The Armchair Book of Baseball; A Lavish Celebration of the national pastime from an all-star lineup of writers, reporters and raconteurs

New York: Charles Scribner's sons, 1985. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. James Stevenson. xiii, 388 pages. Illustrations. DJ is price clipped and has some wear along the edges. Foreword by Peter V. Ueberroth. More than sixty contributions come together in this affectionate look at baseball, from writers, reporters, and raconteurs including Roger Angell, Jim Bouton, Roger Kahn, Philip Roth, James Michener, Red Smith, John Updike, and more. This is one of the Armchair Library series. John A. Thorn (born April 17, 1947) is a German-born sports historian, author, publisher, and cultural commentator. Since March 1, 2011, he has been the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball. Thorn served as the senior creative consultant for the 1994 Ken Burns documentary Baseball. In 2004, Thorn discovered documentation that traced the origins of baseball in America to 1791 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He has also attempted to shed light on the contributions of 19th century pioneers of the game, while debunking common misconceptions. In June 2006, the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) bestowed on Thorn its highest accolade, the Bob Davids Award. The award honors those whose contributions to SABR and baseball reflect the ingenuity, integrity, and self-sacrifice of the founder and past president of SABR, L. Robert "Bob" Davids. James Stevenson, the humorist and cartoonist, illustrated this book. He is a staff writer for the New Yorker Magazine, the author of several books. Derived from a review found posted on-line: Mr. Thorn includes 61 prose and verse selections arranged alphabetically by author. There's a great deal of assorted commentary and humor. Scientist Stephen Jay Gould explains `"The Extinction of the .400 Hitter'' memorably and succinctly . Other writers look to "extreme achievers'' of the past, in such vivid pieces as Gay Talese's profile of Joe DiMaggio in retirement; Thomas Boswell's insouciant evaluation of "Mr. October,'' Reggie Jackson; and Red Smith's tribute to Howard Ehmke, the unlikely veteran hero of the 1929 World Series. Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First'' comedy routine comes across surprisingly well on the printed page, and Russell Baker's imaginary interview with Yankees' president George Steinbrenner (on the subject of firing employees) is wryly amusing. But few readers will find anything funny in the labored "Quotations from Chairman Pete [Rose],'' or much worth preserving in the boring, overheated prose of the late celebrity-sportswriter Jimmy Cannon. There are several good poems from May Swenson, John Updike, and Robert Fitzgerald. There are excerpts from baseball fiction (by Ring Lardner, Robert Coover, and John Sayles) - and from classic nonfiction books like Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer'' and Robert Creamer's "Babe''. It's perhaps just as well that Thorn offers only two speculative essays that attempt to define baseball's appeal. Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti's "The Green Fields of the Mind'' acknowledges the sentimentalism that is at the heart of fan-dom. And Philip Roth's "My Baseball Years'' contends that the game as played (and followed) some 30 years ago was a genuine socializing force. These 61 companion pieces suggest the essential truth of Jim Bouton's memorable observation (in his "Ball Four''): "You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.'' Even those of us who never played the game can feel that tug, and will welcome the vicarious satisfactions to be found in this splendid and entertaining book.