[.ca] Triumph And Tragedy In Mudville (ISBN 0393325571)

From Amazon.com:
The late Stephen Jay Gould was a man of strong opinions--and not just about evolutionary theory and paleontology, the subjects of fine books of his such as Ever Since Darwin and Wonderful Life. Just get him going on baseball, as readers of his long-running monthly column in Natural History magazine will remember, and sparks would fly. Baseball, Gould writes in this collection of diverse essays and reviews, is an intellectual's game, but only accidentally so; plenty of smart folks like other sports. In his case, though, baseball was the game to follow, for he grew up in the New York of the 1950s, when the city had "the three greatest teams in major league baseball." Two of those teams later moved far away, but Gould nursed his passion into adulthood, all the while acquiring plenty of ammunition for sophisticated arguments about every facet of the game. In these pages, for instance, he weighs in on such eminently arguable matters as the greatest player the sport has known (Ty Cobb, maybe), the greatest single game ever played (game six of the 1975 World Series), why it is that no one hits .400 these days (it's a matter of statistics, but so much more too), and whether the current system of postseason playoffs is a good thing (no). The sport has had few more learned and literate fans than Gould, who brings his best to these pieces. Celebrating triumphs and mourning tragedies on and off the diamond, this book makes just the right companion for the new season, and for the seasons to come. --Gregory McNamee

Very disappointing:
Based on Prof. Gould's previous books and his appearances in, among others, the Ken Burns Baseball series, I was supremely disappointed by this book, although perhaps for reasons other than those expressed by other reviewers. Anyone who has read Prof. Gould's other books should know that he is an acquired taste, whether his subject is baseball, paleontology, evolution, or what have you. Many of his books have passages or whole sections that are simply unreadable but the remainder manages to buoy them up. However, because Prof. Gould was in the process of dying as he finished some of the later dated essays and the rest are culled from his history of writing on the sport, it only stands to reason that there is going to be a lot of repetition (he traces his family's history of Yankee fandom so many times I lost count) and his better chapters are the shorter, more distinct ones than the lengthy scientific breakdowns like why no one hits .400 any more. I could have done without the last section of baseball book and movie reviews - they were okay but they didn't do anything for me, perhaps because Prof. Gould was simply reacting to the work of others rather than producing his own contemplations. It is a true shame that Prof. Gould's last work should leave so much to be desired, but there are lots of other volumes of his out there if one wants to revisit them.

Parody, or just awful?:
For a few chapters, I thought this was simply the worst book about baseball I'd ever read. The late genius Prof. Gould seemed less interested in entertaining or informing than in impressing us with obscure allusions and dropping the name of every other genius or celebrity he's ever met. But then it occurred that perhaps Gould was parodying the pompous blowhards he probably spent most of his life enduring in academe. Consider these two sentences from Ch. 8 alone: "We may, on the rarest of occasions, enjoy the privilege of watching a person who can do something so much better than anyone else on the planet that we have to wonder if he really belongs to our universal tribe of Homo sapiens. I can cite only two such experiences in my previous fifty-seven years of life, both musical: when, in the late 1960s, I heard Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sing Schubert's Die Schone Mullerin, and even his triple pianissimos penetrated like pinpricks of utter beauty to my seat in the last row of the last balcony of Symphony Hall; and when, two years ago at the Metropolitan Opera, I saw the world's greatest performers in each part boost their combined talents far above the sum of their individual strengths when they sang the first act of Wagner's Die Walkure: Placido Domingo as Siegmund, Deborah Voigt as Sieglinde, and Matti Salminen as Hunding, with James Levine conducting the finest orchestra ever assembled in operatic history." Phew. Now that's remarkably boring and self-absorbed--but when you imagine an arrogant snob like Frasier Crane delivering those words, it becomes sort of amusing. And could it be that was what Gould was going for? To satirize, rather than nauseate? Naaaa. This book is not about baseball or much else beside Gould's need to impress us with his Big Brain, Refined Taste, and Fabulous Life (which he remembered in excrucitaing detail). Don't waste your time.

Five Star Essays about Baseball and Life:
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

Did he root for the Yankees????:
Two things are crystal after the first eight or so essays in Triumph: 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. Triumph 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.

A Brilliant Fan's Final Love Letter to the Game:
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.