Here’s a couple of reviews of the new Salinger biography from the New York Times. The first, from Michiko Kakutani:

This volume, “J. D. Salinger: A Life,” which draws liberally from Salinger’s letters and a memoir by his daughter, Margaret, is flawed by a tendency to assume direct correspondences between the author’s life and work. And it retraces a lot of ground covered in earlier books by Ian Hamilton and Paul Alexander. Still, it does so without the sort of condescending and at times voyeuristic speculation that hobbled those earlier biographies, and it does an evocative job of tracing the evolution of Salinger’s work and thinking.

And the Sunday Book Review write-up by Jay Mcinerney:

For this reader, the great achievement of Slawenski’s biography is its evocation of the horror of Salinger’s wartime experience. Despite Salinger’s reticence, Sla wenski admirably retraces his movements and recreates the savage battles, the grueling marches and frozen bivouacs of Salinger’s war. It’s hard to think of an American writer who had more combat experience. He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. Slawenski reports that of the 3,080 members of Salinger’s regiment who landed with him on June 6, 1944, only 1,130 survived three weeks later. Then, when the 12th Infantry Regiment tried to take the swampy, labyrinthine Hürtgen Forest, in what proved to be a huge military blunder, the statistics were even more horrific. After reinforcement, “of the original 3,080 regimental soldiers who went into Hürtgen, only 563 were left.” Salinger escaped the deadly quagmire of Hürtgen just in time to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, and shortly thereafter, in 1945, participated in the liberation of Dachau. “You could live a lifetime,” he later told his daughter, “and never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose.”

…Salinger always told friends he was still writing, and it’s possible there’s a trove of unpublished stories and novels, although readers of “Hapworth,” in which he seems to be talking to himself rather than to fans of “The Catcher in the Rye,” may wonder whether they wish to see it. “J. D. Salinger: A Life” leaves this and many other questions hanging. Though Slawenski adds to the record, Paul Alexander’s biography is, to my mind, more dramatically vivid and psychologically astute.

There will probably never be a definitive biography of Salinger, but our understanding will be modified by the actions of his executors and the release of unpublished material in the coming years. For the moment, at least, Holden’s creator might take some satisfaction in knowing the extent to which his efforts to erase his own story have succeeded.

Don’t know how I missed this when it was published a few months ago, but check out Scott Raab’s Esquire profile of Phillip Roth.

[Drawing by Kerry Waghorn]

Anyone who is interested in soul records must read “Sweet Soul Music” by Peter Guralnick. There’s plenty of Solomon Burke to be found there. Guralnick called Burke,”a combination of Sam Cooke at his mellifuous best and Ray Charles at his deep-down and funkiest, an improbable mix of sincerity, dramatic artifice, bubbling good humor, and multitextured vocal artistry.”

He continues:

I remember the first time I saw Solomon Burke myself, in 1964. He was wearing a gold tuxedo with a gold cummerbund and was headlining a show that included Joe Tex, Otis Redding, and Garnet Mimms. Solomon had no competition. There has never been a warmer, more charismatic presence on stage, and when he stretched out his arms to the audience, when he declared at the outset, “There’s a song that I sing, and I believe if everybody was to sing this song, it would save the whole world,” there was scarcely anyone in that frenzied crowd who could resist either the message or the conviction that seemingly lay behind it.

Burke was a singer, a mortician, and a preacher. That was just for starters.  He was a force of nature:

“I’d go to the radio station and see the disc jockeys, go to the church and, of course, have a prayer, go to the homes and bless the homes and babies, and then maybe baptize a few people. My schedule, you see, has always been a three-way personality. There’s the artist, the religious leader, and just plain old Solomon Burke, who had his problems, who had his love life problems. Sometimes that’s another movie, you know, God help us, Jesus.”

Listen, here.

The great Elmore Leonard turns 85 today.

Hope he enjoys it. Lord knows how much pleasure he’s given us.

If you’ve never read it, dig Leonard’s 10 rules of writing.

