Exploring the imagination of sports in books, history and culture
Also In This Issue: Best Baseball Books of 2022; The NBA’s 3-Point Revolution; A Middle-Aged Basketball Obsession; The Year’s Best Sports Writing; eBay’s Sports Card Dealer Extraordinaire; Dusty Baker on Music; Capturing Baseball on a 113-Year-Old Camera; Farewell to Ash Bats; Remembering Vince Dooley, Charley Trippi and Ray Guy
The prolific sports author Jeff Pearlman is back with another obsessively-researched biography, “The Last Folk Hero,” published in late October, which peers behind the veil of Bo Jackson.
Pearlman is clearly drawn to complex, difficult personalities—among them Walter Payton, Roger Clemens and Brett Favre—and attempts to get beneath the veneer of popular lore with a multi-sport star whose aura well into retirement remains elusive.
It’s leading off our list of new and other books that have come out or been reissued this fall, and as the holiday shopping season is almost upon us.
With a late fall World Cup also starting soon, we’ll be looking next week at a variety of new soccer books published for the occasion of sport’s greatest showcase taking place in the heat of the Middle East.
Thanks for the comments I’ve received on the new format for this newsletter. It’s still a work in progress, and I appreciate the reader who missed my “voice” from the links-only version.
I don’t want to get in the way of good books and great sports stories, but I’m glad to be incorporating some narrative power back into what we feature here.
—Wendy Parker
sportsbiblio@gmail.com
Getting To Know The Real Bo
Mythbuster: The search for the Bo Jackson away from the spotlight resulted in more than 700 interviews by author Jeff Pearlman. “As I get older, I worry about people forgetting certain athletic figures,” he told Awful Announcing. “For me, I love dipping into the past, and I really want to preserve his legacy.” | GQ | Andscape | Excerpt | Review | Order Book
The Church of Basketball
Hoop Ruminations: Author and journalist Thomas Beller has written extensively about and played basketball, and his book, to be published Tuesday, blends in family memoir, in particular the early death of his father, who escaped Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938. “I am now older than he was when he died, and, in the months and years since I outlived my father, I’m aware of a change in the way that I think about him. I have become, in some respects, the senior figure in the relationship,” Beller writes in an an essay adapted from the book in The New Yorker. | Review | Order Book
Changing the Game
Revolutionaries: The Golden State Warriors’ 3-point prowess shattered many previous ways of playing and even thinking about how to play basketball. In just a few short years, the exploits of Stephen Curry and the frenzied style led by coach Steve Kerr get a detailed look from Mike Prada, an NBA editor at The Athletic. | Excerpt | Order Book
Best of the Best
Story Time: A wide variety of longform sports stories has been chosen by guest editor J.A. Adande, with bylines including Howard Bryant, Chuck Culpepper, Wright Thompson, Sally Jenkins and Pat Forde. The subjects range from Henry Aaron to Simone Biles, Cristiano Ronaldo to Naomi Osaka and a novel pair of title-winning college and WNBA teammates. | Order Book
Baseball’s Best Books
And the Nominees Are: The finalists for the 2022 CASEY Award, given by Spitball magazine for literary baseball contributions, have been announced. They include Joe Maddon, the World Series, Branch Rickey, Rickey Henderson and a book about baseball books. | Order “The Lineup”
Off-Season Baseball Reading
Get Cracking: SABR’s fall bookshelf selections should last well into the winter and even up until it’s time for pitchers and catchers to report. | Order “Farewell to Flatbush”
A Few Good Reads
Dusty Baker’s longevity in baseball now includes a World Series championship as a manager with the Houston Astros. But his deep love for music included an 18th birthday present at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, where he saw Jimi Hendrix in person. His friendships over the years included John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. Before the Fall Classic began, he talked to Rolling Stone about his Jimi Hendrix experience, among others. | Order “Kiss the Sky”
Capturing old-time baseball with a 113-year-old camera—Los Angeles Times
Baseball History Is No Longer Written With Ash Bats—The New York Times
You Probably Bought That Baseball Card From Rick Probstein—Tablet
The octogenarian ‘who is a Jew?’ sports writing team calls it quits after 25 years—Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Passings
A Horticultured Coach: Vince Dooley, 90, died the day before the Georgia-Florida football game, and as the No. 1-ranked Bulldogs are aiming for a second consecutive national championship in college football. In his retirement, he was also renown for the garden at his home in Athens, where lived for the rest of his life, and that prompted him to write a book about it. | Garden & Gun Feature | Order Book
Charley Trippi, Versatile Football Hall of Famer, Dies at 100—The New York Times
Ray Guy, Hall of Fame punter with Raiders, dies at age of 72—NFL.com | The Last King of Hang Time
The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 253, published Nov. 13, 2022.
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