"I ain’t the world’s best writer, ain’t the world’s best speller         
                   But when I believe in somethin,’’ I’m the loudest yeller"
                                                                           ( W O O D Y   G U T H R I E )

Review for February 2, 2001   (scroll down for archives)

The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble Gum Book

by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred Harris

If you didn’t know any better, you might think this short book filled with pictures was simply something you should buy for your 9-year-old. You would be very, very wrong. It’s really a simple, hilarious book— aimed at adults— about how much fun it is to be a kid and collect baseball cards. The authors grew up as baseball fanatics in the 1950s and ’60s, and it’s amazing how many obscure, pointless facts they remember about the players from that era. The book consists simply of illustrations of baseball cards, one or two to a page, with each card accompanied by informative and irreverent commentary. For example: 

Boyd and Harris are baseball fans, not historians, and so the book is not meant to be informational. In fact, it’s not really meant to be anything at all, except a pleasant stroll down memory lane that takes about an hour to read, keeping you laughing the whole time. But its lack of pretense is deceiving, because it gives us baseball as religion, and the baseball card as high art form. It also contains observations you’d never find in other baseball books, like the fact that  Don Mossi had "the dark, hulking presence of one newly dead or resurrected." Or that "if there was a way to make the worst out of a situation, Don Buddin could be counted on to find it." These are guys who see baseball cards as entertainment, not investments. Every baseball fan has pet players -- guys like Bill Buckner, Dode Paskert, Mickey Hatcher, Rico Brogna -- that they have an unusual attachment to and can’t explain why. This book is an ode to all of them. It’s adolescent and immature in a way, too: The authors remind us of how delightful it is, when you’re a kid, to make fun of players with names like Coot Veal and Ebba St. Clair and Jesus MacFarlane. Most of all, the book reminds us that the main appeal of baseball is that it’s just a hell of a lot of fun.

Search for The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble Gum Book on Amazon.com

About the Book Reviews

I don’t fancy myself a literary critic, but I do enjoy reading books and discussing them. In the hopes that these pages will reach others who love books as much as I do, I will periodically post new book reviews to this site. (Ideally there will be a new book review posted every week, but we’ll see.) The reviews will be fairly brief, and I don’t plan on writing about every book I read. Rather, I’ll only be posting reviews of books I find to be especially moving or significant. (Why waste your time?) So if you enjoy discovering new books and ideas, stop by every once in a while and see what’s here.

Book Review Archives

January 13, 2000        Paul Robeson: A Biography by Martin Bauml Duberman

January 25, 2000        Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen

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