BUNTS: "Curt Flood, Camden Yards, Pete Rose, and Other Reflections on Baseball"
by George F. Will

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Book Reviews of BUNTS: "Curt Flood, Camden Yards, Pete Rose, and Other Reflections on Baseball"

Book Review: As good as any baseball book I have read, and I have read a lot of them
Summary: 5 Stars

Summary of BUNTS: "Curt Flood, Camden Yards, Pete Rose, and Other Reflections on Baseball"

Will, to be sure, is an elegant writer, a little verbose at times, but dependably knowledgeable, stirringly erudite, thoughtfully opinionated, and, here and there, delightfully personal--as in the volume's leadoff hitter in which he traces his own conservative principles to growing up a Cub fan. His lineup continues with a breezy ode to Louisville Sluggers; encomiums to Casey Stengel, Camden Yards, Ripken, Gwynn, and Curt Flood; a startling about-face on the DH; an early homage to statsmeister Bill James; and indictments on the selfishness of Ted Williams, the callousness of the owners in labor- and fan-relations, and the sordid personalities of Pete Rose and Billy Martin. The volume ends with a pair of doubles in the form of larger essays on Jon Miller and the distinctive craft of broadcasting, and a concluding one on the state of the game.

"Baseball," Will observes, "is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season--these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said?" The answer, of course, is not many, which is why Bunts provides a necessary and pleasing public service. --Jeff Silverman

At the beginning of the 1990s, a political columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator set out, in his words, to write an antiromantic book about a subject that had been romanticized in print for one hundred years. The subject was baseball, the columnist George Will, and the book Men at Work. His antiromantic love letter was warmly received by those who love baseball. Critics called it "an excellent book about excellence" (Barbara Grizzuti Harrison), "a classic [that] may even stand up as the best baseball book of the 1990s" (Jerome Holtzman), "a hit -- a triple off the center field wall" (Roger Angell), and by readers who kept it at the top of bestseller lists for more than five months.

He's back.

George Will returns to baseball with more than seventy finely honed pieces about the sometimes recondite, sometimes frustrating, always passionately felt National Pastime. Here are Will's eulogy for the late Curt Flood ("Dred Scott in Spikes"), Will on Ted Williams ("When Ted Williams retired in 1960, a sportswriter said that Boston knew how Britain felt when it lost India. Indeed. Britain felt diminished, but also a bit relieved"), and on his own baseball career ("I was a very late draft choice of the Mittendorf Funeral Home Panthers. Our color was black"). Here are subjects ranging from the author's 1977 purchase of a single share of stock in the Chicago Cubs, a purchase brokered by Warren Buffett ("a St. Louis Cardinal fan, but not otherwise sinister"), to the collision between Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti, to the building of Camden Yards in Baltimore, to the dismantling of the 1997 World Series Champion Florida Martins.

With new material, including an essay on the art of baseball broadcasting, featuring ESPN play-by-play man Jon Miller, and incorporating more than seventy photos, Bunts is certain to be for 1998 what Men at Work was for 1990 -- "inquisitive and extraordinarily nimble-minded ... this season's baseball book of choice" (The Wall Street Journal).

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