CANR
WORK TITLE: WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: www.joeposnanski.com
CITY: Charlotte
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 309
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 8, 1967, in Cleveland, OH; married Margo Keller, 1998; children: Elizabeth, Katie.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Columnist and writer. Kansas City Star, Kansas City, MO, sports columnist, 1996-2009; Sports Illustrated, senior writer, 2009-12; Sports On Earth, founder, 2013; NBC Sports, national columnist, 2013—. Previously a columnist in Charlotte, NC, Cincinnati, OH, and Augusta, GA.
AWARDS:Columnist of the Year Award (twice), First Place Feature Writing Award, and First Place Project Writing Award, all from Associated Press Sports Editors; named best sportswriter, Blogs with Balls 4 Conference; named national sportswriter of the year, National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame; Baseball Bloggers Alliance named its writer of the year award after Posnanski.
WRITINGS
Wrote the film Generations of the Game for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Work has been anthologized in The Best American Sportswriting series. Contributor to Esquire, College Football Encyclopedia, NBC Sports, The Athletic, and MLB.com. Also writes at JoeBlogs, his Substack newsletter.
SIDELIGHTS
In his book The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip through Buck O’Neil’s America, sports columnist and longtime baseball fan Joe Posnanski tells of a road trip he took with legendary Negro League baseball player Buck O’Neil to Kansas City, where O’Neil played for the Kansas City Monarchs, and then on to New York and Minneapolis to appear at Buck O’Neil Day. Along the way, O’Neil, who died at the age of ninety-four in 2006, reminisces about his days as a player and his efforts to try to get Negro League baseball players into major league baseball’s National Baseball Hall of Fame. Posnanski also writes of O’Neil’s life, his powerful charisma and optimism, and his own desire to be in the Hall of Fame. However, O’Neil fell shy by one vote of being elected to the prestigious sports honor before his death. “Once I had taken the road trip with Buck and sat down to write the book, I knew I had a lot of great stories,” Posnanski told Alex Beth for an interview on the Bronx Banter Web site. “There was never any doubt about that.”
In a review in Booklist, David Pitt wrote: “For baseball fans, the book is a treasure trove of history.” He added that he found the book “stirring, moving, and more than a little sad.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor referred to The Soul of Baseball as “a worthy paean to an American legend.”
The Machine
Posnanski covers the 1975 baseball season of the world champion Cincinnati Reds in his 2009 book, The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-Stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds. The Reds dominated baseball from 1972 to 1976, but the 1975 season is considered legendary—even one of the best of all time—by many baseball aficionados. Posnanski sets the season in the context of world and national events in each chapter. Much of his source material came from the four Spink Award (sportswriting) winners who covered the team for various newspapers—Hal McCoy, Ritter Collett, Si Burick, and Earl Lawson, as well as Tom Callahan of the Cincinnati Enquirer. High praise for Posnanski is expressed by Pat Abdalla in his review on the Southpaw Web site. Abdalla stated: “He’s quietly usurped the mantel from Tom Boswell. … He can tell a story. He understands the value in traditional stats and can explain the modern ones with ease. He’s as good a reporter as there is, with the ability to break news and cultivate reliable sources.”
Posnanski “rides the hero quartet [Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Joe Morgan] heavily throughout The Machine, ” stated James Bailey in a review for the Web site Hardball Cooperative. Bailey continued: “While we learn a lot about those four, it would have been nice to go further in-depth with guys like [George] Foster, who was blossoming into a superstar in his own right.” Despite this, Bailey reported that “anyone who followed baseball in the 1970s should enjoy this book. Reds fans, who haven’t had a lot to cheer consistently since the heyday of the Big Red Machine, are going to want to read it more than once.” In Xpress Reviews, Paul Kaplan remarked that The Machine “works so much better than many of the ‘as told to’ baseball books we get.”
Paterno and The Secret of Golf
Following The Machine, Posnanski wrote Paterno and The Secret of Golf: The Story of Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus. The former volume offers a biography and defense of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who was accused of failing to report his fellow coach Jerry Sandusky for molesting children. The latter volume offers a more straightforward, and far less controversial, sports history. The Secret of Golf focuses on the careers of golf greats Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus. The volume centers on Watson’s career, but since Watson and Nicklaus were friendly rivals, Posnanski details their career intersections and interactions. For instance, the pair faced off at the 1977 British Open, where Watson won by a single stroke, beating Nicklaus’s score of sixty-six. The author goes on to comment on Watson’s loss at the 2009 British Open, where he lost on the eighteenth hole. According to Posnanski, Nicklaus, who was watching the game on television, cried when he saw his old friend’s defeat. Ultimately, by discussing the accomplishments and competitions between Watson and Nicklaus, the author offers insights into the finer points of golf.
Commenting on his inspiration for the book in a Stay Thirsty Web site interview, Posnanski explained: “I don’t know that I had any specific expectations, but I’ve always thought that golf is a perfect little microcosm of that lifelong pursuit of excellence. I’m fascinated by the idea of how people become great at things—how they become great poets or great magicians or great violinists or great surgeons. The answer, I’ve come to believe, is a combination of the interesting (inspiration, obsession, passion, talent) and the utterly mundane (repetitive practice). Every awe-inspiring magic trick you’ve ever seen required countless hours of mind-numbing preparation. So it goes with golf.” He added: “So with Watson and Nicklaus—particularly Watson as he’s the heart of the book—I wanted to try and get behind what drives someone to become the best in the world. I wanted to try and understand what kept them on the golf course practicing when it was 100-plus degrees outside and nobody else was around. I wanted to try and understand why they kept wanting to get better even after achieving what most people would call success. Watson talks often about The Secret—that’s the inspiration for the title—so I wanted to know what The Secret really means.”
