![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yay, my first book review
Well, so I finished reading my Ty Cobb book on the bus to work this morning, and spent a little while after lunch writing my first ever Amazon book review (because I didn't feel any of the reviews currently up there really captured the book).
I guess the only thing I regret is not bringing the Eight Men Out book with me to work today to start on the bus home...
One big story, a million entertaining substories...
I really enjoyed reading this book. It was the first book about Cobb that I had ever read; before that, he was just a name and statistics to me.
The overarcing story of this book is Ty Cobb's career in baseball, with a little bit about his life before and a few flashes into his life after. Now, it would be easy to sum up a career in baseball with several numbers, a few game highlights, etc. But that is not what you'll find in this book. What you'll find is a ton of short, 5-10 paragraph interludes about almost every big name in baseball from the 1905-1928 period... and even big names elsewhere. Ty Cobb was fortunate enough to have interacted with everyone from actors to presidents to business executives, and he has humorous angles on each of them. I actually laughed out loud several times while reading this book at the way he portrayed various people.
In a lot of ways, reading this book is almost like listening to your grandfather tell stories of his adventures and his friends in his youth. Except it's not your grandfather, it's Ty Cobb, telling stories of the Golden Age of Baseball, and his friends were legends like Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Connie Mack, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, Nap Lajoie, and others who may also simply be names in the Hall of Fame to you. Cobb's stories bring life to long-dead names, color to old black-and-white photos. Most of us have only heard legends of those early parks, players, pennants, pitches, pundits. Cobb was there. And through reading his story, it almost feels like you were, too.
While I've read other reviews that say this book hides the Dark Side of Ty Cobb, I don't think that is entirely true. He definitely talks about some ways he treated people, such as Shoeless Joe Jackson, that makes you realize that at his core he was a man who would stop at nothing to win.
It doesn't matter if you like Ty Cobb or hate Ty Cobb. If you want to hear some great baseball stories, read this book.
I guess the only thing I regret is not bringing the Eight Men Out book with me to work today to start on the bus home...
One big story, a million entertaining substories...
I really enjoyed reading this book. It was the first book about Cobb that I had ever read; before that, he was just a name and statistics to me.
The overarcing story of this book is Ty Cobb's career in baseball, with a little bit about his life before and a few flashes into his life after. Now, it would be easy to sum up a career in baseball with several numbers, a few game highlights, etc. But that is not what you'll find in this book. What you'll find is a ton of short, 5-10 paragraph interludes about almost every big name in baseball from the 1905-1928 period... and even big names elsewhere. Ty Cobb was fortunate enough to have interacted with everyone from actors to presidents to business executives, and he has humorous angles on each of them. I actually laughed out loud several times while reading this book at the way he portrayed various people.
In a lot of ways, reading this book is almost like listening to your grandfather tell stories of his adventures and his friends in his youth. Except it's not your grandfather, it's Ty Cobb, telling stories of the Golden Age of Baseball, and his friends were legends like Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Connie Mack, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, Nap Lajoie, and others who may also simply be names in the Hall of Fame to you. Cobb's stories bring life to long-dead names, color to old black-and-white photos. Most of us have only heard legends of those early parks, players, pennants, pitches, pundits. Cobb was there. And through reading his story, it almost feels like you were, too.
While I've read other reviews that say this book hides the Dark Side of Ty Cobb, I don't think that is entirely true. He definitely talks about some ways he treated people, such as Shoeless Joe Jackson, that makes you realize that at his core he was a man who would stop at nothing to win.
It doesn't matter if you like Ty Cobb or hate Ty Cobb. If you want to hear some great baseball stories, read this book.
no subject
Stories I remember reading about Ty Cobb:
- He sent his roommate to the hospital because he raced him to the bathroom in his apartment one time, lost, and proceeded to beat him senseless as a result
- He sharpened his cleats so as to gore basemen when sliding into bases
- In his dotage, he asked the catcher at an old-timers' game to step back because he felt the bat might slip from his weakened hands, and then bunted immediately afterwards
I don't know if any of these stories are true, since I read them in some "Horrible Moments in Sports" book from the '80s, but the book seemed reputable enough. Were any of these in the book you read?
no subject
you have to debate whether to read between the lines on some of his rebuttals. I could fully see him spiking Frank Baker on purpose... since the photo of the play looks like Frank really WAS blocking his basepath. And so on...
no subject
no subject