Players Books

My name is christin, and Lois P. Nicholson is my aunt. I swear to it. This is a very great biography, very well written, and totally not boring. Aunt Lois, keep 'em comin'.

When I first acquired this book, I expected to receive a run of the mill book on little calculator tricks. I should have known better. In this collection of six games, Sackson uses the calculator as an integral part of the game. This is not a "type 01134 and turn the calculator upside down" book. Rather, these are six of Sackson's games that belong on the shelf of any Sackson fan or game collector.

Reviewed by Matthew Feliciano (age 7) for Reader Views (1/08)

I really liked this book because it told a true story about Roy Campanella. I think the author did a very good job of telling this story. The author told interesting things about Roy Campanella and when I was reading the book I felt like I was living Campy's life right with him. The illustrations were not so good. I did not like the way they looked like paintings. The faces seemed "bubbly" and they looked funny.

In "Campy," we learn all about the baseball player Roy Campanella. He is a hero for many reasons. First, he did not let the color of his skin stop him from doing what he wanted to do. He was the best baseball player out there. He was very professional and polite to everyone and was a good person.

The second reason Campy is a hero is because when he had a car accident and couldn't move, he never gave up. He kept living his life and went on to teach baseball to others from his wheelchair.

In "Campy: The Story of Roy Campanella," Campy can teach everyone a lesson: the color of your skin does not matter. What matters is how you feel and how you act.

I have read this book and enjoyed it immensely. It is very informative and written with a heart. I happen to have lost my copy in a move to another country, so if Mr. Shearon happens to read this, please contact me so I can buy another copy!!

The work of serious baseball historians tends to fall into two main categories; excellent writing short on research and extraordinary research spoiled by pompous, often pedantic prose.
Then there's Howard Rosenberg. Rosenberg's "Cap Anson 4" the recently released...biography of one of the game's first "superstars" is as compelling as the latest James Patterson thriller and as meticulously well-researched as a successful doctoral thesis.
Adrian C. Anson was the first player to get 3,000 hits,arguably the greatest player-manager of all-time and a pivotal figure in the creation of baseball's shameful color line that kept Black players out of the majors for more than 60 years.
Rosenberg doesn't flinch from the accusations of Anson's racism, nor does he gloss over the Hall of Famer's other foibles and eccentricities. The book contains literally hundreds of footnotes and citations and perhaps thousands of newspaper quotations.
Rosenberg poured over thousands of ancient newspaper clippings and archives. He concluded that in the 1880s and '90s writers were given a virtually free hand and did a superior job of capturing the mannerisms of players and painting pictures with words." He added "By the first decade of the 1900s, photography was a major presence and writers would, overall never be as independent and thus as interesting again."
That may have been true for the vast majority of baseball writers including those plying the trade today. But it is certainly not true of Rosenberg.
If you're at all interested in the early days of the "great America game," you can never go wrong reading Howard Rosenberg.

(From a review and feature) by Bart Fisher, New Britain (Conn.) Herald, May 1, 2006

This is definitely a worthwhile book for all fans of the Cape Cod Baseball league. Mr. Thomas did an excellent job interviewing many of the players, coaches and umpires that help make the League the best collegiate league in the country. Great job! Looking forward to reading his next book.

Capital Tennis: A Memoir is the personal musings of Allie Ritzenberg, founder and director of St. Albans Tennis Club. Ritzenberg's club was at the crest of a sweeping change, sparked during the Kennedy administration, in which Washington's power elite favored tennis rather than golf, the favored sport of the Eisenhower administration. Ritzenberg personally coached such memorable figures as Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert McNamara, George McGovern and Donna Shalala. Ritzenberg's memoir is packed with telling glimpses of dozens of public figures, as well as his own personal efforts to found the club as a place of equality as surely as the spirit of sports - though St. Albans was a private club, it would not discriminate on the basis of race or religion, an almost unprecedented decision in 1962, two years before Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. An inset selection of black-and-white photographs rounds out this revealing, heartwarming, and inspirational testimony.

Roland S. Jefferson has written a high concept novel about the Las Vegas Scene in the 1980's.The protagonist of this exciting tome is an alienated loser named Bernie who assembles a team of high stakes gamblers to help him pull off a heist of the Vegas casinos by counterfeiting the gaming chips and exchanging them for cash. Written is a style that reminds one of the late, great Chester Himes or even more like James Jones. With meticulous attention to detail, Jefferson is especially skillful with character descriptions and their interplay with one another. His development of Bernie's cold, detached, indifference, especially in his relationship with Janine, the only female member of his criminal enterprise is especially brutal in it's depiction. If you want to know how it ends, you'll have to read it. But I guarantee you won't be disappointed...especially since Las Vegas has, in the years since this novel was written, converted itself into a family playground. A Card For The Players is like going back home again, to the Las Vegas we remember. Not the corrupt infant of the Bugsy Siegel days, but the Las Vegas of Ocean's Eleven or 5 Against The House. I can't wait to see the movie

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT SOME OF THE FORMER PLAYERS FOR THE ST LOUIS CARDINALS. AMONG THE PLAYERS INTERVIEWED ARE JACK CLARK, RICK WISE, DICK GROTE AND TED SIMMONS. EACH PLAYER IS GIVEN 4-6 PAGES COVERAGE. THEY TELL US A BIT ABOUT THEIR CAREER WITH THE CARDS AND WHAT THEY ARE DOING NOW. I AM NOT EVEN A CARDS FAN BUT FOUND THIS BOOK TO BE INTERESTING AND NOSTALGIC. I RECOMMEND IT FOR ALL BASEBALL FANS.

Kudos to Mr. Long. This is a fine read. A must for Red Sox Fans. The perfect stocking stuffer for that baseball fan on your Christmas list.