Baseball is a metaphor for life of Bart Giamatti

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	• A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti Algonquin Books, 1998 - 121 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Baseball is a metaphor for life of Bart Giamatti

Bart Giamatti's baseball story is really a metaphor for life, and he undoubtedly intended it as such. He was a masterful wrangler of the English language and indispustably the best-educated commissioner of baseball ever. His story doesn't rely on his education, though. He felt and lived his life-long love of the Boston Red Sox and never gave up on them. I'm so sorry he didn't live to see the Red Sox win the World Series. I watched the 1986 series and despaired of the Red Sox, thinking of Bart as he must have watched, too. What a great man and wonderful mentor--Bart Giamatti was one in a million, and it's too bad he died so young.

I've always thought Pete Rose "killed" him, though I suppose it was just that Bart's heart couldn't stand the stress.

Bart Giamatti will always live in my heart, and besides his wonderful work in Renaissance literature and mythography, I will always prize his baseball writings as the essence of a fine man.

Susan McDanielBart: A Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti, by Him and About Him (A Harvest/Hbj Book)

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Ok...

The language of Giamatti is wonderful and there are some interesting stories in here. It is nothing more then that and it really wasn't my cup of tea. I would have liked to see some more intertwined stories about his life in baseball. I guess this was as good as it was going to get.

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just loved this book...

I read this book outloud with my 12-year-old son in October 2000 during the playoffs and world series. We had borrowed it from the library, and ever since then he's been asking me to buy it. We finally have and now he's reading it again on his own. I thought it was too advanced for him, but there is a passion in this book you can't miss.

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The Soul of Baseball at It's Intellectual Best

Bartlett Giamatti's essays provide you with a delightful dimension of the national pastime which you will find in no other source. It reflect's one man's eloquent love of the game before and beyond the hoopla, hype and heavy hand of greed. It is a very refreshing, quick read worthy of your investment of time and a few dollars less than a movie ticket!

A Glorious Book About A Glorious Game

When renaissance scholar A. Bartlett Giamatti was asked to become president of Yale University, he said the only presidency he had ever aspired to was that of the American League. Instead, a few years later, he took the helm of the National League, and shortly after that, became commissioner of baseball. Tragically, his tenure in that office ended after only five months with his sudden death at the age of 51.

But Giamatti's legacy endures. and those who seek to understand or re-embrace it need only turn to this gem of a book. It's all here, opening with his wonderful essay, "The Green Fields of The Mind," which famously begins "It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart." There's his farewell to Tom Seaver, where the departure of Seaver and his wife Nancy from the Mets calls to mind a famous painting of Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden. The book closes with its most powerful and saddest item--a statement Giamatti released to the press after banning Pete Rose from the game for life for betting on baseball.

If you love the "great and glorious game," you must read this book. Savor the beauty of the prose and the passionate idealism that drives it. And pause for a moment to reflect on what the game--and the world--lost with Bart Giamatti's passing.--William C. Hall

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

With a foreword by David Halberstam. He spoke out against player trading. He banned Pete Rose from baseball for gambling. He even asked sports fans to clean up their acts. Bart Giamatti was baseball's Renaissance man and its commissioner. In A GREAT AND GLORIOUS GAME, a collection of spirited, incisive essays, Giamatti reflects on the meaning of the game. Baseball, for him, was a metaphor for life. He artfully argues that baseball is much more than an American "pastime." "Baseball is about going home," he wrote, "and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need." And in his powerful 1989 decision to ban Pete Rose from baseball, Giamatti states that no individual is superior to the game itself, just as no individual is superior to our democracy. A GREAT AND GLORIOUS GAME is a thoughtful meditation on baseball, character, and values by one of the most eloquent men in the world of sport.

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