“The Silent Season of a Hero,” a collection of Gay Talese’s sportswriting, got a rave review in the Times over the weekend. Gordon Marino writes:

Early on, Talese studied fiction with the strange intention of writing nonfiction, of elevating real life to literary life. Taking note of his way of setting up scenes, his oddly angled story lines and realistic dialogue, Tom Wolfe credited Talese with stirring a revolution in reporting that Wolfe christened the “new journalism.” This pronouncement was neither fiction nor hyperbole. Gay Talese’s outré method of framing and developing his “factual short stories” (as Rosenwald describes them) was as groundbreaking as it is still arresting. As this marvel of an anthology makes manifest, Talese transformed sportswriting into literature that is both serious and delightful.

Talese wasn’t the first writer to apply novelist techniques to non-fiction–WC Heinz and John Lardner had been doing it for years. In a recent interview for the Paris Review, Talese explained:

My first job was on the sports desk, but I didn’t want to write about sporting events. I wanted to write about people. I wrote about a losing boxer, a horse trainer, and the guy in the boxing ring who rang the bell between rounds. I was interested in fiction. I wanted to write like Fitzgerald. I collected his work—his short stories and journals. “Winter Dreams” is my favorite story of all time. The good nonfiction writers were writing about famous people, or topical people, or public people. No one was writing about unknown people. I knew I did not want to be on the front page. On the front page you’re stuck with the news. The news dominates you. I wanted to dominate the story. I wanted to pick subjects that were not the ordinary assignment editor’s idea of a story. My idea was to use some of the techniques of a fiction writer: scene setting, dialogue, and even interior monologue, if you knew your people well enough. I was writing short stories, and there were not many people on the Times who were doing that. Once, at an NYU baseball game, I overheard a conversation between a young couple who were having a lovers’ quarrel. I wrote the dialogue and I told the story of the game through what they were watching and what they were saying. At the St. Patrick’s Day parade, I wrote about the last person in the procession, a little guy who was carrying a tuba, and behind him came the sanitation trucks. I followed the parade from the vantage point of this tuba player.

…I could not contain myself within the twelve-hundred-word limit of daily journalism. Wherever I was, I thought that there were stories that other people weren’t telling. When I was going into professional athletes’ locker rooms, for instance, I would just listen to the chatter and look at the bodies of these men who had been in locker rooms with other men since they were little boys. There’d be other sports writers there, and they’d be asking the athletes questions about their performance in that night’s game, but I thought, No, there’s a different story here. These men are fascinating not as performers but in the way in which they mingle together. They’re freer with each other than homosexual men in a bathhouse. These other reporters didn’t even see the story, they just saw their job. Yet because it was a daily newspaper I was always being pulled away from these stories. I couldn’t do them at any real depth. That was really why I couldn’t do the job anymore.

At the same time, in the mid-sixties, Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin were having fun at the Herald Tribune. They were able to write what they wanted to write and I wished I had that kind of freedom. I was getting a lot of freedom by the standards of the Times, but not compared to them. I wanted more room and I wanted to go anywhere I wanted.

Talese wrote memorably about Floyd Patterson and his Esquire feature on Joe DiMaggio remains a classic.

I’ve had at least ten people tell me that “The Wire” isn’t only their favorite show but that it is without a doubt, “the best Television show ever made.” I still haven’t seen it but plan to tackle it this winter.

Over at the New York Review of Books, check out novelist Lorrie Moore’s take:

Set in post–September 11 Baltimore, the HBO series The Wire—whose sixty episodes were originally broadcast between June 2002 and March 2008 and are now available on DVD—has many things on its rich and roaming mind, but one of those things is Baltimore itself, home of Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, Babe Ruth, and Billie Holiday. Baltimore is not just a stand-in for Western civilization or globalized urban rot or the American inner city now given the cold federal shoulder in the folly-filled war on terror, though it is certainly all these things. Baltimore is also just plain itself, with a very specific cast of characters, dead and alive. Eminences are pointedly referenced in the course of the series: the camera passes over a sign to Babe Ruth’s birthplace, tightens on a Mencken quote sculpted into the office wall of The Baltimore Sun; “Poe” is not just street pronunciation for “poor” (to the delight of one of The Wire‘s screenwriters) but implicitly printed onto one horror-story element of the script; a phrase of Lady Day wafts in as ambient recorded music in a narrative that is scoreless except when the credits are rolling or in the occasional end-of-season montage.

