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Alphonse

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    Baseball Books

    in Book and Writers Club

    Posted

    Anybody ever read "The Natural"? I liked the movie well enough but I've heard the book is head and shoulders above it, albeit with a significantly different ending. I'd like to check it out, though.

    Back in the English major days, I was somehow able to finagle a professor into letting me design an independent study class entitled "Baseball and American mythology" in which I read or reread a bunch of fiction and nonfiction baseball works. I took on a pretty heavy reading of The Natural and wrote quite a bit on the symbolism in the book. Rereading it makes me smile, cause my copy is chock-full of marginalia, and I still find new things in it. It's definitely worth your time (I think every Malamud work read has been pretty incredible). The ending is tragic, not triumphant like the film.

    Other books I read or partially read for the class:

    Universal Baseball Association (one of the more strange things I've read, and utterly fascinating) - Robert Coover

    The Great American Novel - Philip Roth

    Bang the Drum Slowly - Mark Harris

    The Celebrant (utterly phenomenal) - Eric Rolfe Greenberg

    A Day in the Bleachers - Arnold Hano

    Saying it's So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal - Daniel Nathan

    Ball Four: The Final Pitch - Jim Bouton

    I Never Had It Made - Jackie Robinson

    Babe - Robert Creamer

    Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville - Stephen Jay Gould

    Summer of '49 - David Halberstam

    The Teammates - David Halberstam

    Cobb: A Biography - Al Stump

    Baseball and Philosophy - Eric Bronson

    The Faith of 50 Million - Herzog, Evans

    Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti

    Baseball: America's Diamond Mind - Richard Crepeau

    Past Time: Baseball As History - Jules Tygiel

    The Sports Immortals: Deifying the American Athlete - Peter Williams

    Annotated Baseball Stories of Ring Lardner

    "The List" got kinda crazy, and I also read these for the class:

    The Birth of Tragedy - Nietszche

    The Hero With a Thousand Faces - Campbell

    Mythologies - Barthes

    And various other bits of theory and criticism.

    Fun class.

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