Praising the author’s efforts in Publishers Weekly, a critic noted that The Secret of Golf “demonstrates the ups and down of life and sport to create a work that will resonate with avid golfers and sports fans.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor found that “Posnanski is at his best when narrating events, at his weakest when waxing philosophical. Occasionally, he clutches at cliche.” Steven Silkunas, writing in Library Journal, was more positive, and he advised that “the instruction offered here is well phrased, though serious golfers have probably already heard this message.” Booklist correspondent Bill Ott offered a similar assessment, asserting that The Secret of Golf provides “familiar material for golf fans but given new life through a moving retelling.” Washington Times Online columnist Michael Taube presented more glowing applause, finding that Posnanski “writes with passion about this great game that has produced many legends. … His beautifully written book also explores the deep-rooted love and admiration Mr. Watson and Mr. Nicklaus have for golf.” Taube went on to conclude that “Posnanski’s wonderful prose about this great golfing rivalry and friendship makes his book a joy to read. It also makes you wish that Mr. Watson and Mr. Nicklaus could do it all over again.”
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The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini
Posnanski turned away from sports but not the topic of entertainment personalities with his next book, The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini. The book is both a biography and an exploration of why Houdini continues to fascinate people almost a century after his death. The latter involves Posnanski writing about people who were inspired by Houdini, such as the girl who ran away from home and eventually became the first female magician to saw a person in half on television. Posnanski also interviews experts and modern-day disciples of Houdini to try to understand the impact this particular magician has had.
Writing for TLS: Times Literary Supplement, Eric J. Iannelli described Posnanski’s book as a “casual, idiosyncratic effort to sift through the jumbled mass of Houdiniana and separate the more established fact from the more persistent fiction.” Iannelli noted that Posnanski is a fan of the fiction and described the book as a “romanticization of tall tales and folklore as entertainment.” He called Posnanski’s writing “the swift, comma-spliced prose of magazine articles.” Alice Cary, writing for BookPage, was more generous, calling the prose “wonderfully entertaining” and the book itself an “up-and-close personal tour of the escape artist’s life.” For Cary, the result is “pure magic.”
“Entertaining and brimming with wonder” is how the writer for Kirkus Reviews described the book in their review. They called it a “jaunty and infectious biography.” The review in Publishers Weekly was more mixed, acknowledging that part of the book is an “entertaining study on the power of a charismatic personality.” It bemoaned, however, the profiles of other magicians, saying that they “often drag.”
The Baseball 100
Posnanski returned to more familiar ground with his door-stop overview of baseball history, The Baseball 100. Coming in at almost 900 pages, the book combines a history of baseball with Posnanski’s ranking of who he believes are the one hundred greatest baseball players. That discussion includes profiles of each player and how they fit into baseball’s rich legacy. Posnanski pointedly does not overlook the Negro Leagues, giving those often-overlooked stars their due. The book is also a celebration of the game itself and why it has captivated America for well over a century.
The writer for Kirkus Reviews called the book “red meat” for baseball fans, especially those who have “an appreciation for the past and power of the game.” The reviewer noted that Posnanski focuses on certain themes, such as the importance of fathers, and the writer praised Posnanski for how he “skillfully weaves statistics into the narrative without spilling into geekdom.” The reviewer for Library Journal agreed, calling the book a “thought-provoking volume” and “a must-have for baseball fans.” They were particularly taken with Posnanski’s “poetic, inspired, and entertaining writing.” Alan Moores, in Booklist, echoed the other reviews, calling the book “manna for baseball geeks.”
Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments
Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments continues Posnanski’s emphasis on ranking “America’s pastime.” This time he counts down the fifty greatest moments in the history of baseball, including such iconic examples as Babe Ruth’s called homer, Willie Mays’s over-the-shoulder catch, and Kirk Gibson’s limping home run off of one of the greatest closers ever. Baseball fans will already know many of these, but Posnanski brings them to life and adds some less-familiar ones. “A book for any baseball fan to cherish” is how the writer for Kirkus Reviews described it. They particularly appreciated that Posnanski occasionally highlights mediocre players who had one crowning achievement.
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2007, David Pitt, review of The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip through Buck O’Neil’s America, p. 24; September 15, 2009, Alan Moores, review of The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-Stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, p. 17; June 1, 2015, Bill Ott, review of The Secret of Golf: The Story of Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus, p. 22; September 1, 2021, Alan Moores, review of The Baseball 100, p. 29.
BookPage, November, 2019, Alice Cary, review of The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, p. 33.
Denver Post, August 22, 2012, review of Paterno, p. 2.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2007, review of The Soul of Baseball, p. 65; September 15, 2012, review of Paterno; May 1, 2015, review of The Secret of Golf; September 1, 2019, review of The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini; November 15, 2021, review of The Baseball 100; June 15, 2023, review of Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments.
Library Journal, June 1, 2015, Steven Silkunas, review of The Secret of Golf, p. 108; December, 2021, review of The Baseball 100, pp. 106+.
Philadelphia Inquirer, September 7, 2012, review of Paterno.
