Baseball: An Astrological Sightline

For those of you who have seriously missed baseball during the pandemic, my friend César Love has an unusual and intriguing book--Baseball: An Astrological Sightline. Not your average account of the sport, this is an examination of baseball's magical quality, its spiritual aspect. Baseball: An Astrological Sightline uses astrology to demonstrate the transcendental nature of the game, showing how the stars and planets "affect the course of every baseball season and every baseball game." If you've wondered why the Cubs seem accursed or why the Mets were miraculous in 1969 Mets, César offers answers with astrology as a lens.

Love baseball but don't believe in astrology? You still might find this an interesting book. César, a poet and journalist as well as an astrologer, is a serious baseball fan, so there's lots of baseball lore here. As Kim Shuck, Poet Laureate of San Francisco and author of Deer Trails and Smuggling Cherokee, notes, "César Love takes a very fresh view of the histories of the various baseball teams. Poetic, beautifully written and researched, this book is a great read for baseball fans, historians and those interested in astrology. An absolutely unique piece of writing."

The Fastest Game in the World

Bruce Berglund is best known to me as a historian of early Czechoslovakia--we met through Fulbright and both work on the interwar period. We have some other things in common too, like Minnesota origins. Bruce's latest book goes in a direction that gets to those northern roots--hockey and its history! In The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports, which is just out from University of California Press, Bruce looks at how hockey spread across the world and how games connect with politics, economics, and culture. You can read more about it here and order a copy in either hardback or paperback.