Special to Behind the Bombers From Harvey Frommer

HARVEY

FROMMER
"More Sporting Reads"

FANTASYLAND and other Sporting Reads
SPORTS BOOK REVIEW

By Harvey Frommer

Funny. Insightful. Maniacal! A vivid journey, A fantasy trip!

"Fantasyland" by Sam Walker (Viking, $25.95, 353 pages) is all of the above and more. It is a book that plumbs the colorful history of fantasy baseball from its

beginnings in 1960 by a Harvard proof through its rise to being big business with $1 billion in yearly expenditures and more than 15 million United States participants. If you want a terrific read, if you want to have a truly heightened awareness of what fantasy baseball is and does - grab this mind boggling to me.

Two books in the same mold are "Sports Off-Center" by Ken Widmann and Dan Appel (Three Rivers Press, $14.95, 192 pages) and "Shanks for Nothing" by Rick Reilly (Doubleday, $24.95, 253 pages). The former is aimed at lampooning and also celebrating our sports obsessed culture. The latter is a hilarious and irreverent look at the world of golf and characters who are part of its landscape.

HIGH NOTABLE: Mike Lupica has done it again. "Heat" (Philomel Books, Penguin Young Readers Group, $16.99, 324 pages) is a riveting read for ages 10 and up.

It is all about Michael Arroyo, Cuban born, Bronx residing, lover of the New York Yankees and his team's opportunity to get to the Little League World Series lots of fabulous reading here.

FOR YOUNGER READERS: "The Outside Groove" By Erik E. Esckilsen (Houghton Mifflin, $16.00, 258 pages) features Casey LaPlante who reluctantly gets behind the wheel of a stock car and learns what it is like to be the first female driver at Demon's Run racetrack. A heck of a read!

Still Chasing Bonds and Other Sports Reads - June 8, 2006

If there are still those among you who have not yet had your fill of the Giants slugger after his aborted ESPN show, multiple reams of copy about him in newspapers and magazines and an Internet explosion of data, gossip, editorializing about this most unpleasant of men - there is now for your consumption two books for the purchasing on Barry Bonds.

"Love Me, Hate Me" by Jeff Pearlman (HarperCollins, $25.95, 365 pages) is an overstuffed Bonds fest with over 500 interviews used to give heft to this no holds barred profile of Barry Bonds, the man we know too much about. The book makes for good reading.

By Mark Fainaru - Wada and Lance Williams, San Francisco Chronicle reporters.

"Game of Shadows" (Gotham Books, $26.00, 332 pages) is a more focused tome as it has in its sightlines Bonds, Balco and Steroids.

Part detective story, part investigative reporting, part excessive rehashing of newspaper clips, "Game of Shadows " does put the very overexposed Mr. Bonds in the most compromising of positions. There is a lot to digest here.

In the completely revised and updated second edition of "The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball" by David Nemic (University of Alabama Press, $69.95, 1.056 pages) has complete player rosters for every team 1871-1900, an extensive alphabetical roster for every player, manager and umpire in that century.

If you're into that era - or into baseball history - go for that one.

"Hammerin Hank" by Mark Stewart and Mike Kennedy (Lyons Press, $22.95, 252

pages) is subtitled "How the Media made Henry Aaron" and the tome is a very interesting read as it attempts to answer the question - who was Hank Aaron? – a sleepy slugger a Civil Rights activist or the sports hero of the 1970s packaged and primed to be consumed by the public?

Stewart and Kennedy have the right stuff here.

Harvey Frommer is now in his 32nd consecutive year of writing sports books. He is the author of 38 sports books, including the classics: "New York City Baseball," "Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball," "Rickey and Robinson," "A Yankee Century," and Red Sox Vs. Yankees: The Great Rivalry" (with Frederic J. Frommer). His newest efforts are OLD TIME BASEBALL and WHERE HAVE ALL THE RED SOX GONE?
He is now at work on the definitive book on the 1927 Yankees to be published in 2007.

Frommer sports books are available direct from the author - discounted and autographed.

FROMMER SPORTSNET (syndicated) reaches a readership in excess of 750,000 and appears on Internet search engines for extended periods of time.

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