Publishers Weekly, January 29, 2007, review of The Soul of Baseball, p. 54; May 11, 2015, review of The Secret of Golf, p. 52; August 12, 2019, review of The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, p. 54.
TLS: Times Literary Supplement, February 28, 2020, Eric J. Iannelli, “The Real Life of a Man Whose Name is Synonymous with Impish Escape,” review of The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, p. 7.
Xpress Reviews, December 25, 2009, Paul Kaplan, review of The Machine.
ONLINE
Amazon, https://www.amazon.com (July 25, 2023), author interview.
Baseball Analysts, http://baseballanalysts.com/ (February 1, 2005), Rich Lederer, “Poz: An Interview with a Kansas City Star.”
Bronx Banter, http://bronxbanter.baseballtoaster.com/ (March 8, 2007), Alex Beth, “Bronx Banter Interview: Joe Posnanski.”
ESPN Web site, http://espn.go.com/ (September 15, 2009), Rob Never, review of The Machine.
Hardball Cooperative, http://www.hardballcooperative.com/ (September 8, 2009), James Bailey, review of The Machine.
JoeBlogs, https://joeposnanski.substack.com (July 25, 2023), author website.
Joe Posnanski Home Page, http://www.joeposnanski.com (March 16, 2016).
Kansas City Star Web site, http://www.kansascity.com/ (August 26, 2007), brief profile of author.
Southpaw, http://www.yorkblog.com/ (April 10, 2010), Pat Abdalla, review of The Machine.
Stay Thirsty, http://www.staythirstymedia.com/ (March 16, 2016), author interview.
Wall Street Journal Online, http://online.wsj.com/ (December 20, 2010), Adam Najberg, review of The Machine.
Washington Times Online, http://www.washingtontimes.com/ (September 8, 2015), Michael Taube, review of The Secret of Golf.*
Joe Posnanski
I am entirely unsure how I got to live the life I’m living.
OK, so here’s some of the fun stuff I do.
I write a lot at JoeBlogs, my Substack newsletter.
I also write for Esquire.
My seventh book, WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL, will be coming out on September 5, published by Dutton Books.
I co-host The PosCast with my friend Michael Schur.
I wrote the movie Generations of the Game, with my friend Jonathan Hock. You can see that at the Baseball Hall of Fame
I helped my friend Dan McGinn found Honoring America, a non-profit group dedicated to bringing people together and pumping joy into the world.
And, as you can see on the right, I get to hang out with cool people like Dwier Brown, who played Kevin Costner’s father in Field of Dreams. We are standing at the Field of Dreams for the photograph.
I live in Charlotte with my wife Margo. We have two daughters, Elizabeth and Katie, and we have one poodle, Wesley.
To the left is an autographed baseball I received from three-time All-Star reliever Jim Kern. When I was maybe 8 or 9, I got an autograph from Kern, but it was in pencil and I could not find it later.
I wrote about this, and Kern found out and sent me an autographed baseball. On it he wrote: “To Joe. Quit Whining!”
Westley ate this baseball, as you can see. I wait in the hopes that Jim Kern will someday send me another one.
Hi. I’m Joe. I’m a writer. This is JoeBlogs. It’s free!
Those words, “I’m a writer,” feel a bit boastful to me, even after 30-plus years of writing for a living. But I guess there’s really no denying it at this point. I’ve written six books — the last a 2.7-pound beast (and surprise New York Times Bestseller!) called The Baseball 100 — and millions of other words in places like Sports Illustrated, The Kansas City Star, NBC Sports, The Athletic, etc. And you should see some of the texts I write.
The other two words — “It’s free” — has been rated “mostly true” by various truth-o-meters. There is a paid option to get everything I write. I hope you will want that. But signing up is absolutely free, and I write free posts all the time. You can sign up right here!
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I do some other things besides write. You might have seen or heard me on any number of talk shows. I have consulted on some movies and TV shows. I have co-created various projects designed simply to make the world a better place such as Tip Your Cap, First Woman Voter and Honor Your Hometown — combined those three have topped more than a billion media and social media impressions.
And I also co-host The PosCast, a podcast where Michael Schur — a comedy writer and showrunner who you probably know as “Mose” from The Office — and I mostly argue about fruit pie and lament the Yankees’ inevitability.
Here’s a photo of Mike and me and some other guy named Nick or something at Wrigley Field.
JoeBlogs is basically an open door into my mind.
Everything spills out here, most of it revolving around baseball, but there’s also some football stuff, some tennis stuff, some golf stuff, basketball, music, travel, movies, Olympics, Buck O’Neil memories, infomercials, family, complaints about people backing into parking spots, science, hockey, chess, magic, Billy Joel loathing, soccer, pretty much anything and everything except politics, which we try to avoid even if not everybody believes that.
What I can promise you are words. Lots of words. I do tend to go overboard on words — such as the 60,000-or-so word baseball preview I did leading into the 2022 season. As I write this About section, I’m hard at work on my next big project “Ten Who Missed,” a companion to The Baseball 100, which will feature, yes, ten players who just missed.
There is a free version and a paid version of JoeBlogs. Both contain lots of words, though perhaps some of the better words are in the paid version. Well, ain’t that America. I’d be appreciative if you signed up and doubly appreciative if you bought a paid subscription and helped me put two daughters through college.
Here again, is an easy button to subscribe.
