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Rating: 
Summary: Thoughtful book marred by factual errors
Review: Although I enjoyed this book's leisurely stroll through one man's relationship with baseball, I was disturbed by some serious screwups.First, Benson gets wrong the year Roger Maris' single season record for home runs was broken. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa pursued and passed Maris in 1998, not 1999. This is an almost unbelievable error. Only three seasons after the fact, a baseball author making this mistake is like an American historian writing about the original twelve colonies. Six pages later we read about the famous home run hit by
"a light hitting infielder named Bobby Thomson" in 1951. Thomson was an outfielder and finished tied for fourth (with Stan Musial) in the National League in home runs that year with 32. Since Benson's book is built on his lifelong love of the game, mistakes like this diminish our trust even if they don't make us doubt the depth of his feeling. His sincerity seems very real, and his writing is smooth, personal and appealing. Mistakes aside, it's nice to read a baseball book by a fan who is a writer first.
Rating: 
Summary: Pleasurable Reading
Review: I eagerly awaited this new release from Robert Benson, having savored his two previous non-fiction books and the prayer book he had published. At first, though, I was disappointed: I was waiting for some of his customary spiritual autobiography based on baseball themes, but did not get any. Instead, Benson charts the understanding of his life through the plot of a nine inning baseball game that he sat through at Greer Stadium in Nashville. Each chapter reports what Benson saw at the game, and proceeds to record his ruminations about his life, sparked by the events of the game. Also thrown in are several quotations from Bartlett Giamatti, the esteemed former commissioner of baseball. A word of caution: If you are seeking to buy this book for spiritual insight, you might stick with a rereading of Living Prayer or Between the Dreaming and the Coming True. But if you want to read a book for the pure pleasure of Benson's masterful prose, then you cannot go wrong with this selection; his prose gets better and better the more he publishes. After getting over my initial frustration (which was my fault; not Benson's), I read the book in one night and was very satisfied. I strongly recommend this book to all baseball fans and to fans of Robert Benson. I gave the book four stars instead of five only because I felt that when Benson applied his insights to life he became too moralistic and determinative, instead of the usual open-ended application I have come to expect from him.
Rating:
Summary: Pleasurable Reading
Review: I eagerly awaited this new release from Robert Benson, having savored his two previous non-fiction books and the prayer book he had published. At first, though, I was disappointed: I was waiting for some of his customary spiritual autobiography based on baseball themes, but did not get any. Instead, Benson charts the understanding of his life through the plot of a nine inning baseball game that he sat through at Greer Stadium in Nashville. Each chapter reports what Benson saw at the game, and proceeds to record his ruminations about his life, sparked by the events of the game. Also thrown in are several quotations from Bartlett Giamatti, the esteemed former commissioner of baseball. A word of caution: If you are seeking to buy this book for spiritual insight, you might stick with a rereading of Living Prayer or Between the Dreaming and the Coming True. But if you want to read a book for the pure pleasure of Benson's masterful prose, then you cannot go wrong with this selection; his prose gets better and better the more he publishes. After getting over my initial frustration (which was my fault; not Benson's), I read the book in one night and was very satisfied. I strongly recommend this book to all baseball fans and to fans of Robert Benson. I gave the book four stars instead of five only because I felt that when Benson applied his insights to life he became too moralistic and determinative, instead of the usual open-ended application I have come to expect from him.
Rating:
Summary: A good baseball book
Review: Let's point out a couple other factual errors about Mr. Benson's book. First of all he claims Harry Caray's signature home run call is, "It could be, it might be, it is!"
Actually, Harry used to say, "It might be, it could be, it is!"
I'm sure this is pretty trivial, but I've heard Harry call it this way hundreds of times and I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to point this out. Benson makes this mistake a few times in this book, and it's annoying.
Benson also claims to be at Wrigley Field one day in May to see a young phenom by the name of Kerry Wood face the author's favorite team the Braves. At that game, Benson and his wife and the rest of the crowd are led in a rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" by none other than Harry Caray.
Well, Harry died in February of 1998, and Kerry Wood didn't make his major league debut until 4/12/1998 (Easter Sunday) against the Expos.
The reason why I bring this up is because I often wondered what Harry would have said had he been alive during Wood's 20 strikeout performance against the Astros and the remarkable 1998 season that we all enjoyed as Cubs fans.
These are just a couple of annoying factual errors that I encounter in Benson's book. Other than that, I love the book and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys baseball and doesn't view it as just a sport, but as a way of life.
Despite the errors mentioned above, Mr. Benson, I would love to play catch or have you hit fungoes to me anytime.
