Time to immerse yourself in America’s Game via the Library’s Baseball Book Display. Heavy on the Red Sox, our exhibit does a fair job job of representing the other teams and ballparks across the nation as well. Go ahead enjoy summer’s sport though the novels and nonfiction titles set aside for you on the main floor of the Library. Feel free to pick up a copy of the booklist that goes with the exhibit.
And please don’t miss Providence Journal Columnist Ed Achorn’s extraordinary new baseball book, cover and reviews below -
Reviews:
“Make room, Satchel and Cy, Walter, Grover and Roger. In a game where winning is everything, Old Hoss Radbourn did more of it than any of you in that magical season of 1884. But don’t believe me. Travel back there with Ed Achorn, who makes Old Hoss’s case for greatness in a book that passionately evokes a forgotten era and convincingly rewrites our list of the most accomplished pitchers ever.”
—Larry Tye, author of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend
“Beautifully written and impeccably researched, Fifty-Nine in ’84 is the best book out there on 19th-century baseball. Old Hoss Radbourn would be pleased that he is finally getting his due—and angry that it took so long.
—Cait Murphy, author of Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History
“This is a beautifully written, meticulously researched story about a bygone baseball era that even die-hard fans will find foreign, and about a pitcher who might have been the greatest of all time.”
—Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers and American Creation
“Baseball historians and anyone interested in the give and take of everyday life in America in the tumultuous twenty or thirty years after the Civil War will be fascinated by the extraordinary detail unearthed by Edward Achorn for Fifty-Nine in ’84, his monumental biography of Charlie (Old Hoss) Radbourn, who for at least a few years was probably the greatest pitcher ever to play professional baseball, and who for all his life was a truculent, fiercely independent character.”
—Robert W. Creamer, author of Babe: The Legend Comes to Life and Stengel: His Life and Times
“All fans of baseball, all fans of a good story, will love this book. With clear and colorful prose, Edward Achorn has told the marvelous suspense-filled story of Charles Radbourn’s 1884 season as a baseball pitcher. In the process Achorn has recreated not just the rough and tough baseball world of “Old Hoss” Radbourn, perhaps the greatest pitcher who ever lived, but also the raucous society and the money-mad culture that sustained the wild and wooly and rapidly developing game of nineteenth-century baseball. Once you’ve read this book, you won’t forget it.”
—Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution and Empire of Liberty
“Ed Achorn’s vivid prose breathes life into a forgotten but fascinating era of baseball and one of its legendary heroes.”
—Maury Klein, author The Life and Legend of Jay Gould, Pulitzer finalist
“Fans who love reading about the history of baseball will enjoy Edward Achorn’s fascinating book on the great pitching exploits of the legendary pitcher Old Hoss Radbourn. It is a great story of the early years of major league baseball and of a pitcher who won 59 games in one season with 441 strikeouts and 73 complete games. How such an unparalleled feat was accomplished is amazing and hard to imagine. A must read.”
—Dave “Boo” Ferriss, former Boston Red Sox pitcher
List and exhibit presented by the staff at the Library’s Reference Desk.
Enjoy!