A Q&A with author Joe Posnanski
Can you talk a little bit about how this project came about? For almost a decade, I’d been thinking about the ultimate baseball project, something that would allow me to tell the story of baseball and why it has had such a powerful hold on me and my life. On a different track, I started a countdown of the 100 greatest players, then started another countdown of the 100 greatest players. And then it hit me: Both of these projects — telling baseball’s story and counting down the 100 greatest players — are really the same project, and that’s what led to The Baseball 100.
Have any of your picks or rankings proven controversial to readers? I would say only 99 of the 100 have been controversial. Everybody disagrees about which players are on this list, which players are not on this list, where the players are ranked. But that’s why it’s fun, right?
This book is longer than Moby Dick—what is it about the game of baseball that inspires so much passion in you and so many others?
Baseball is unique in so many ways. It’s the only game where the defense controls the ball. It has a leisurely pace that is different from other games. Its history, as Ken Burns will tell you, runs an almost perfectly parallel track to America’s history. And, I think, it is the sport that best mixes the individual with the team; by that I mean that the batter, the pitcher, even the fielder, all of these people are doing individual things, they can’t rely on anybody else to help them, but all of it is inside a team game.
What is some of the most interesting research you did for the book?
I think and hope there’s interesting research everywhere … I did spend a lot of time on each of the players. But my favorite research involved the Negro Leagues players on this list. I’m hoping that people will really enjoy learning more about Oscar Charleston and Buck Leonard and Bullet Rogan and players they might not know that much about.
You’ve ranked the players here—what do you think is the best baseball team in history?
I’m afraid that you’ll have to wait for The Baseball Team 100.
Joe Posnanski
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joe Posnanski
Posnanski in 2007
Born January 8, 1967 (age 56)
Cleveland, Ohio
Occupation(s) Sports columnist
Author
Spouse Margo
Children Elizabeth, Katie
Website joeposnanski.com
Joe Posnanski (/pəzˈnænski/; nicknamed "Poz" and "Joe Po"; born January 8, 1967)[1] is an American sports journalist. A former senior columnist for Sports Illustrated (where he wrote the blog Curiously Long Posts) and columnist for The Kansas City Star, he currently writes for his personal blog JoeBlogs.
Early life
Posnanski grew up in South Euclid, Ohio and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina during high school. He studied accounting, but later switched his major to English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.[2]
Journalism
Posnanski began his journalism career as a multi-use reporter and an editor at The Charlotte Observer. He worked as a columnist at The Cincinnati Post, The Augusta Chronicle, and The Kansas City Star.[3] He was a senior writer for Sports Illustrated until April 2012 when he announced that he would work for Sports on Earth, a new internet joint venture between USA Today and Major League Baseball Advanced Media.[4] His first column for Sports on Earth was published on August 26, 2012.[5] In February 2013, he became the national columnist for NBC Sports. In February 2017, he became a national columnist for MLB.com and contributor on the MLB Network.
A selection of his columns about the magic of sports is compiled in the book The Good Stuff. His book The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America[6] was published by William Morrow & Company and won the CASEY Award as best baseball book of 2007.[7] MLB.com included the book in its list of the "Best baseball books of all time" in 2021.[8]
Another book, about the Big Red Machine, titled The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, was published in 2009 and reached Number 17 on the New York Times Bestseller List.[9] Posnanski wrote a biography of longtime Penn State football coach Joe Paterno[10] for Simon & Schuster, which was released on August 21, 2012 and debuted at Number 1 on the New York Times Bestseller List.[11] Posnanski's fourth book, The Secret of Golf, details the longstanding rivalry and friendship of golfers Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus. His book The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini was released on October 22, 2019.[12] His latest book was The Baseball 100 was released on September 28,2021.[13] In October 2007, he debuted his website at joeposnanski.com, later converted to a blog and titled Joe Blog. In 2011, his blog post on The Promise was named one of "Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism" by The Atlantic.[14] The blog was nominated for a National Magazine Award.[15]
Journalism awards
In 2002 and 2005, Posnanski was named the best sports columnist in America by the Associated Press Sports Editors.[16] In all, he has been nominated 26 times for APSE Awards,[3] and he also has won in the features and projects categories. In 2009, he won the National Headliners Award for sports column writing, and he won back-to-back National Headliners Awards in 2011 and 2012 for Online Writing. In January 2012, the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association (NSSA) named Posnanski National Sportswriter of the Year. In 2014 and 2016, he won Sports Emmy Awards as part of NBC's Olympic coverage.
Posnanski has won many other awards, including the Missouri Press Association award for best sports columnist in Missouri 10 times, and he was the first recipient of the Joe McGuff journalism award, presented by the Greater Kansas City Sports Commission.[17] In 2011, the Baseball Bloggers Alliance named Posnanski the inaugural winner of their online writer of the year award. The BBA also announced that they will rename the award "The Joe Posnanski Award."[18] At the Blogs With Balls 4 conference, he won best sportswriter in the first Untitled Sports Media Award Project (USMAP).
The National Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame held its 48th Annual Induction Banquet in September 2021, inducting Bronko Nagurski, J.R. Cielski, A.J. Pierzynski and Mike Krukow. Joe Posnanski was honored with the Tony Kubek Media Award.