Rating:
Summary: While we're at it...
Review: Let's point out a couple other factual errors about Mr. Benson's book. First of all he claims Harry Caray's signature home run call is, "It could be, it might be, it is!"
Actually, Harry used to say, "It might be, it could be, it is!"
I'm sure this is pretty trivial, but I've heard Harry call it this way hundreds of times and I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to point this out. Benson makes this mistake a few times in this book, and it's annoying.
Benson also claims to be at Wrigley Field one day in May to see a young phenom by the name of Kerry Wood face the author's favorite team the Braves. At that game, Benson and his wife and the rest of the crowd are led in a rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" by none other than Harry Caray.
Well, Harry died in February of 1998, and Kerry Wood didn't make his major league debut until 4/12/1998 (Easter Sunday) against the Expos.
The reason why I bring this up is because I often wondered what Harry would have said had he been alive during Wood's 20 strikeout performance against the Astros and the remarkable 1998 season that we all enjoyed as Cubs fans.
These are just a couple of annoying factual errors that I encounter in Benson's book. Other than that, I love the book and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys baseball and doesn't view it as just a sport, but as a way of life.
Despite the errors mentioned above, Mr. Benson, I would love to play catch or have you hit fungoes to me anytime.
Rating:
Summary: While we're at it...
Review: Let's point out a couple other factual errors about Mr. Benson's book. First of all he claims Harry Caray's signature home run call is, "It could be, it might be, it is!"
Actually, Harry used to say, "It might be, it could be, it is!"
I'm sure this is pretty trivial, but I've heard Harry call it this way hundreds of times and I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to point this out. Benson makes this mistake a few times in this book, and it's annoying.
Benson also claims to be at Wrigley Field one day in May to see a young phenom by the name of Kerry Wood face the author's favorite team the Braves. At that game, Benson and his wife and the rest of the crowd are led in a rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" by none other than Harry Caray.
Well, Harry died in February of 1998, and Kerry Wood didn't make his major league debut until 4/12/1998 (Easter Sunday) against the Expos.
The reason why I bring this up is because I often wondered what Harry would have said had he been alive during Wood's 20 strikeout performance against the Astros and the remarkable 1998 season that we all enjoyed as Cubs fans.
These are just a couple of annoying factual errors that I encounter in Benson's book. Other than that, I love the book and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys baseball and doesn't view it as just a sport, but as a way of life.
Despite the errors mentioned above, Mr. Benson, I would love to play catch or have you hit fungoes to me anytime.
Rating: 
Summary: "A Great and Glorious Game"
Review: That's the title of late baseball commissioner & renaissance scholar Bart Giamatti's collected baseball essays, and it also summarizes Robert Benson's passion for the game. Giamatti clearly is one of Benson's heroes, not least for the grace and elegant simplicity of style that both bring to their reflections on our national pastime. This is a baseball book, but more than that it is a book about passion itself. The life-lessons Benson extracts from the game's routine and ritual are profound; his manner of conveying them is sweet and appealing, especially to those of us who (like the author) also share a passion for baseball with our children and believe in what ex-Yankee (and ex-Nashville Sound) Don Mattingly called the pleasure of "passing stuff along." This is a special treat for fans of the minor league game and for Nashville's Greer Stadium faithful in particular. Just one glitch worth mentioning: it was Jack Buck, not Vin Scully, who reported Kirk Gibson's legendarily improbable pinch-homer in the '88 World Series with the exclamation "I don't believe what I just saw!" But that's hardly worth mentioning and I wouldn't, if I weren't a Jack Buck fan. Anyway, thanks Mr. Benson. See you at the ballpark!
Rating:
Summary: awesome...
Review: the human drama plays on, even with the world's greatest baseball player and his friends....
Rating:
Summary: One of the best baseball books
Review: This is one of the best baseball books out there, for my money better than books by the likes of Bob Costas and George Will. Why? Because this is a book about the actual pleasures of the game: playing it, teaching it to children, watching and keeping score of live games, and so forth. Most books about baseball become treatises on the metaphysics of the game. This one is about the sport itself, as it is actually played on sandlots and in professional stadiums. Robert Benson writes about just a few ordinary games and a several extraordinary memories and thus avoids the tedious abstractions that infect the prose of many writers on the sport (excluding the likes of Gammons and Boswell, and a few others). There is no other American sports book quite like this one. The closest book I can compare it to would be Nick Hornby's FEVER PITCH, which is a classic exploration of what life is like for a sports fan (in this case, an English soccer fan). Benson's book does the same thing, in my opinion, for baseball, which is the highest praise I can give it.
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