Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams
Author: John Updike
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010-04-29
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1598530712

On September 28, 1960—a day that will live forever in the hearts of fans—Red Sox slugger Ted Williams stepped up to the plate for his last at-bat in Fenway Park. Seizing the occasion, he belted a solo home run—a storybook ending to a storied career. In the stands that afternoon was twenty-eight-year-old John Updike, inspired by the moment to make his lone venture into the field of sports reporting. More than just a matchless account of that fabled final game, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu is a brilliant evocation of Williams’ entire tumultuous life in baseball. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of the dramatic exit of baseball’s greatest hitter, The Library of America presents a commemorative edition of Hub Fans, prepared by the author just months before his death. To the classic final version of the essay, long out-of-print, Updike added an autobiographical preface and a substantial new afterword.

The Kid

The Kid
Author: Ben Bradlee Jr.
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 804
Release: 2013-12-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0316084484

From acclaimed journalist Ben Bradlee Jr. comes the epic biography of Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams that baseball fans have been waiting for. Williams was the best hitter in baseball history. His batting average of .406 in 1941 has not been topped since, and no player who has hit more than 500 home runs has a higher career batting average. Those totals would have been even higher if Williams had not left baseball for nearly five years in the prime of his career to serve as a Marine pilot in WWII and Korea. He hit home runs farther than any player before him -- and traveled a long way himself, as Ben Bradlee, Jr.'s grand biography reveals. Born in 1918 in San Diego, Ted would spend most of his life disguising his Mexican heritage. During his 22 years with the Boston Red Sox, Williams electrified crowds across America -- and shocked them, too: His notorious clashes with the press and fans threatened his reputation. Yet while he was a God in the batter's box, he was profoundly human once he stepped away from the plate. His ferocity came to define his troubled domestic life. While baseball might have been straightforward for Ted Williams, life was not. The Kid is biography of the highest literary order, a thrilling and honest account of a legend in all his glory and human complexity. In his final at-bat, Williams hit a home run. Bradlee's marvelous book clears the fences, too.

Assorted Prose

Assorted Prose
Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-09-18
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0679645837

John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits of Updike’s boyish ambition to follow in the footsteps of Thurber and White. These jeux d’esprit are followed by “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” an immortal account of Ted Williams’s last at-bat in Fenway Park; “The Dogwood Tree,” a Wordsworthian evocation of one Pennsylvania childhood; and five autobiographical essays and stories. Rounding out the volume are classic considerations of Nabokov, Salinger, Spark, Beckett, and others, the earliest efforts of the book reviewer who would go on to become, in The New York Times’s estimation, “the pre-eminent critic of his generation.” Updike called this collection “motley but not unshapely.” Some would call it a classic of its kind.

These Few Precious Days

These Few Precious Days
Author: Christopher Andersen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2013
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476732337

An account of Jack and Jackie Kennedy's final year together reveals details of their complex marriage, including rumored infidelities, the president's hidden medical problems, and the tragic death of their infant son.

Joe DiMaggio

Joe DiMaggio
Author: Richard Ben Cramer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2001-09-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0684865475

This is the life story of Joe DiMaggio, including his first game with the New York Yankees in the 1930s, his marriage to Marilyn Monroe & his rise to hero status. Richard Ben Cramer tells of the ways in which fame can both build & destroy.

Our Boston

Our Boston
Author: Andrew Blauner
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 0544263804

An anthology of essays about Boston and what it means to the contributors, including Susan Orlean, Kevin Cullen, Mike Barnicle, Pico Iyer, and many more.

Our House

Our House
Author: Curt Smith
Publisher: Contemporary Books
Total Pages: 362
Release: 1999
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9780809226641

Relates the history of the Red Sox and their home, Fenway Park.

Antwerp

Antwerp
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2024-09-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 125089817X

“It’s hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño . . . [Antwerp is] exceptional and moving.” —Nicole Krauss, The Guardian Oft called the “big bang” of Roberto Bolaño’s universe, Antwerp is his first novel—or the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely strange and solitary that he tucked it away for more than twenty years, certain that any publisher would slam the door in his face. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a lonely highway, a desolate campground, a freshly abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere just out of reach, a young, feverish writer named Roberto Bolaño drifting in and out of view. A radical, sui generis effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño’s oeuvre.

My Turn at Bat

My Turn at Bat
Author: Ted Williams
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1988-03-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0671634232

Ted Williams tells of his childhood, his military experience, and his baseball career.