Miscellaneous
He is on the 10-person voting panel for the Fielding Bible Awards, an alternative to the Gold Glove Award in Major League Baseball.[19]
The PosCast is a weekly podcast on the Le Batard and Friends podcast network hosted by Posnanski and is co-hosted by Michael Schur. The podcast primarily discusses baseball but meanders into other sports, subjects, drafts of random items, and prides itself in being nonsensical. The podcast has featured notable guests and co-hosts such as Linda Holmes, Ken Rosenthal, Nick Offerman, Ellen Adair, Stefan Fatsis, Brandon McCarthy, Joey Votto, and Sean Doolittle.
Filmography
Posnanski has appeared on several television programs and documentaries.
Year Title Credited as Notes
2022 Facing Nolan Self documentary film
The Jackie Stiles Story Self documentary film
2021 If You Build It: 30 Years of Field of Dreams self documentary film
Rulon Gardner Won't Die self documentary film
2020 Curious Life and Death of... self season 1, episode 5
2016 Fastball self documentary film
2014 Happy Valley self documentary film
2013 A Football Life self season 3, episode 16
2012 NFL Top 10 self season 5, episode 12
2011 NFL Top 10 self season 6, episode 1
2006 Countdown with Keith Olbermann self
ESPN Outside the Lines Nightly self
Personal life
He and his wife Margo live in Charlotte, North Carolina. They have two daughters.[20]
Joe Posnanski was a Senior Writer at The Athletic. He has been named national sportswriter of the year by five different organizations and has won two Emmys as part of NBC’s digital Olympics coverage. He is the author of five books including “The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini,” released in October of 2019.
HOUDINI
The elusive American
ADAM BEGLEY
224pp. Yale University Press. $26.
THE LIFE AND AFTERLIFE OF HARRY HOUDINI
JOE POSNANSKI
318pp. Avid Reader Press. 20 [pounds sterling] (US $28).
HARRY HOUDINI WAS born in Appleton, Wisconsin, on April 6, 1874. From the moment he could walk he showed an apparently superhuman genius for circumventing locks and other obstacles. Despite his uncanny ability to extricate himself from almost any form of restraint handcuffs, straitjackets, milk cans, jails, even graves --he did have repeated brushes with death during a career spanning nearly three decades. One of the best-known occurred in the late autumn of 1906 during an otherwise routine bridge jump in Detroit. Having decided to press ahead with the feat despite a sudden drop in temperature, Houdini plunged through a hole that had been cut in the river's frozen surface, only to discover that he couldn't find the same opening from which to escape. After an interminable period, he emerged very much alive, dazzling his public yet again. Inevitably, his luck proved to be finite. The escape artist would die in 1926 while being shackled and suspended upside down in a glass-fronted water tank.
Both during and after Houdini's lifetime, biographical nuggets such as these were introduced and repeated by biographers, reporters and followers of Houdini--not to mention two of his most ardent and grandiose promoters, Houdini himself and his wife Bess. They make for lively yarns that reaffirm what we think we know of the man whose name is synonymous with impish escape. But nearly every word of my opening paragraph, right down to the birthdate, is demonstrably false. Erik (later Erich, or "Ehrie") Weisz was actually born on March 24, 1874 in Budapest. His family--save for his father, who had already assumed a rabbinical position among Appleton's fledgling Jewish community --did not emigrate to America until Weisz was four. And he would not assume the moniker Houdini until 1891, when he was still moonlighting as an aspiring magician.
As for the death-defying frozen bridge jump: it simply did not happen. That and Houdini's tragic demise in the "Chinese water torture cell" were just two of the many liberties taken by the melodramatic, nominally biographical Houdini (1953), George Marshall's cinematic fable starring Tony Curtis as Harry and Janet Leigh as Bess. Nor did Houdini die at the age of fifty-two as the direct result of a sucker punch to the gut, as pub trivia might have us believe. Appendicitis and stubbornness were the more likely culprits.
To be sure, the comfort and eagerness with which Houdini departed from the truth raises a number of questions about the man himself. Why, even as a teenager, was he content to be photographed wearing phoney medals? Why--and how--did he end up recruiting pulp writers such as H. P. Lovecraft to ghostwrite preposterous first-person fiction masquerading as allegedly true stories? What explains his congenital propensity for exaggeration and outright lies? "The best answer", writes Joe Posnanski in response to similar rhetorical questions of his own, "is that for Houdini, the illusion never ended and real life never began." Mystery and secrecy, he says, are integral elements of the magician's code. "This was Harry Houdini's code."
Posnanski's The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini is a casual, idiosyncratic effort to sift through the jumbled mass of Houdiniana and separate the more established fact from the more persistent fiction. Beyond that, it is an attempt--intentional or not to defend the fiction. Posnanski's dreamy reverence for the brotherhood of magicians and their code, such as either exists, is one kind of rationalization; his romanticization of tall tales and folklore as entertainment is another. Thus Hollywood's twee Technicolor Houdini "is true even if the details are not". This is also how Posnanski squares Houdini's well-documented antipathy towards spiritualists (who employed their own arsenal of smoke and mirrors) with his equally well-documented penchant for pretence: "On the one hand, yes, Houdini was a perpetual liar, but he lied to build his own legend". So: metaphysical quackery bad, vaudevillian self-aggrandizement good.
