Release Date:- 2012-03-20
Reviews Counts:- 114
User Average Rating:- 4
Availability:- In Stock
Kind:- ebook
The 50th Anniversary edition of āthe book that changed baseballā (NPR), chosen by Time magazine as one of the ā100 Greatest Non-Fictionā books.
When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, and a āsocial leperā for having violated the āsanctity of the clubhouse.ā Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasnāt true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadnāt read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries.
Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four. Fans liked discovering that athletes were real peopleāoften wildly funny people. David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Vietnam, wrote a piece in Harperās that said of Bouton: āHe has written . . . a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.ā
Today Ball Four has taken on another roleāas a time capsule of life in the sixties. āIt is not just a diary of Boutonās 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros,ā says sportswriter Jim Caple. āItās a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades. To call it simply a ātell all bookā is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting peaches in California.ā
Includes a new foreword by Jim Bouton's wife, Paula Kurman
āAn irreverent, best-selling book that angered baseballās hierarchy and changed the way journalists and fans viewed the sports world.ā āThe Washington Post