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The Baseball 100
- De: Joe Posnanski
- Narrado por: Cary Hite
- Duración: 30 h y 46 m
- Versión completa
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General5 out of 5 stars 554
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 477
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Historia5 out of 5 stars 476
Longer than Moby-Dick and nearly as ambitious,The Baseball 100 is a one-of-a-kind work by award-winning sportswriter and lifelong student of the game Joe Posnanski that tells the story of the sport through the remarkable lives of its 100 greatest players. In the book’s introduction, Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator George F. Will marvels, “Posnanski must already have lived more than 200 years. How else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories about the rich history of this endlessly fascinating sport?”
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2 out of 5 stars
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Just OK. Too Tangential & Distracting
- De Matthew R. en 01-21-23
- The Baseball 100
- De: Joe Posnanski
- Narrado por: Cary Hite
Self-indulgently Loving Tome on Baseball’s Best Players
Revisado: 05-05-22
Joe Posnanski has generated a compelling 300,000+ word compilation of stories and reflections about the “greatest” 100 players in the history of Major League Baseball and the Negro leagues (plus, incongruously, Japan’s Sadaharu Oh). The book ranks, in reverse order, about 0.5 percent of the men who played the game at the highest level open to them. One could fuss about some of the author’s inclusions and exclusions. Further, as he admits freely, the absolute numerical rankings are inescapably arbitrary - some were chosen based on a player’s uniform number or the year in which he played in a memorable World Series. However, the book is less an alignment of players on a normalized scale of baseball greatness, an impossible task even with modern Sabermetrics, than a vehicle to reflect on the sport’s sweeping history.
I most enjoyed the chapters on legendary Black players whose best years or entire careers elapsed before Jackie Robinson began MLB’s painfully slow integration. Posnanski struggles more in writing about stars who benefited from PEDs during baseball’s steroid era. Barry Bonds, for example, is placed above Hank Aaron but below Babe Ruth and Willie Mays, a ranking likely to satisfy neither those who believe PED use was irrelevant nor those who would consign the offenders to perpetual baseball Purgatory. Similarly, it’s disconcerting to see the admitted gambler Pete Rose included in a top 100 list (at #60), while Shoeless Joe Jackson is nowhere to be found.
While the author seems proud of churning out such an immense work, I thought often of the Emperor’s criticism of a Mozart opera in the film Amadeus — “Too many notes!” Posnanski frequently indulges in digressions and tables of obscure statistics (particularly painful in a book-on-tape). A tough editor might have curbed these excesses and made this a better read. I found the final two chapters (spoiler alert - on Babe Ruth and Willie Mays) disappointingly rambling and unfocused, as if the exhausted author was groping vainly for final profundities about baseball in American life. Even so, overall this book is a treat for any lifelong lover of the game.
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How the Weather Was
- De: Roger Kahn
- Narrado por: Bryan Bendle
- Duración: 8 h y 26 m
- Versión completa
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General4 out of 5 stars 1
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Narración:2 out of 5 stars 1
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Historia5 out of 5 stars 1
Robert Frost, Claudio Arrau, John Lardner, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Leo Durocher, Bobby Thomson, Al Rosen, Jascha Heifetz, and other heroic figures in their years of glory, in their times of trial. This is a book about people to be remembered, and what it was like in America at a very special time.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Trenchant profiles from baseball and beyond
- De mfiddle en 02-03-19
- How the Weather Was
- De: Roger Kahn
- Narrado por: Bryan Bendle
Trenchant profiles from baseball and beyond
Revisado: 02-03-19
I've loved this book since first reading it in the mid-1970s. Roger Kahn grew from a wet-behind-the-ears sports journalist, covering the Brooklyn Dodgers in their glory years, to a masterful profiler of human strength and weakness. His breakthrough book, The Boys of Summer (1972), follows the Dodgers stars into middle age. In How the Weather Was (1973) Kahn profiles other baseball figures whose fascination derives from their outsized personalities (Babe Ruth, Leo Durocher), outsized ability (Ruth, Willie Mays), central role in an outsized event (Bobby Thomson), or outsized courage breaking barriers of color and religious heritage (Jack Robinson, Mays, Al Rosen). Kahn goes beyond baseball with portraits of fellow journalist and drinking buddy John Lardner, pianist Claudio Arrau, violinist Jascha Heifetz, and poet Robert Frost. These chapters focus on how artists cope with both the public and the inner expectations that inevitably accompany extraordinary talent and accomplishment, especially as they age. He adds a compelling narrative of the police riot after the SDS takeover of a building at Columbia University and a nonfiction murder mystery. Simply, Kahn can write. Unfortunately, Bryan Bendle does not read with the same fluidity. His choppy narration obscures the rhythm of the author's sentences, and pronunciation errors sometimes suggest poor familiarity with subject matter. Kahn's words win out, but another narrator easily might have made this a 5-star offering.
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