In Houdini: The elusive American, part of Yale's Jewish Lives series, Adam Begley is less starry-eyed about the "peerless self-liberator". "Houdini was a compulsive exaggerator ... and a serial prevaricator", he writes. "Any untruth in the service of publicity was perfectly acceptable to him." On the debate over Houdini's hypocrisy with regard to spiritualism, Begley uses very similar phrasing to Posnanski but remains more neutral: "If the ethical line between promotional falsehood and conjuror's deception on the one hand and the 'crime' of a charlatan spirit medium on the other seems from this distance somewhat hazy, Houdini was convinced he knew where it lay".
On the whole, Begley's concise and conventional biography is also less interested in searching for significance. Houdini's stunts "accomplished nothing. They advanced no cause, proved no point" and were "in a sense ... meaningless". They fed the showman's insatiable hunger for attention and kept crowds entertained almost as a side effect. And yet, despite concluding that "the most useful verdicts are the simplest, verdicts that take Houdini at face value", Begley doesn't refrain entirely from psychoanalytical overreach. We are told early on, for instance, that his father's eventual failure to succeed in the New World triggered in Weisz "the earliest stirring of his impulse to escape", and that the 5'4" showman (his exact height, like so many other details, is up for debate) "affirmed his masculinity" through impossible jailbreaks in the nude.
This sort of speculation is tempting, Begley admits, because Houdini's "outsized eccentricities" invite it. Throughout his life, his relationship with his mother bordered on the Oedipal; he was left fundamentally changed when she died in 1913. He and Bess had no children but shared an imaginary son, lending a certain plausibility, incidentally, to the most implausible element of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He pursued imitators with monomaniacal fury and went so far as to make his Chinese water torture cell into a play entitled Houdini Upside Down so as to copyright the trick. He bitterly turned on personal heroes such as the illusionist Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, whose name he stole and whom, in a fit of either pique or patricide, he later sought to expose as a fraud. Even after gaining some degree of international stardom, he "still felt the need to exaggerate the fabulousness of each fresh success, trumpeting solid victories so that they sounded more like epic conquests".
It is hard not to share the open admiration Posnanski has for his subject, flawed though he was. So long as we view him as puckish rather than malicious, the wholesale commitment that Weisz showed to his self-invented persona is impressive. The knotty enigma of his life is, like Houdini's best stunts, a puzzle that dares one to solve it, or perhaps just sit back and revel in the feeling of wonderment. Posnanski does a bit of both. In short chapters written in the swift, comma-spliced prose of magazine articles where the author insists on always being present, he meets the "Houdini zealots" who have built museums and internet archives to the man and who continue to pore over his every move. He sits down with magicians such as Dorothy Dietrich--"the first female magician to saw a man in half on television" --who were inspired by Houdini. And he muses on the unchanging nature of spectacle and awe, teasing out parallels between Houdini and David Kotkin, better known as David Copperfield, whose grandparents were also Jewish immigrants from Europe.
There is another, more inadvertent way in which Joe Posnanski's book transcends its subject. The Life and Afterlife shows that Houdini's career and his enduring legacy are not just the work of a single entertainer with a yearning for fame. They require a constant audience, an organic promotional machine that consists of those who are willing to accept and repeat the folklore unchallenged as well as those who are willing to let it slide--celebrate it, even--in the name of showmanship. If there is indeed something a little suspect about Houdini's disregard for the truth, can't the same be said of us when we justify printing the myth?
To buy The Madness of Knowledge at a discount, visit shop.the-tls.co.uk or call +44 (0)203 176 2935
Caption: Clockwise from top left: A montage depicting, clockwise from bottom left, Marcel Proust, Karl Marx, Rosalind Franklin, Sigmund Freud, Arnold Schoenberg, Sarah Bernhardt, Albert Einstein; "Thomas Cromwell" (1532-3) by Hans Holbein, the Younger; Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns (1992); View from a prison window; West Side Story on Broadway
Caption: Tony Curtis in Houdini, 1953
Eric J. Iannelli is a freelance writer and translator based in Spokane, Washington
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 NI Syndication Limited
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Iannelli, Eric J. "Turned upside down: The real life of a man whose name is synonymous with impish escape." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6100, 28 Feb. 2020, p. 7. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632692794/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=283e5783. Accessed 19 July 2023.
Biography
The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini (Avid Reader, $28, 9781501137235) is hardly a typical biography; it's more like taking an up-close-and-personal tour of the escape artist's life, narrated not only by author Joe Posnanski in his wonderfully entertaining prose but also by a host of colorful experts whom the author tracks down.
Posnanski says he was drawn to the legendary escape artist because he "sparks so much wonder in the world, even today." Modern magicians seem to concur that, technically speaking, Houdini wasn't a particularly good magician. However, crowds were mesmerized by his escapes and were convinced he could do the impossible. The great actress Sarah
Bernhardt was so gobsmacked that she asked if Houdini could restore her missing leg.
The truth of the matter is that Houdini was a charismatic, brilliant entertainer who was obsessed with fame. This publicity genius was ruthless against critics and competitors and could not for the life of him ignore an insult. He loved making money but wore tattered clothes, preferring to spend his money on self-promotion, magic books and paraphernalia.
Even today, Houdini "lives on because people will not let him die," Posnanski writes. He introduces readers to a variety of Houdini's modern disciples, such as Kristen Johnson, "Lady Houdini," who says that after she tried her first rope escape, "she felt alive in a whole different way." Magician David Copperfeld takes Posnanski on a tour of his private museum in Las Vegas, discussing his predecessor's influence. Australian magician Paul Cosentino admits, "I guess . . . he saved my life. Little boys like me, we need Houdini, you know? He's a symbol of hope." As Posnanski concludes, "Houdini is not a figure of the past. He is a living, breathing, and modern phenomenon."
