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Articles 1 - 19 of 19
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Book Review: Sport History In The Digital Era, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Sport History In The Digital Era, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
Review of Sport History in the Digital Era. Edited by Gary Osmond and Murray G. Phillips. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 279 pages. Hardbound. $60.00
Book Review: For The Love Of Baseball, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: For The Love Of Baseball, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
I was having a great deal of déjà vu all over again when I started For the Love of Baseball—and that was even before I read the forward by Yogi Berra.
Book Review: ¡Arriba Baseball!, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: ¡Arriba Baseball!, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
Sports writers and league owners continue to work to keep their industry as non-political as possible, claiming that, among other things, "it should be about the game." Students and scholars of sport culture and writers of sport fiction, including many of the authors included among the selections of ¡Arriba Baseball! know otherwise.
Book Review: Final Fenway Fiction, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Final Fenway Fiction, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
If there is a special room in the house of sport literature for fan creations, then the Fenway Fiction series deserves a place of prominence among the legions of blogs about everything from baseball cards of AAA ball players to Todd Zeile's homers for 11 different teams, "Johnny Marz" tribute videos on YouTube, and mash-ups with A-Rod's head photoshopped onto the bodies of figures from Greek Mythology.
Book Review: Drawing Card, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Drawing Card, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
Although Drawing Card employs many of the standard conventions of a baseball novel, Mills' book also makes significant and surprising departures. Instead of telling the story of a player's experience in the game, the narrative derives primarily from the consequences of a dream denied. The novel also serves as a cultural history of Cleveland of the 1930s and 1940s with side trips to Sicily at various key points in the island's history.
Book Review: Knocking On Heaven's Door, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Knocking On Heaven's Door, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, baseball has had more than its share of apologists to proclaim the game's virtues and unique qualities-how the game lends itself to narrative, how it's a meritocracy that rewards hard work and perseverance, or how it acts as a conduit to the American Dream. What baseball literature needs in he present day and age is more writers to tell the whole story-and Marty Dobrow's Knocking on Heaven's Door does just that.
Book Review: Major League Bride, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Major League Bride, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
As the title indicates, Lockwood's memoir sets out to relate the big league experience from the uncommon perspective of a baseball player's wife. Fans of a certain age might recognize her husband, Skip Lockwood, a starter turned closer who achieved some fame with the New York Mets in the mid-1970s—and who shared a 1965 rookie card with Blue Moon Odom and Catfish Hunter. More than just a memoir, Lockwood's book provides a cultural history because her and her husband's time in baseball was bracketed by the strikes of 1972 and 1981—an important period in the labor relations of Major League …
Book Review: Our White Boy, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Our White Boy, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
Equal parts history and memoir, Our White Boy works on a number of levels while developing a wide range of themes. Operating as baseball history, the book chronicles two seasons of the Wichita Falls/Graham Stars, a black semi-pro baseball team. As a memoir, Jerry Craft tells his unique story as the only white man to play in the West Texas Colored League. On still another level, Craft and Sullivan follow the time-honored narrative strategy of illustrating how baseball can aid in the development and maturity process of a young man.
Book Review: The Great Match And Our Base Ball Club, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: The Great Match And Our Base Ball Club, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
These two early baseball texts are well met (and well married) in the recently published book that was edited by Trey and Geri Strecker. While Our Base Ball Club focuses more on illustrating how "baseball fever" could overtake a nineteenth century American town, both texts demonstrate the contemporary significance of the game.
Book Review: Drowned Boy, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Drowned Boy, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
The seven stories and the novella that make up Jerry Gabriel's recently published collection are linked by a single character, much in the manner of another Ohioian, Sherwood Anderson. The pieces follow Nate Holland from age eight to young adulthood and portray his upbringing in a small town in Southeastern Ohio.
