Rating: 
Summary: Five Star Essays about Baseball and Life
Review: This book should provide plenty of enjoyment for every baseball fan and all the devotees of the late essayist Stephen Jay Gould. While I will touch on the flaws later (because in some ways the totality of this posthumously published collection of Gould's essays is less than the sum of the parts), this is a wonderful book to sample at your leisure. Many of the pieces manage to be thought provoking and incredibly nostalgic at the same time. One of my favorites in this regard was an incredibly brief piece (The Babe's Final Strike) originally published in the NY Times in 1984 regarding the strikeout of Dale Mitchell by Don Larsen to complete the only perfect game in World Series history. It revived both my memory of watching those final moments on our small black and white TV on October 8, 1956 after arriving home from high school late in the game and also recalled the controversy that raged over the strike three call by Babe Pinelli that both guaranteed Don Larsen a place in the record books and also ensured that particular film clip of Yogi Berra jumping into Larsen's arms the status of perpetual inclusion in world series highlight collections.One of the best pieces in the book is actually the introduction by David Halberstam, a good friend of Gould's, a fellow intellectual, and an ardent baseball fan himself. It is literally the perfect bookend for the last selection in the book, a wonderful reprint of a long piece in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS which manages to incorporate a meaningful summary review of ten diverse baseball biographies into a discussion of the elemental attraction of baseball, the parallel changes in the sport and our culture while mixing grandiose generalizations with little known facts. In between these two marvelous selections are pieces as diverse as a lengthy tribute to THE AMAZING DUMMY (about both the often overlooked exploits of Dummy Hoy and also the role of nicknames in baseball) and FREUD AT THE BALLPARK, a very brief piece about how the author finally came to terms years later with the loss of the 1955 subway series by his beloved Yankees to the hated Brooklyn Dodgers. The book is composed of four sections. The first is REFLECTIONS AND EXPERIENCE, which is comprised of thought pieces about various aspects and events of the game. The second is HEROES LARGE, SMALL, AND FALLEN, which includes pieces on Mickey Mantle, Dusty Rhodes, Mel Allen, Jim Thorpe, Joe Dimaggio and "Shoeless Joe" Jackson in addition to the selection on Dummy Hoy; of course all these selections are about much more than the individuals profiled and their impact on the game. The third section is titled NATURE, HISTORY, AND STATISTICS AS MEANING. It examines some of the myths of baseball and such questions as "why no one hits .400 any more" and whether Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak really was an achievement in a class by itself. The last section is simply entitled CRITICISM. It is a collection of some of the best topical book reviews which Gould wrote, which are always a taking off point for an elegant discussion of some aspect of the game. Despite the fact that I consider the great majority of the essays in this collection to deserve five star ratings, there are several factors about the book which kept me from rating it five stars. First, with the exception of Halberstam's foreword and Gould's introduction, these are set pieces all of which have appeared elsewhere and thus suffer from repetition of some of the author's favorite musings and ideas. (I suspect that given his death the editors were less ruthless than he would have been about correcting this flaw.) Second, some of the pieces are slightly dated and the reader is left to wonder how Gould would have responded to recent events impacting the sport (e.g. the undoubted effect of questionable substances on the obliteration of power hitting records in such areas as home runs and slugging average). Last, in a collection of this length and this diversity, it is almost inevitable that a few of the selections will suffer in comparison to the best of the group. Even if this reaction is only due to my preferences and prejudices as an individual reader, it still is a factor that influenced my overall reaction to the book. While there are several pieces that I found very memorable and/or educational (some of which I have in fact reread), others seemed only of average quality compared to the work of other good sportswriters. So I heartily recommend the book with the caveat that most readers will probably want to take time to savor some of the pieces while quickly browsing others. But practically everyone will reflect that we are all undoubtedly the richer for the unique insights furnished us by Gould as he managed to combine the knowledge gained from his lifelong career as a paleontologist with his passion for the game of baseball. Tucker Andersen
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Fan's Final Love Letter to the Game
Review: This is a fan's book, in every sense of the term. Thanks to his writings about baseball in such unlikely places as the New York Review of Books, and his appearance in Ken Burns' documentary about the sport, Stephen Jay Gould's position as one of the premiere intellectuals who also happens to love baseball will forever be secure; this collection of works will keep that legacy alive for a new generation. Because these writings are generated from Gould's own love of the sport, the focus tends heavily toward the two teams he spent most of his life watching--the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. And that's fine, because no other two teams have encompassed the heights of triumph and tragedy this sport has to offer. For the non-scientist, Gould may get a bit technical at times, such as his explanation of why the .400 hitter is as extinct as the dinosaurs, but even this journalism major managed to wade through it all. A passionate lovesong to the sport from a fan who left his seat too soon.
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Summary: Did he root for the Yankees????
Review: Two things are crystal after the first eight or so essays in <i>Triumph</i>: Gould hails from New York, and he grew up rooting for the Yankees. That's, apparently, all he had to say in the first section. I hated it: an egocentric and elongated indulgence into his childhood, peppered with snippets of baseball history to build up his credibility. But the tone shifted. <i>Triumph</i> comes in four pieces: one's the aforementioned section on Gould himself; the second's on "hereos," including Mantle and Thorpe; third's on baseball as a sport and a piece of culture, and the fourth's a collection of book and movie reviews. If you can stomach (or skip) the 47 pages of "Reflections and Experiences," do it: the rest is surprisingly pleasant. You'll find good works on why Jim Thorpe might be the greatest athlete ever, why The Babe (the movie) was terrible, and the creation myths of baseball. He's not Roger Angell, but Gould did pretty well.
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