When a talented writer like Posnanski tackles a subject as endlessly fascinating as Harry Houdini, the results are, quite simply, pure magic.
--Alice Cary
By Joe Posnanski
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 BookPage
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Cary, Alice. "The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini." BookPage, Nov. 2019, p. 33. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A603633293/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6785c655. Accessed 19 July 2023.
Posnanski, Joe THE LIFE AND AFTERLIFE OF HARRY HOUDINI Avid Reader Press (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 10, 22 ISBN: 978-1-5011-3723-5
Unlocking the doors to the legendary performer's world of magic.
Noting that there are more than 500 books about Ehrich Weiss, aka Harry Houdini (1874-1926), MLB.com national columnist Posnanski (The Secret of Golf: The Story of Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus, 2016, etc.) still delivers a jaunty and infectious biography of the famous magician and his impact on magic and popular culture. The author relates his discussions with magicians who have emulated or criticized Houdini's magic as well as the "truest believer[s]" who have studied and written about him for years. As a young boy, writes Posnanski, "locks spoke to Houdini, and Houdini understood." Though he said he was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, he was actually born in Budapest. This lie, discovered Posnanski, is a key to understanding how Houdini achieved his mythic status. "[Houdini] believed that magic was about the performer more than the performance," writes the author, "and the bigger, gaudier, more dangerous, more thrilling, the better." Posnanski's Houdini is a consummate liar and a genius at self-promotion. He hired ghost writer H.P Lovecraft to "tell exaggerated tales about him or write short stories under the Houdini name" and planted self-aggrandizing stories about himself in the local newspapers of the towns where he performed. Posnanski is excellent at describing Houdini's greatest escapes, from the famous Mirror Cuffs to straitjackets. The author chronicles his visit to David Copperfield's private museum; the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he viewed the rare Houdini film, The Grim Game; and the Academy of Magical Arts' exclusive Magic Castle, where he finally got to meet Patrick Culliton, author of the rare and coveted Houdini: The Key. Houdini was good as a magician, Posnanski learns--he created the popular needles-in- the-mouth trick and made an elephant disappear--but he was, above all, a remarkable performer. Spoiler alert: The author does not reveal any Houdini secrets.
Entertaining and brimming with wonder.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Posnanski, Joe: THE LIFE AND AFTERLIFE OF HARRY HOUDINI." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A597739475/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a987c096. Accessed 19 July 2023.
Joe Posnanski. Avid Reader, $28 (336p) ISBN 978-1-5011-3723-5
Legendary escape artist Harry Houdini used showmanship, bombast, and a bit of fraud to concoct magic that still inspires, according to this starry-eyed biography. Sports Illustrated columnist Posnanski (The Soul of Baseball) gives a brisk, episodic recap of the Hungarian-American magician's rise to vaudeville's summit by escaping handcuffs and straitjackets (sometimes in mid-air) and underwater traps as audiences agonized in suspense. Posnanski doesn't reveal much Houdini methodology, but he does note the element of humbug: some of the seemingly impossible challenges he accepted were probably setups with confederates, and his signature upside down escape from a sealed, water-filled "Chinese Water-Torture Cell" was accomplished by lowering a curtain and having an assistant let him out. Houdini's real genius, in Posnanski's telling, was for publicity--his greatest PR agents were the many police departments that obligingly let him test himself against their restraints with reporters on hand--and romantic grandstanding. Posnanski intertwines the biography with profiles of present-day magicians and aficionados who acknowledge his mediocre magical chops but still revere him; these sections often drag, with their subjects coming off as skillful but gray magical technicians beside Houdini's larger-than-life flimflammer. When Posnanski stays focused on Houdini, he gives readers an entertaining study on the power of a charismatic personality to conjure captivating illusions. Photos. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 32, 12 Aug. 2019, p. 54. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A597198110/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=99909866. Accessed 19 July 2023.
Posnanski, Joe THE BASEBALL 100 Avid Reader Press (NonFiction None) $25.93 9, 28 ISBN: 978-1-982180-58-4
Longtime sports journalist Posnanski takes on a project fraught with the possibilities of controversy: ranking the 100 best baseball players of all time.
It would steal the author's thunder to reveal his No. 1. However, writing about that player, Posnanski notes, "the greatest baseball player is the one who lifts you higher and makes you feel exactly like you did when you fell in love with this crazy game in the first place." Working backward, his last-but-not-least place is occupied by Japanese outfielder Ichiro Suzuki, whose valiant hitting rivaled Pete Rose's, mostly a base at a time. As for Rose, who comes in at No. 60, Posnanski writes, "here's something people don't often say about the young Pete Rose, but it's true: The guy was breathtakingly fast." Thus, in his first pro season, Rose stole 30 bases and hit 30 triples. That he was somewhat of a lout is noted but exaggerated. Posnanski skillfully weaves statistics into the narrative without spilling into geekdom, and he searches baseball history for his candidate pool while combing the records for just the right datum or quote: No. 10 Satchel Paige on No. 15 Josh Gibson: "You look for his weakness, and while you're looking for it he's liable to hit 45 home runs." Several themes emerge, one being racial injustice. As Posnanski notes of "the greatest Negro Leagues players....people tend to talk about them as if there is some doubt about their greatness." There's not, as No. 94, Roy Campanella, among many others, illustrates. He was Sicilian, yes, but also Black, then reason enough to banish him to the minors until finally calling him up in 1948. Another significant theme is the importance of fathers in shaping players, from Mickey Mantle to Cal Ripken and even Rose. Posnanski's account of how the Cy Young Award came about is alone worth the price of admission.