Book Review: The Wide Turn Toward Home, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: The Wide Turn Toward Home, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
In "How to Write a True Baseball Story," Richard Peterson employs the ghost of Ring Lardner to dish out advice to a would-be practitioner of the genre. Lardner advises the rookie writer to avoid tall tales of his ball playing youth, games of catch with his dead father, and all the other oh-so-familiar formulas in favor of seeking the simple-and often unpleasant-truth about baseball. Following Peterson's rubric, the introspective protagonists of Winkler's collection would bat somewhere near a cool .500, which is an impressive debut. But truth is not everything in the game of baseball (Just ask A-Rod) and the …
Book Review: Shoeless Joe And Ragtime Baseball, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Shoeless Joe And Ragtime Baseball, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
As Harvey Frommer indicates in the new introduction to this old tale, some stories will never go away and the 1919 Black Sox scandal is one of them. In Saying It's So, Daniel Nathan argues that this particular tale has been retold every generation because it is so central to America's culture and history. Instead of letting it go, we've got to dust it off and tell it again (and again) in the form of non-fiction, fiction, and film. Frommer's book, which was recently reissued just 16 years after its last release, focuses on the life and times of …
Book Review: A Game Of Brawl, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: A Game Of Brawl, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
Felber's book is more than just a close account of the 1897 baseball season: on the way to the September showdown between the Baltimore Orioles and the Boston Beaneaters, his readers attend what passed for spring training in the 1890s, observe the struggles of the lone umpire on the field, and follow the efforts to open up Sunday baseball by thwarting the Blue Laws.
Book Review: The Fade-Away, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: The Fade-Away, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
Even without the baseball on the cover and the reference to Christy Mathewson's out pitch, fans of baseball fiction should have no doubt that The Fade-away is a sport novel. The town baseball team is the heart of Port Newton, as revealed by the newspaper clippings that make up a number of the book's chapters. Baseball is the main concern of the book's narrators, from former-player Doc Fuller to second baseman Calvin Elwell, and Sophie Fuller, Doc's daughter and Calvin's girlfriend.
Book Review: The Great God Baseball, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: The Great God Baseball, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
The stated goals of this book are both evangelical and scholarly as Hye seeks to convince his readers, including the casual and non-baseball varieties, to pick up the nine books in his "lineup." He also seeks to fill some of the gaps in sport literature scholarship and have his book serve as "an agent for the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional renewal offered by the great game and literature of baseball" (12).
Book Review: Town Ball, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Town Ball, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
This handsome volume would make an excellent addition to the coffee table book collection of any fan of amateur baseball, but it would also be of special interest to cultural and sports historians who specialize in the post-World War Two era and the upper Midwest. Just as its title hearkens back to the earliest days of baseball, Town Ball takes its readers to one of the last great heydays of the game and allows them to get lost among wooden bleachers under the cloud-filled skies of a Georgia O'Keefe painting.
Book Review: Baseball/Literature/Culture Essays: 2004-2005, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Baseball/Literature/Culture Essays: 2004-2005, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
This collection is the third in a series of essays selected from the Indiana State University Conference on Baseball in Literature and Culture. Each of the three volumes is edited by Carino, who tells us in the present introduction that he prefers to think of the 18 essays-nine on baseball and literature and nine on baseball as a cultural institution-as a doubleheader rather than two competing nines.
Book Review: Bleeding Red, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Bleeding Red, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
Bleeding Red is one of (at least) three books that contain diaries from the 2004 season of the Boston Red Sox (the other two beingFaithful by Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan and Now I can Die in Peace by Bill Simmons). How, one might ask, were these authors fortunate enough to choose that particular year of the previous 86? This is more easily answered in the case of Simmons, who didn't start his diary until after the All-Star break, but does this mean we can look forward to diaries of the 2005 White Sox season, and are there scribes …
Book Review: Breaking Into Baseball, Scott D. Peterson
Book Review: Breaking Into Baseball, Scott D. Peterson
Communication Faculty Publications
Ardell's book might very well be subtitled “The Seven Faces of Eve” as she argues for goddess worship theories for baseball's origins and then organizes the rest of the chapters around the seven ways in which women can interact with the game of baseball: as fans (both in and out of the stands), as players (both amateur and professional), as umpires, owners, and members of the media. Baseball's gender barrier (a first cousin to the game's now obsolete color barrier) provides a consistent and compelling undertone to the book as so many of the women that Ardell writes about (perhaps …