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February 28, 2013

In A Pickle

Enamorin' Hank

by Jason Wojciechowski

Scroll through Amazon's top-selling books of 2012 and you'll see the expected assortment: The Hunger Games, Fifty Shades of Grey, scads and scads of "practical" books (SAT prep guides, cookbooks, The Power of Habit), John Grisham. What you don't see are biographies. I count only two: Walter Isaacson's profile of the very recently deceased Steve Jobs and a new Thomas Jefferson book by Jon Meacham, the former editor-in-chief of Newsweek and a current editor at Random House.

I can't/won't make any grand cultural claims about the genre, but on a personal level, to give you a sense of where I'm going to be coming from, there's this: I was markedly more interested in biographies when I was 12 than I am now. I remember my excitement at seeing Rickey Henderson's auto (with John Shea) on the New Releases shelf at the Salinas Public Library in 1993, and devouring the behind-the-scenes tales, down to his birth in a car on the way to the hospital on Christmas. In more recent times, though, I've probably read more biography-of-a-thing books than biographies of humans (think Robert Sullivan's Rats or C.J. Chivers's The Gun). I still read nonfiction books and I still read about people (a good New Yorker profile may give me more joy than any other type of magazine piece), but I don't read nonfiction books about people.

The why of this disconnect does not boil down to a sole cause. The mishmash at the heart of it involves who I married (I just asked my wife about the last biography she read—she shrugged), cultural elitism (biographies are so mainstream, bro), available time (billing like a lawyer and writing like a blogger means that Scott Pilgrim looks a lot more inviting than the latest tome on Abraham Lincoln), and, most crucially, readily available information. Why would I read 300 pages on Rickey Henderson when I can get the CliffsNotes version on Wikipedia and have his stats and salary a

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7 comments have been left for this article.

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newsense

(5112)

It's not a book but the documentary, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, was well-researched and covered a lot of the important points about Greenberg's life.

Does the book talk about Moe Berg at all?

Feb 28, 2013 08:18 AM

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Jason Wojciechowski

BP staff

(1272)

The great Nicholas Dawidoff book "The Catcher Was A Spy" is noted as a reference, but Berg himself makes just one appearance in the book: in a list of Jewish players who took the field on Rosh Hashanah in 1934.

Feb 28, 2013 09:39 AM

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rweiler

(21660)

I'm guessing Rosengren doesn't focus much on Greenberg as emblematic Jewish ballplayer is due to the fact that Jews were at least well enough assimilated into American life that they were allowed to play major league baseball as opposed to black players, who were not. So there isn't the kind of tectonic shift when Greenberg reaches the majors as there is when Jackie Robinson does.

Feb 28, 2013 08:57 AM

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BarryR

(1188)

There were always Jewish baseball players. The first professional player was a Jew, Lipman Pike. Benny Kauff, "The Jewish Ty Cobb", was a two-time Federal League batting champion. But Greenberg was at a whole different level - a star who, to Jews, demonstrated that they were capable of being big and strong and dominant in America's national pastime. That was huge, especially in an era where anti-semitism and stereotypes were commonplace. - and in Europe, deadly.
As for Jackie Robinson, in spring training in 1947, Greenberg sought him out to talk to him about what it was like for him. Even though it was worse for Jackie, Hank could tell him what it was like to be a star and have epithets (and baseballs) thrown at him with regularity on the field. Robinson always gave Greenberg a lot of credit for doing that, because Robinson had no one who could tell him what it was like at that level, who had been through it day after day as not just a ballplayer, but as a "representative" of a people.

Feb 28, 2013 09:48 AM

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rating: 3

Llarry Amrose

(1146)

Sounds like Rosengren's facts could stand to meet Kurlansky's writing (and vice versa). Has anybody read the Kurlansky book and can give an opinion on it relative to this one?

Feb 28, 2013 13:40 PM

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mhross

(1206)

This film, "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg," is terrific and has both great clips and a perspective rather than just lots of desciption. It sounds like this meet your needs much better than the book. Here is a link to it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0208261/

Marc

Mar 01, 2013 18:18 PM

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drawbb

(3190)

ANYTHING has to be more inviting than Scott Pilgrim.

Apr 28, 2013 22:50 PM

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