…he use of Baltimore as a millennial tapestry, in fact, might be seen as a quiet rebuke to its own great living novelists, Anne Tyler and John Barth, both of whose exquisitely styled prose could be accused of having turned its back on the deep inner workings of the city that executive producer David Simon, a former Baltimore reporter, and producer Ed Burns, a former Baltimore schoolteacher and cop, have excavated with such daring and success. (“Where in Leave-It-to-Beaver-Land are you taking me?” asks The Wire‘s homeless police informant Bubbles, when driven out to a leafy, upscale neighborhood; the words are novelist and screenwriter Richard Price’s and never mind that this aging cultural reference is unlikely to have actually spilled forth from this character; the remark does nicely).

So confident are Simon and Burns in their enterprise that they have with much justification called the program “not television” but a “novel.” Certainly the series’s creators know what novelists know: that it takes time to transform a social type into a human being, demography into dramaturgy, whether time comes in the form of pages or hours. With time as a medium rather than a constraint one can show a profound and unexpected aspect of a character, and discover what that character might decide to do because of it. With time one can show the surprising interconnections within a chaotic, patchworked metropolis.

It is sometimes difficult to sing the praises of this premier example of a new art form, not just because enthusiastic viewers and cultural studies graduate students have gotten there first—”Heroism, Institutions, and the Police Procedural” or “Stringer Bell’s Lament: Violence and Legitimacy in Contemporary Capitalism” (chapters in The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television)—but also because David Simon himself, not trusting an audience, and not waiting for posterity, in his own often stirring remarks about the show in print interviews, in public appearances, and in audio commentary on the DVD version, has not just explicated the text to near muteness but jacked the critical rhetoric up very high. He is the show’s most garrulous promoter. In comment after comment, even the word “novel” is not always enough and Simon and his colleagues have compared his five-season series to a Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes are all named), Homer’s Iliad, a Shakespearean drama, a serialized narrative by Dickens, an historical document that will be read in fifty years, a book by Tolstoy, and Melville’s Moby-Dick. This leaves only journalist Joe Klein to raise the ante further: “The Wire never won an Emmy?” Klein is shown exclaiming in the DVD features on the final episode. “The Wire should win the Nobel Prize for literature!”

Terry Southern is one of those writers that keeps popping up, has for a long time. Nu? Why haven’t I read anything by him? I really should, shoudn’t I? Why don’t I see his books more in used bookstores?  Man, I’ve been meaning to read him for years now.

Southern is one of those characters that you hear about, time and again, yet his legend has outlasted his work. His two best know novels are The Magic Christian and Candy (co-writen with Mason Hoffenberg ), but he is more famous for the work he did as a screenwriter–Dr. Strangelove, The Cincinnati Kid, Easy Rider. (Peter Sellers, the story goes, bought 100 copies of The Magic Christian, gave one to Stanley Kubrick, and that’s how Southern got the job on Strangelove.)

Southern was briefly a writer on SNL during the Eddie Murphy years but apparently, not much of his material made the show. He was a guy who drank a lot and dig a ton of drugs, and his writing suffered as a result.

I’ve read a couple of pieces on Southern lately. Maybe I’m not missing much. There is this, from a New Yorker article about Easy Rider, “Whose Movie is This?” by Mark Singer (June 22, 1998).

Peter Matthiessen, who says that a Southern story from the fifties, “The Accident,” helped to inspire the founding of The Paris Review, told me recently that he though Southern had lost the energy and discipline to persevere as a serious writer. “I don’t believe there was much more work he wished to do,” Matthiessen said. “He was an observer anda commentator on modern life, and he had this quirky take on things. He was one of the founders of that school of irony–that cool style–and when he had a big splash with ‘Dr. Strangelove’ that irreverent, obstreperous take on things was all very startling and new. But, after that, everybody was into outrage. Terry’s style became diffused throughout the culture, and I think he’d already said what he had to say.”

And this, from an essay by Luc Sante, “I Can’t Carry You Anymore.”

Southern staked everything on effect. Thus he required a social context; he needed both an audience of cronies who would get it and an audience of squares who not only wouldn’t, but would turn purple and thrash ineffectually in offended protest. His was the strategem of someone with a lot to prove, and perhaps a lot to conceal. Other writers of his time similarly polarized the readership, but never quite in the same way. His old friend William Burroughs, for example, put all his contradictions on the line. He might have enjoyed provoking the enemy, but he hardly appeared dependent on the finger-popping approval of his frat brothers. Anway, his provocation had a point–there was a world of repression that had caused him misery and that he wanted to destroy. Southern never made it clear that he was in it for more than high fives and free drinks.

