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Tim Hornbaker is a lifelong sports historian and enthusiast. His books Turning the Black Sox White: The Misunderstood Legacy of Charles A. Comiskey and War on the Basepaths: The Definitive Biography of Ty Cobb were received with critical acclaim.

Werken van Tim Hornbaker

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male
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USA

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If you're thinking about reading this book solely based on the title, you should just read the forward. Within three pages, Bob Hoie blows the whole story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox to hell and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Charles Comiskey wasn't quite the miserly figure he seems to be in Eight Men Out.

The rest is a straightforward biography, and to be honest, there isn't much to it. The writing is very similar to that in Warren Brown's [b:The Chicago White Sox|758359|The Chicago White Sox|Warren Brown|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348948952s/758359.jpg|744470], and the subject matter is hardly different either. Hundreds of players come and go, streaks of wins and losses stress out Comiskey, and eventually everybody dies. What a narrative.

While I'm glad the book exists, I'm struggling to appreciate it fully. The fact is that anyone interested enough in the subject matter of the book to read the entire thing will probably already know most of the details within. If you already know about Chris von der Ahe, Frank Isbell, Harry Grabiner, and both Tip O'Neill's, you don't need to read much of this, but if you don't know who they are, good luck keeping up.

It's all important information, but it's just not as compelling as it should be.
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bgramman | 1 andere bespreking | May 9, 2020 |
I have been a pro wrestling fan for almost 60 years. I remember Buddy Rogers, Bruno Sammartino, The Kangaroos, Bobo Brazil and many other Old-time wrestlers. I remember watching Florida Championship Wrestling with Gordon Solie in black and white when I was in college. I have been fascinated by the entertainment that pro wrestling has provided and have always been interested in knowing more about the business side of it.

Hornbaker takes me back to the AWA, NWA, Mid-South and other regional federations and how they tried to fend off the national ambitions of the WWF and Vince McMahon.

My sense is that this book is fine for readers who are long time pro wrestling fans. I think many other readers would be confused without knowing more about the history of the federations and the personalities of the wrestling federation owners and the wrestlers.
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writemoves | 2 andere besprekingen | Jun 17, 2019 |
Ty Cobb may or may not be baseball's greatest player, but he's probably the most written about. Thus, any new biography has to pass a 'why' test, especially since Chas. Alexander's biography is justly regarded as one of the great baseball biographies. And so I was not reassured by the author's introductory statement that he was going to get back at all the Cobb haters who had been dominating the writing of his biography; I'm no Cobb hater, but I've read my share on him, and most of his biographers seem to me to be quite objective. And so I set into Hornbaker's account and found a well-planned account which boasts a lot of research, a happy reliance on contemporary sportswriters to help tell the story, and just the right amount of game narratives.

This book ultimately fails, though, because of the author's poor prose. It is poorly written, and if it was proofread at all, it was poorly proofread. The author's ramshackle syntax would do no credit to a seventh-grader, he makes crazy, primary-school-level grammatical errors (it even seems a struggle for him to get verb tenses right), he seems never to have learned the value of the word 'of', and his adverb- and adjective-heavy meanderings are spiced by a pretentious vocabulary with which, like a kid with a new thesaurus, he usually manages to toss off a five-dollar word and get the shading of meaning exactly wrong for the point he is trying to make. Read aloud, it truly sounds like the work of one of the old double-talk comedians like Al Kelly or Norm Crosby., and Pepe LePew comes to mind as well. As told here, Cobb's story is as fascinating as ever, but, though it has its occasional merits, it's difficult to recommend this book when there are many superior biographies of Cobb.
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½
 
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Big_Bang_Gorilla | 1 andere bespreking | Jan 11, 2019 |

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Statistieken

Werken
9
Leden
187
Populariteit
#116,277
Waardering
½ 3.5
Besprekingen
7
ISBNs
30

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