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A. Bartlett Giamatti (1938–1989)

Author of Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games

14+ Works 515 Members 49 Reviews

About the Author

Works by A. Bartlett Giamatti

Associated Works

Baseball: A Literary Anthology (2002) — Contributor — 335 copies
Autumn: A Spiritual Biography of the Season (2004) — Contributor — 57 copies
Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: Minor English Poems v.2 (1970) — Editor, some editions — 12 copies

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“It breaks your heart,” writes Bart Giamatti in the first paragraph of his first essay, “it is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” With that opening sentence, Giamatti’s words seize even casual fans of baseball and only releases them when his untimely death silences his pen.

A Great and Glorious Game is a collection of essays, speeches and executive decisions from Bart Giamatti, a Yale PhD in comparative literature who became President of the National League, then Commissioner of Major League Baseball, an office he held just five months before he died. Quite fortunately for fans of baseball—or of America—Giamatti is a PhD in literature who is also an exquisite writer (a rarer combination than it should be).

A reader will find his thoughts on the men of the game, both those of great character like Tom Seaver (“…among all the men who play baseball there is, very occasionally, a man of such qualities of heart and mind and body that he transcends even the great and glorious game, and that such a man is to be cherished, not sold.), those of flawed character: Kevin Gross (“Mr. Gross exhibited a reckless disregard for the reputation and good name of his teammates, club and league and for the integrity of the game.”) and Pete Rose (“One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts that have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts.”) and even the umpires (“Spectator and fan alike may, perhaps at times must, object to his judgement, his interpretation, his grasp of precedent, procedure and relevant doctrine. Such dissent is encouraged, is valuable, and rarely, if ever, is it successful.”).

Likewise, a reader will hear Giamatti chide the owners and striking players of the league (“Go back to work. You will lose a country if you impose autumn on a people who need and deserve a summer…”) and the fans (“To sports fans: clean up your act.”)

But the heartbeat of the book is Giamatti’s lyrical contemplations on the game itself, its preeminent place in American character and baseball as a narrative. Here we find why the game breaks our heart. Here we find all the patterns of the game. We find why “home” (“an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues”) plate is a metaphor for the game and a nation (“Baseball is about going home, and how hard it is to get there and about how driven is our need.”). We discover how the game is tied to the earth and nature, and loosed from time. Likewise, the author crafts metaphors from Eden and ball parks, the autumn and the Fall.

Giamatti also reveals why the game is so enmeshed in our character: “the baseball field and the game that sanctifies boundaries, rules, and law and engages cunning, theft and guile; that exalts energy, opportunism, and execution while paying lip service to management, strategy, and long-range planning…for the immigrant, the game was a club to belong to, another fraternal organizatoin, a common language in a strange land…It was neither chic nor déclassé to care about baseball. It was simply part of being an American.”

Read the book if you love—or even are mildly interested in—baseball. Read it to learn something of the American character. Or read it just to enjoy excellent writing. But read it you must.

Baseball, says Giamatti, “is the Romance Epic of homecoming that America sings to itself.” This all-too-short collection of his writing is a Great and Glorious Book about a Great and Glorious Game.
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fathermurf | 1 other review | Oct 4, 2023 |
This is a must read for those with even an inkling of an interest in baseball. Giamatti is a compelling writer, and his idealism in and passion for America's sport shines brightly. This is going right on my favorites!
 
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EllAreBee | 1 other review | Sep 19, 2016 |
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
When a piece of sports writing references, in the first few pages of the first chapter, Shakespeare, Thomas Carlyle, historian Allen Guttman, and Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan (1621-95), you can be pretty sure it's about baseball. No other sport seems to produce quite the kind of prose baseball does. Bart Giamatti was a master of that prose -- his "The Green Fields of the Mind" is a stands out even among the many great pieces of writing collected in Baseball: A Literary Anthology -- but also a master of the quality of thought required to keep that sort of prose from being pretentious or downright ridiculous. "Take Time for Paradise" won't take long to read, but its reflections on the nature of cities, of sports and leisure, and ultimate of being human, will stick with you for a long time.

The second section of this essay, called "Community," includes some thoughts on why home plate on a baseball diamond is called "home." It brought to mind, of all things, George Carlin's bit contrasting pastoral baseball, where the object is to get safely home, with martial football, where the objective is to penetrate the opponent's defense and rush or throw a bomb into his end zone. Carlin plays it for laughs, but it's making much the same point Giamatti is. There's a reason baseball carries so much nostalgia with it. As Mary McGrory said, "Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become." If football is a metaphor for war and empire (and hardly even a metaphor anymore -- see Gregg Easterbrook's new "The King of Sports: Football's Impact on America"), then baseball can be a metaphor for life. Or as George Will might, and probably already has, put it, life is a metaphor for baseball. Either way, take time for "Take Time for Paradise." You don't have to be a philosopher to enjoy baseball (fortunately), but sometimes a little philosophy can help.
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1 vote
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Cascadian | 46 other reviews | Oct 9, 2013 |
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
In this magnificent gem of a book, Bart Giamatti argues for a classical view of sports and leisure generally. Drawing heavily from Aristotle and Shakespeare, he argues that the mark of truly free people is in how they use their freedom. Many areas of our public and private lives have some element of "work" to them, some compulsion to produce in a particular way, but in our games, we live by the rules which we choose for no particular reason at all. When we play a game, we choose to create the game's world for a while, and even when we participate as spectators, we hope to see a spectacular performance within that created world. This is a philosophical, abstract section; beautiful but (as other reviewers have noted) deceptively deep in places.

In the second section of the book, Giamatti considers the role of sports in cities, pointing out the social benefits and tensions in our arenas. This section is somewhat more practical and less theoretical. With twenty-some additional years, we can see Giamatti's predictions coming through in some places, such as his concern over athlete's salaries and the cost of the sport becoming a barrier between the athlete and the fans. In others, such as the issues around steroids and cheating, we can only wonder how he might have handled the 90s or 2000s. As the first section makes you think about theories, the second section makes you consider our current world of leisure.

The third section is a smart man's paean to his beloved sport of baseball. The baseball section of your local library or bookstore is chock-full of this kind of writing, and Giamatti's is as good as anyone else's I've read. That said, it's not particularly better, nor does it reflect his status as commissioner in any obvious way. Perfectly nice to read, though, and a dense volume like this probably does need a lighter ending.
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½
 
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hipdeep | 46 other reviews | Jun 9, 2013 |

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