false 17520 34629 0679762892 9780679762898 18 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168571744m/34629.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168571744s/34629.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34629.The_Catcher_Was_a_Spy_The_Mysterious_Life_of_Moe_Berg 3.48 107 17520 3.75 215 46 1994 983606 037570082X 9780375700828 5 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179999992m/983606.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179999992s/983606.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/983606.In_the_Country_of_Country_A_Journey_to_the_Roots_of_American_Music 4.00 23

From the Hardcover edition.]]> 17520 3.75 215 46 1997 2424085 0375400281 9780375400285 10 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2424085.The_Crowd_Sounds_Happy_A_Story_of_Love_Madness_and_Baseball 3.93 29 The Catcher Was a Spy, his most original work yet: a memoir of two cities (New Haven and New York), a family (troubled), a time (the 1970s), a boy who never quite fits in anywhere--and how baseball helps him find his place in America.

The Crowd Sounds Happy is the story of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in a doomed hometown, with a missing father, a single mother, and the professional ballplayers who gradually become the men in his life as he listens to them every night on the bedside radio. This is a childhood shaped by remarkable characters, foremost Nicholas Dawidoff's mother, a stoical, overwhelmed, enterprising woman committed to securing a more promising future for her children. It also tells, with the same arresting candor of Dawidoff's celebrated New Yorker magazine memoir of his father, what it's like to grow up with a disturbed, dangerous parent. Here are the events and places that come to define a young boy's outlook: a local playground, a kidnapping and a murder, rock 'n' roll, the steamy awkwardness of adolescence and first love, and the private world of baseball--the inner game as it has never been described before.

The Crowd Sounds Happy is a beautifully written, moving piece of personal history that transforms ordinary moments into literature.]]> 17520 3.75 215 46 2008 31253 193108209X 9781931082099 6 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168272978m/31253.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168272978s/31253.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31253.Baseball_A_Literary_Anthology 4.23 26 Baseball: A Literary Anthology, The Library of America presents the story of the national adventure as revealed through the fascinating lens of the great American game.

Philip Roth considers the terrible thrill of the adolescent centerfielder; Richard Ford listens to minor-league baseball on the radio while driving cross-country; Amiri Baraka remembers the joy of watching the Newark Eagles play in the era before Jackie Robinson shattered the color line. Unforgettable portraits of legendary players who have become icons-Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Hank Aaron-are joined by glimpses of lesser-known characters such as the erudite Moe Berg, who could speak a dozen languages "but couldn't hit in any of them."

Poems in Baseball: A Literary Anthology include indispensable works whose phrases have entered the language-Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat" and Franklin P. Adams's "Baseball's Sad Lexicon"-as well as more recent offerings from May Swenson, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Martin Espada. Testimonies from classic oral histories offer insights into the players who helped enshrine the sport in the American imagination. Spot reporting by Heywood Broun and Damon Runyon stands side by side with journalistic profiles that match baseball legends with some of our finest writers: John Updike on Ted Williams, Gay Talese on Joe DiMaggio, Red Smith on Lefty Grove.]]> 17520 3.75 215 46 2002 191281 0375400273 9780375400278 1 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172557374m/191281.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172557374s/191281.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/191281.The_Fly_Swatter_How_My_Grandfather_Made_His_Way_in_the_World 4.08 12
Born in 1904 into the progressive Odessa intelligentsia, Gerschenkron fled the Russian Revolution at sixteen and settled in Vienna, immersing himself in the charged civic and intellectual life of another doomed city. Escaping the Nazis in the late 1930s, he made his way to Massachusetts, evolving from a political exile and social outcast into a man referred to by The New York Times as “Harvard’s scholarly model,” and by his peers as “The Great Gerschenkron”—the Harvard professor who knew the most.

Gerschenkron was a dazzling thinker, and his professional theories complemented his personal preoccupations. He was particularly interested in people—and economies—that cleverly overcame the large forces conspiring to hold them back; there were uses, he said, to adversity. Colleagues admired his vigorous ethical code and considered his personality to be perhaps even more original than his work. Gerschenkron was an uncompromising man who feuded with everyone from Vladimir Nabokov to John Kenneth Galbraith, who played chess with Marcel Duchamp, who enjoyed an intimate interlude with Marlene Dietrich, and who was a confidant of both Isaiah Berlin of Oxford and Ted Williams of the Red Sox.

Or was he? Layers of mystery and contradiction are at the core of this brilliantly recreated life, this prism through which we look back across some of the most important and unsettling moments of the twentieth century. With The Fly Swatter, best-selling author Nicholas Dawidoff gives us an intelligent, beautifully written, deeply felt biographical memoir of a real-life American character.]]> 17520 3.75 215 46 2002 7178772 0307377520 9780307377524 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7178772-crowd-sounds-happy 0.0 0 17520 3.75 215 46 2008