About 40 years ago, I finally had to accept the fact that I could no longer digest meat. An operation had destroyed my system’s ability to handle it.
May 29, 2013
Baseball movies have improved. No longer do they depend on fantasy for effect, like a long-dead ballplayer appearing in the cornfield, or a worn-out player with a magic bat. Happily, now they deal with reality. They feature the type of serious fans I wrote about in Chasing Baseball (McFarland 2010) or the type of women I included in my forthcoming eBook, Who Ever Heard of a Girls’ Baseball Club? Hurrah for that!
May 17, 2013
A new documentary, “The Girls in the Band,” features women of the 1930s who, prevented from joining all-male bands, formed their own groups and toured the country. Discrimination by male musicians gave them a new adventure. But traveling through the South was something they want to forget, says a trumpeter with one of these bands.
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May 5, 2013
Ho hum, another biographical article of a major league player, this one appearing in the prestigious New Yorker of May 6.
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April 8, 2013
Major League Baseball has become concerned about American children. Not as many children are as interested in baseball as they were before 2000. They don’t watch baseball on television as much as they used to, either. “Children are the paying fans of tomorrow,” says economist Andrew Zimbalist, “and baseball cannot afford to treat their waning interest with indifference.”
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March 29, 2013
In a scholarly paper read at the Spring Training Conference of NINE at Tempe, Ariz., this month, I heard a scholar read a carefully annotated paper about “Female Masculinity” as it is exemplified in a novel called Rachel, the Rabbi’s Wife, by Silvia Tennenbaum (Morrow 1978).
March 20, 2013
A new book, so new it bears a publication date two weeks from today, includes interviews with many people in baseball or connected with it in some way. All the people selected for interviews are Jewish because the author is interested in the relationship between American success stories and the values of American Jews.
Feb. 26, 2013
Children’s books have become as important in the publishing field as adults’ books. The Sunday New York Times Book Review always carefully sets aside space that gives attention to newly published children’s books, just as it does for the separate category of adult mysteries. Continue reading “Feb. 26, 2013”
Feb. 19, 2013
Two baseball people are failing to get the recognition they would have gotten a hundred years ago. Continue reading “Feb. 19, 2013”
Feb. 13, 2013
“Women and baseball” is an aspect of baseball history that is becoming recognized. The Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College in Harvard University owns a copy of my autobiography, A Woman’s Work, the librarian there tells me. Some scholars consider this book a feminist document. The Smith College library has a copy of Chasing Baseball for use in courses on sport history. Did you know sport history is taught in women’s colleges? Smith has also just discovered that I devoted two pages to early Smith baseball in Baseball: The People’s Game, the third volume of the series I wrote for Oxford University Press with Dr. Harold Seymour.