Whispers of the Gods: Tales from Baseball’s Golden Age, Told by the Men Who Played It

Americans may be without baseball this year, at least for a while, but for baseball fans out there comes this wonderful compendium of baseball stories. Peter Golenbock is a baseball writer with several baseball books under his belt and hours and hours of taped interviews with some of the great players from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s — players like Ted Williams and Phil Rizutto and Roy Campanella, whose names everyone knows, and players with names that aren’t so familiar but who also had great careers and experiences to share. There are seventeen chapters in the book representing sixteen different big leaguers telling stories about their own time in the show. Jim Bouton, who wrote a pretty good baseball book himself, has two chapters, bookending all the other stories. Each has a little introduction by Golenbock, but the rest seems to be a transcript of the tapes Golenbock made all those years ago. There are wonderful old photos of the players and those they are talking about. This will be a welcome addition to the library of any baseball fan, especially those who love the history of the game. Whispers of the Gods is definitely a home run.