…Many of his riffs have failed to survive their context, and there wasn’t a whole lot in his work that transcended the category of riff. What we have here is a caution to the young, which might be summed up by one of Southern’s most famous lines: “You’re too hip, baby. I can’t carry you anymore.”

Here is a nice interview with Southern by his biographer, Lee Hill.

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There is a long interview with Gay Talese in the new edition of The Paris Review. This caught my attention:

INTERVIEWER: Are you equally interested in everyone you meet?

TALESE: One of the key facts of my life is that I was raised not in the home, but in a store. My father had been an apprentice to his cousin, a famous tailor in Paris who had movie stars and leading politicians as clients. My father left Paris in 1920 on a ship to Philadelphia. He hated Philadelphia and developed a respiratory problem, and someone suggested he move to the seashore. In Ocean City, New Jersey, he bought an old store on Asbury Avenue, the main business street, and he opened the Talese Town Shop. On one side of the store he set up a tailor shop. On the other side my mother, who had grown up in an Italian American neighborhood in Park Slope, Brooklyn, opened a dress shop. Above the store my parents had an apartment.
       The tailor business never really worked out. The craftsmen were fine, but there weren’t quite enough people in Ocean City who wanted to pay for handmade suits. So my mother became the wage earner. All the money we made was because of my mother selling dresses. She was successful because she had a way of getting women to talk about themselves. Her customers were, for the most part, large women, women who did not go to the beach in the summertime. My mother would give them clothes to try on that made them look better than they thought they had any right to look. She wasn’t a hustler. She made her sales because they trusted her and liked her, and she liked them back. I was there a lot—folding the dress boxes, dusting the counters, doing chores—and I learned a lot about the town by eavesdropping. These women, telling my mother their private stories, gave me an idea of a larger world.

…INTERVIEWER:  When did you realize that you had talent?

TALESE: Never. All I have is intense curiosity. I have a great deal of interest in other people and, just as importantly, I have the patience to be around them.

Talese has been one of my inspirations because he’s always been fascinated by the characters on the margins, and because of his unyiedling curiosity. I am a great fan of his journalism, particularly during his glory days at Esquire in the Sixites.

Earlier this year, Jonathan Van Meter wrote an excellent profile of Talese and his wife Nan, the celebrated book editor, in New York magazine. Talese does not come across as being sympathetic, but the piece provides a sharp look at his career, which imploded during and after the writing of “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” a book that became Talese’s “Apocalypse Now.”

Talese has a new book coming out about his marriage. I have no idea if it will be worth reading; I thought his last effort, “A Writer’s Life,” was meandering and dull.

If you are not familiar with Talese’s work, here is a selection of his essays, including Looking for Hemingway, a takedown of George Plimpton and his Paris Review crew, and perhaps Talese’s most celebrated story, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.

Bronx Banter Interview

By Hank Waddles

For Yankee fans, Roger Clemens is a difficult case — even before all his recent steroid trouble. If you’re of my generation, you grew up despising him. Even though he pitched for Boston during an era when we all knew the Red Sox would never win anything, he was still a fearsome enemy. He was the gunslinger who stole your girlfriend before shooting the sheriff right between the eyes on his way out of town. There was some pleasure to be had when his skills began to decline during his twilight years in Boston, but it wasn’t too much of a surprise when he became great again — if irrelevant — during his time in Toronto. And when he came to New York in 1999, if all wasn’t forgotten, at least it was put aside. First of all, the Yanks were adding the best pitcher in the game; second, they were twisting the knife in the heart of Red Sox Nation. It was a win-win.

Roger helped the Yankees to a couple more championships, won his 300th game, endeared himself to the Boss and legions of fans, and said all the right things about wearing a Yankee cap into the Hall of Fame. But then came the defection to Houston, the self-serving Stadium announcement of his return to New York, and, finally, the steroid allegations. There was an embarrassment that we had once embraced him, and the ashes in our mouths were there to remind us that we had gotten exactly what we deserved.

