pathogan
03-20-2002, 10:41 AM
There is a new volume out from the library of america,{which Annie was lovely enough to buy for me} which has attempted to gather in uniform volume, the greatest works of american literature{it started with whitman, Melville and Hawthrone in the early 1980"s] The have just[end of february] released Baseball a literary anthology,edited by Nicholas Dawidoff,he of the excellent Moe Berg biography, the catcher was a spy. Normally, these type of anthologies are blowhard central,filled with purple prose on baseball and the meaning of life,or,essay's repeated over and again with the usual suspects{Updike, angell, Roth, Kahn...et.al] They are here,but so are some wonderful pieces not ordinarily collected:William Carlos Willimas, James Weldon Johnson[on throwing a curveball],Wendell Smith on jackie robinsons first game in the dodger system,The late,great Murray Kempton{on the Mets at the Polo Grounds}Molly O'neill, the former food critic of the NY Times,on her brother Paul,an exerpt from Don Delillo 's Underworld,, a lovely Stephen King piece, another from the late poet joel oppenheimer[who wrote in lowere case}...There are NO stats,no pictures,no obscure pythagorian theoroms...just good fun, and alot that I have never seen anthologized before. Its steep[about 28 froom amazon.com or Bn.com]...it'll help during rainouts...really quite good,even with the redundancy.:read: :read: :read: :read: