By Kim J. Harmon

There are a lot of people who may think Bob Costas is just a little bit long winded. I’m one of them. But when it comes to talking about the great game of baseball, there is nobody – not Tim McCarver, not Jack Buck, not Vin Scully – who I’d rather listen to than him.

Somehow, he speaks about the game with an unabashed reverence without letting the glow of that touch most of the players in the major leagues – those who seem to do their level darndest to sully a game crafted over more than a century by such great players as Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and Mark McGwire.

If there is anything better than listening to Bob Costas talk about baseball it’s reading Bob Costas write about baseball – which he does quite eloquently in Fair Ball: A Fan’s Case For Baseball. From the perspective of a true fan who has stood on the front lines of the battle between owners and players, small market teams and large market teams, he has an intriguing and plausible solution to most of the problems facing the game today. He also provides a critique of the wild card, the designated hitter, and interleague play – all gimmicks contrived by the owners to boost fan appreciation.

Costas writes as if the game can be saved – and saved for the ordinary fans who have watched the game being taken away from them.

And while we’re on the subject of baseball, anyone who read the July 3 issue of Sports Illustrated saw an interesting article on the best baseball town in the country – St. Louis, Missouri. With that in mind, pick up The Spirit of St. Louis: A History of the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns by Peter Golenbock.

Cardinals fans will sure like it – but so will baseball fans in general, especially when Golenbock relives the glory days of Rogers Hornsby (the greatest right-handed hitter who ever lived), Stan Musial, Grover Cleveland “Pete” Alexander. From way back in 1874, when local boosters raised the $20,000 needed to start a professional ballclub, right up to Mark McGwire hitting his 70th home run in one season, St. Louis has rightfully been the best baseball town in America . . . even considering the often-horrendous St. Louis Browns team – “first in shoes, first in booze, last in the American League.”

Golenbock is a great baseball writer and touches on the lives of George Sisler (the greatest player the Browns ever had), Dizzy Dean, Frankie Frisch, Marty Marion, Enos Slaughter, Max Lanier, Johnny Mize, Tim McCarver, Bob Gibson, and the 3-foot, 7-inch Eddie Gaedel who saw one major league at-bat and was walked on four pitches.

A much more sweeping view of major league baseball, however, is taken in The Autobiography of Baseball: The Inside Story from the Stars Who Played the Game by Joseph Wallace. Players like Babe Ruth and Mike Schmidt talk about the game, about their teams, about their teammates, and about themselves in a volume that is crammed with stunning pictures.

Much of the material in this book apparently comes from interviews never published or newspaper and magazine articles which appeared in obscure publications.

And while we’re stilling talking about baseball, there is one more book that probably merits some attention – Field of Dreams: A Guide to Visiting and Enjoying All 30 Major League Ballparks by Jay Ahula.

If there is one thing baseball offers to even the non-fan is visualing stunning cathedrals of the game like Yankee Stadium, The Ballpark at Arlington, Jacobs Field, Wrigley Field and Oriole Park at Camden Yards. This book came out in 1998, before Enron Field in Houston, Comerica Park in Detroit, Safeco Field in Seattle, and Pac Bell Park in San Francisco opened but still provides a well thought out plan for visiting all the stadiums in one summer – if anyone is crazy enough to attempt a stunt like that.

Okay, enough about baseball.

For those basketball fans still numb from the excruciatingly long NBA which mercifully ended a few weeks ago (training camps are opening soon!), take another visit with the man who made the game a spectacle (rather than a farce) – For The Love of the Game: My Story by Michael Jordan.

It’s not about the NBA as a whole. It’s about Mike – the 10 scoring titles, the five Most Valuable Player Awards, the 29,277 points, the aura that made him the most recognized and greatest athlete of the 20th century.

Even a New York Knicks fan – like myself – can enjoy this.

And now for a book I won’t allow in my house – The Rock Says by The Rock. I wish there was a study that would conclusively say that everything wrong with America and the youth of today is the fault of professional wrestling, but until there is I will have to be content just knowing it in my heart. I’ve seen this, I’ve read some of it, and I can honestly say its miserable stuff – but wrestling fans, and fans of The Rock, will love it! Not exactly a book for reading at the beach (more like a dark closet, with a flashlight), but for anyone who wanted to know what it was like growing up and becoming The Rock, then this here book is it.

Gad.

A much more interesting book would be Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter by James S. Hirsch. On the book jacket, it says, “On June 17, 1966, two black men strode into the Lafayette Grill, a white redoubt in racially mixed Paterson, New Jersey, and shot three people to death. Rubin Carter and his young acquaintance John Artis were not those men, but they were convicted of the murders in a highly publicized and racially charged trial.”

Carter became a folk hero, leading Bob Dylan to write his famous song. The movie, Hurricane, apparently takes some liberties with the truth and with known factual information, but the book seems to tell it like it was – right from the eyes of the Hurricane.

Charles Kaiser of The New York Times Book Review writes, “Anyone curious about the persistence of Carter’s notoriety – or the accuracy of the movie – will find all the answers in Hurricane, an exhaustive biography by the journalist James S. Hirsch. Although this is an authorized work, Hirsch says that ‘the interpretations and conclusions are my own.’  That the book wasn’t censored is believable – Hirsch never makes his subject into the unblemished Hollywood hero portrayed by Washington . . . [a] nearly biblical tale of persecution, punishment and redemption.

Sounds good, eh?

Now, I can’t see how it would be possible, but if there is anyone – anyone – around these parts who would want to read about the Philadelphia Eagles then that person (if there are two, then the two of you can probably share it) can pick up Bringing the Heat by Mark Bowden. I have always had a special place in my vault of Bad Memories for the Eagles, ever since The Fumble, but this book goes back to 1992 and a day-by-day perspective of a team looking to take a run at the National Football League championship.

This is back when Buddy Ryan was a lovable lunatic and Randall Cunningham was a quarterback with an unholy ability to beat the New York Giants.

Be my guest. I’ll stick with the autobiography of Joe Pisarcik.

Now, the Iditarod is the sled dog race that captures most of the attention of adventurists around here (of which there are a few), but author John Balzer would have us draw our attention to the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race, one of the most dangerous organized sporting events in the world, in his book Yukon Alone: The World’s Toughest Adventure Race.

Over more than 1,000 miles of frozen rivers, icy mountain passes and spruce forests as big as entire states – with only seven hours of daylight at a time and temperatures at 40 below zero – the Yukon Quest certainly gets my vote for the one thing I would never try.

But Balzar moved to Alaska to find out why anyone would. Jack London took a fictional look at the north country, but Balzar gives us a first-hand account – somehow jotting his notes down before the ink in his pen froze.

Jon Krakauer went to the top of Mount Everest to figure out why so many people wanted to climb to the top of Mount Everest in Into Thin Air, one of the most riveting non-fiction books I have ever read. Now Reinhold Messner climbs the Himalayas looking for the one thing anyone who climbs the Himalayas is looking for in My Quest for the Yeti: The World’s Greatest Mountain Climber Confronts the Himalayas’ Deepest Mysteries.

This book is translated by Peter Constantine (and not because Messner was eaten by Yeti).

Messner (an expert on the Himalayas) was apparently the first to reach the top of Mount Everest without the use of oxygen (and if you read Into Thin Air, you will see how unfathomable that is) and if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, he went searching for the Yeti in 1986.

According to the publisher, “ . . . during a solo climb in eastern Tibet, Messner confronted the greatest terror of his career – not a looming rockface or bottomless ice crevasse or murderous blizzaard; this terror was alive. A creature had crossed his path, a creature of such proportions and agility that it defied reason and category. For the next few hours Messner saw it repeatedly, disappearing, reappearing, both chilling his marrow and thrilling him with the sudden yet burning conviction that he had found living proof of a legend.”

Messner himself writes, “the creature towered menacingly, its face a gray shadow, its body a black outline. Covered with hair, it stood upright on two short legs and had powerful arms.”

For anyone who has been fascinating with the tales of the abominable snowman, the Sasquatch, the Jersey Devil, the Loch Ness Monster or any of the other creatures of legend should get a thrill from this one.