But there is more to Roger Clemens. Sure, he cut corners, but he also worked harder than any of his teammates. Yes, he is hopelessly selfish and egotistical, but he’d be the first player to volunteer for visits to children’s hospitals. Whether you loved him once or never at all, whether you think he deserves a plaque in Cooperstown or a spot in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, you have to admit that Roger Clemens matters. In Jeff Pearlman’s latest book, The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality, he does his typically thorough job of cutting through the Roger Clemens mythology and getting to the heart of the man who was once considered one of the five greatest pitchers of all time. A few weeks ago Jeff was generous enough to spend part of his morning talking with me about the book, the steroid era, and a few other topics. Enjoy…

BronxBanter:  You’ve said that you love writing books, but when I spoke to you a while back while you were deep in this one, you described it as hell. How do those two things go together?

Pearlman:  The only thing I can really compare it to is running marathons. I run a lot of marathons. When I first start running a marathon, I’m really excited, and I love the first thirteen miles, and then the next four miles I sort of start feeling it, and then once you hit the twenties you start thinking, “I’m never gonna do this again. I’m neeeever doing this again.” And when you cross the finish line your first thought is, “Thank god this is over so I never have to do it again.” And then ten minutes later you’re thinking about the next marathon. And that’s how I feel about writing books. It’s nightmarish. It’s hellish. You’re solely focused — usually for a year and a half or two years — on one person, one subject, for all that time. You’re looking for these little details that seem insignificant to someone who doesn’t do it for a living, I would guess, but they become these gold nuggets for you. Finding out what someone used to drink for breakfast in the morning, silly little things like that that you think mean nothing, but they mean everything when you’re working on a book. Detail is what counts. When I was a kid I read every book imaginable, every sports book I could find, and I didn’t really differentiate between the good ones and the bad ones and the mediocre ones because I didn’t know any better. But now, when I’m reading someone else’s book, I really am looking for the details. If you’re writing a book about Reggie Jackson, everybody knows all there is to know about his three home run game in the World Series, but when you learn what sort of glasses he was wearing or where he got his hair cut or what he was saying to Mickey Rivers right before the game, that’s interesting.

BB:  How does that compare to writing feature articles? You used the marathon analogy; are these just sprints if you’re writing a piece for SI or some other magazine?

JP:  One of the best pieces of advice I got for writing a book was when I was doing my first book, which was about the Mets. Jon Wertheim, who is a friend of mine and writes for SI, said to me, the best thing you can do is think of each chapter as an article, as a lengthy article. So I would compare an article, if it’s long, to writing a chapter. And a book is just like a big monsoon.

BB:  I heard David Maraniss say once that it was much easier to write about dead people. If he was writing a biography about a living subject – and I think he was referring to his Clinton book – he would just pretend that the person was dead. Did you seek out Clemens at all, or did you pretend he was dead?

JP:  Well, I did reach out, and it was made clear he wouldn’t talk. Hence, it really was as if he was dead to me. I didn’t think of it in Maraniss’s terms, but he’s 100% right. And it’s definitely easier to write about a deceased person, because:
A. He won’t come back and say, “That’s not right.”
B. You don’t waste all that time trying to get him to talk.
C. People are more open when they know the person won’t get mad.
D. He can’t sue you for anything.

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Bronx Banter Interview

Our old pal Allen Barra sat down with me recently to talk about his new book, Yogi: Eternal Yankee.

Bronx Banter: You make the argument that Yogi was a better catcher than Johnny Bench. How close was Roy Campanella to Yogi during the Fifties? Was there any catcher even close to these two at the time?

Allen Barra: In Rio Bravo, Walter Brennan asks John Wayne if Ricky Nelson is faster than Dean Martin. “I’d hate to have to live on the difference,” says Duke. The real truth is that if you take Campanella at this peak, there’s probably very little difference between Berra, Bench and Campy. The only thing I might add to that is that it’s possible that, if given the same material to work with, Johnny and Roy could have gotten as much out of as many mediocre pitchers as well as Yogi did. But Yogi did do it, and that has to give him the edge.

BB: Did Yogi really deserve the 1954 and ‘55 MVP awards? In ‘54 the Indians won and Bobby Avila had a big year, also playing a key defensive position, and Mickey Mantle had a monstrous year. And in ’55 Mantle again had another ridiculous year.