Red meat, and mighty tasty at that, for baseball fans with an appreciation for the past and power of the game.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Posnanski, Joe: THE BASEBALL 100." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A682168521/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e7102918. Accessed 19 July 2023.
*Posnanski, Joe. The Baseball 100. Avid: S. & S. Sept. 2021.880p. ISBN 9781982180584. $40. REF
A rich, sweeping history of American baseball told through profiles of its 100 greatest players; the contents originally appeared on the sports blog The Athletic. In the introduction, Posnanski (The Secret of Golf: The Story of Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus) writes that this volume was sparked by his love of baseball, which originated with his mother; she wasn't herself a baseball fan but helped a nine-year-old Posnanski collect and organize a complete set of 1976 Topps baseball cards. The book's 100 profiles include biographical information, career achievements, statistics, and comparisons to other players. To make a truly complete top-100 of American baseball, Posnanski covers a number of players in the Negro Leagues, who for decades couldn't play in the segregated Major Leagues. Posnanski's ranking of players within this volume isn't meant to be definitive; sometimes a player's ranking corresponds to his uniform number, but other times the reasoning is unclear (the author addresses his ranking methods in a later chapter). Posnanski acknowledges that it takes gall to rank the 100 greatest players in history, and that many will disagree with him, but he contends that these disagreements and debates are part of what makes baseball fun. His devotion to the game shines through in his poetic, inspired, and entertaining writing. The volume includes a preface by George F. Will and a glossary of baseball terms. VERDICT This thoughtprovoking volume is a must-have for baseball fans.--Dave Pugl, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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"Posnanski, Joe. The Baseball 100." Library Journal, vol. 146, no. 12, Dec. 2021, pp. 106+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A686559462/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f74ddc5a. Accessed 19 July 2023.
The Baseball 100. By Joe Posnanski. Sept. 2021. 848p. Simon & Schuster/Avid Reader, $40 (9781982180584). 796.357.
Longtime sports columnist Posnanski, who now writes for TheAthletic.com, offers manna for baseball geeks with his selection of the 100 all-time greatest baseball players, melding the sabermetrics chops of a Bill James with the eloquence and droll humor of a Roger Angell. Fans will disagree, feverishly, with his choices--Carlos Beltran (98), for example, was one of the principals behind the Astros team that cheated its way to the 2017 World Series title--but he appears to relish it. Yet Posnanski also nobly, and rightly, casts a wide net, embracing Japanese legends Ichiro Suzuki (100) and Sadaharu Oh (85), and, more important, long-neglected Negro leagues players, such as Oscar Charleston (5). "He was you before you," the legendary Buck O'Neill told Willie Mays (1), who knew him and apparently didn't disagree. The author also includes current players, including Clayton Kershaw (78), Miguel Cabrera (77), Mike Trout (27), and Albert Pujols (23). Most important, these selections will bring to the mind's eye of any baseball fan a vision of how singularly great each of these athletes have played--or, in the case of the old-timers, might have played--the game. Recommended for the strong baseball collection.--Alan Moores
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Moores, Alan. "The Baseball 100." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 1, 1 Sept. 2021, p. 29. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A675268010/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a99868a3. Accessed 19 July 2023.
Posnanski, Joe WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL Dutton (NonFiction None) $29.00 9, 5 ISBN: 9780593472675
The celebrated sportswriter circles the bases, calling out exceptional moments in the history of the game.
"Henry Aaron's 715th home run is the most magical moment in baseball history," writes Posnanski, author of The Baseball 100. It's a tall claim, but it holds up, illustrating Aaron's quiet resistance to White hatred and proving his repeated claim that in baseball, "All that matters is if you can play." There are plenty of other noteworthy events in Posnanski's pages--and well more than 50, in fact: He counts 108, coincidentally the number of stitches in a standard ball and number of years between Chicago Cubs championships. Some of the moments are well known, such as Babe Ruth's calling the home run he was about to hit. Others are buried deep in baseball lore, including an appearance on the mound by Jackie Mitchell, a young woman who just so happened to strike Ruth out at an exhibition bout after Ruth loudly proclaimed that women were "too delicate" for the game. One of Posnanski's winning ploys is to dig into the archives to find such hidden gems and especially to celebrate the mediocre players who, for one of those magical moments, pulled something out of their caps and hit a surprise homer--as with Bartolo Colón, the 42-year-old portly pitcher who smacked one out of the park and then took so long to round the bases that one announcer was moved to explain, charitably, "I think that's how fast he runs." Other of Posnanski's diamond heroes, famed and obscure, have more hustle, including 15-year-old Joe Nuxhall, who pitched for the Cincinnati Reds when the grown-ups were fighting in World War II; J.L. Wilkinson, who introduced lights and night games to the field by way of the old Negro League; and Ichiro Suzuki, the ever smiling Mariner--"Has there ever been a more joyous player than Ichiro?"--who showed what love of the game is all about.
A book for any baseball fan to cherish.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Posnanski, Joe: WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A752723066/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ee9daba6. Accessed 19 July 2023.