Thrills of a more mundane nature may be found in Muhammed Ali’s Greatest Fight: Cassius Clay versus The United States of America by Howard Bingham, Max Wallace and Muhammed Ali. The guy who can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee was going to get swatted in 1966 by refusing induction in the Army as a conscientious objector.

That led to a five-year battle in which he lost his heavyweight title, was barred from boxing, and nearly got dropped in prison.

Get an inside look at Ali’s refusal and the legal maneuvering – all set against the backdrop of some pretty turbulent times.

The Library Journal said, “One cannot deny Ali’s influence on his times, though. And neither can one deny that, whatever his motives for refusing military service, he paid a great price by being banned from boxing for three and a half years during his prime. While not The Greatest, as its subject proclaimed himself, Bingham’s book deserves a place in the sports collections of most public libraries.”

A battle of a different kind was undertaken by Michael D’Antonio, a reporter with a penchant for golf who follows the life of Esteban Toledo, an unlikely player trying to make it on the PGA Tour – and writes bout it in Tin Cup Dreams: A Long Shot Makes It on the PGA Tour.

Starting at Q School, D’Antonio follows Toledo’s struggle to reach the big time. Publisher’s Weekly says, “The premise is simple and not unfamiliar: a writer attends the PGA’s qualifying tournament, or Q. School, and latches on to one of the winners, whom he then follows around for a season on the tour. The resulting chronicle would have been a disaster had the player, like so many Q. School graduates, not made the cut on the tour; D’Antonio lucked out in finding Esteban Toledo, a self-taught Mexican grinder who just wants to earn enough to keep his Tour card for another year and for whom a Tour victory would represent not fame and fortune but the final step away from his dirt-poor origins in Mexicali, where his family ‘never had money for [Christmas] presents or a tree, or a feast.’ ”

Those who find televised golf boring may find literary golf even more boring, but people who like rags to riches stories would like this one. But – for God’s sake – you have to like golf. Otherwise, don’t bother.

You probably won’t have to be a big basketball fan – just a big Kareem Abdul-Jabbar fan – to read A Season on the Reservation: My Sojourn with the White Mountain Apache by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Stephen Singular.

According to the publisher, “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has always been fascinated by history -nineteenth-century American history in particular. Tired of Los Angeles., restless and looking for new adventure, challenge, and discovery, he decides to go live among the Apaches he’s read about. He encounters a complex reality. The kids on the Alchesay Falcons (basketball) team don’t easily embrace what he’s trying to teach them on the court. Gradually they begin to learn from him as he begins to learn from them. He teaches them to push out of their comfort zone and try new things, both in sports and in life. They give him something he didn’t quite expect: a way to reconnect with his passion for basketball.”

Finally, there must be women’s hockey fans out there somewhere and those that are out there can harken back to the Winter Olympics when the United States women’s ice hockey team (not very surprisingly) won the Gold Medal. Read Crashing the Net: The U.S. Women’s Olympic Ice Hockey Team and the Road to the Gold (Volume 1).

Inspirational for female athletes (and, heck, sports fans of all kinds) read about the United States’ pummeling of the competition and bringing home the first women’s ice hockey gold. The only fun I got out of the Olympic games that winter, truthfully, was seeing AJ Mleczko of Nantucket, Massachusetts, skating around on the ice. I remember writing about her when she was skating for The Taft School girls’ hockey team up there in Watertown.

And, finally, for the young sports fan - or for the father who wants to read to his young sports fan - there is Honus &_Me or Jackie &_Me by Dan Gutman. A boy with the power to travel back in time just by rubbing a baseball card gets to meet some of the greatest baseball players the country has ever known. He also gets a taste of the problems and issues of the time - especially Jackie Robinson’s attempt to break into a game  that had been closed off to black people for nearly a century.

Honus &_Me is a little bit better than Jackie &_Me_because the kid’s gift of traveling back in time is new in the first book, so there is a level of amazement there. In Jackie &_Me the ability to travel back in time is rendered ho-hum.

But whereas Honus &_Me is really, really cool, Jackie &_Me is also a bit more emotional and challenging.

Take your pick.

So, here is stuff you can read in the next seven-and-a-half weeks of summer. Have fun.