AB: That’s a tough question. I don’t know if anyone’s done a “Value over Replacement Factor” kind of analysis for those years, but it’s arguable that Yogi might have had the highest value over anyone who could have replaced him at that position. In 1954 my guess is that the difference between Mantle and Berra wasn’t that great. Avila played a key defensive position, but not more key than Yogi’s. It probably should have been Mantle in ’55, but then I think there’s an equally good case that it probably should have been Yogi in 1950 instead of Phil Rizzuto. What’s interesting is that so many people thought that it should have been Yogi those years. I think that tells us something very important about him.

BB. Was there any year that Yogi should have won an MVP when he didn’t?

AB: Well, as I just mentioned, there was 1950. And you could turn the ’54 argument on its head and ask why Al Rosen, an Indian, wins the MVP [in 1953] when Yogi’s team won the pennant. I’m not saying Rosen didn’t deserve it, I’m just saying that if Yogi had won it, nobody would have gone to the barricades to say he didn’t deserve it, and I’d argue that he was also one of the top five players in the league in 1952. It’s more difficult to figure the value of a top-flight catcher. He did so many things to hold his pitching staffs together back then, I just don’t know if you can figure his worth compared to payers at other positions.

BB: It ‘s well known that Yogi helped Elston Howard when he joined the team but did Yogi ever question or go on the record about the Yankees’ institutional racism?

AB: No, I’m not aware that anyone in that period did. For one thing, when you talked to the players of that era, they all say, “Well, every year we heard that they were brining black players up through the minor league system, and we thought each year would be the next year.” I think there’s something to that – Gil McDougald told me something to that effect. I mean, the Yankee players were ready for it. They had no objections at all to integrating the team. It was only after a few seasons of George Weiss signing a black player for the minor league system and then trading him that they began to catch on. I’d have to say, though, that while the Yankees front office was as racist in its policies as the Boston Red Sox, the Yankees themselves got good marks from Elston and Arlene Howard and Larry Doby for their overall attitudes. Both the Howards and Doby put Yogi at the top of their list of good guys. Arlene Howard told me that Yogi and Elston “hit it off right away.”

BB. I know that walk rates were up in the Fifties and comparatively Yogi didn’t walk that much. But he was contact hitter and it’s hard to point this out as a major flaw. That said, were there any noticeable holes in his game, either offensively or in the field?

AB: No, none, and it ought to be mentioned that though Yogi didn’t walk that much, his on-base average was actually six points better than Johnny Bench’s in about the same number of games, and that’s what’s important. No, Yogi had no flaws. We all know he wasn’t much of a catcher until Bill Dickey learned him all of his experience, but by 1949 he was a very good catcher, and by 1950 the Yankee staff was pretty much relying on him to call their pitches. Or rather, he knew them well enough to call their pitches for them – did I just make some kind of Yogiism? Anyway, all that crap in David Halberstam’s The Summer of ’49 about Allie [Reynolds] and Yogi not getting along is fiction. All the Yankees told me so.

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 More voting…(S-W)

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 Here’s the voting, in alphabetical order: A-R (S-Z to follow)

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Last month I received an e-mail from Chris Illuminati, the content editor of Phillyburbs.com. He told me he was asking different people for one baseball book that they’d consider essential. I picked "No Cheering From the Press Box," Jerome Holtzman’s wonderful collection of interviews with old time sports writers, but sent Chris a list of ten essential books just for the fun of it. Shortly after the story ran I thought it’d be fun to ask a group of seamheads–historians, biographers, columnists, beat writers, screenwriters, novelists–for a list of their ten essential baseball books. Not the ten best books or even the ten most essential books just ten essential ones.

I deliberately rigged the question because there are more than just ten essential books in any self-respecting baseball libray. But I was more interested in lists that would reveal the quirks and personal tastes of each individual rather than trying to assemble an authoratative or comprehensive poll. 

The top vote getters are interesting–though not particularly surprising–and because the lists are so subjective there are no consensus selections. "Ball Four" and "The Glory of Their Times" and "The Bill James Historical Abstract" were the top picks, though some people distinctly went with the original Historical Abstract while others chose the new one.  Bill James got more votes than any individual writer followed by Roger Angell (the most common difficulty for the contributors seemed to be which Angell compilation to go with).

I heard back from 55 people via e-mail and even trooped to the far reaches of the upper east side to visit Ray Robinson and get his list (I also had some partial responses and decided not to include them). A total of 168 different books were selected.  Here are the results.  Tomorrow, I’ll post the individual ballots.

Table 1: Here are the top 15 (7 or more votes):

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