you, I highly recommend EXTRA INNINGS.