The Bookshelf Conversation #176: Ron Rapoport

TLDR.

For those of you not up on the latest lingo, that stands for “too long, didn’t read.”

One of the problems with the world today is that people are too impatient. They don’t have the time or inclination to concentrate for more than a couple of minutes . A number of outlets include a “warning” to how long something will take to read an article.

So when I come across a book like Frank Chance’s Diamond: The Baseball Journalism of Ring Lardner, edited by Ron Rapoport, I soak it in like a sponge. As the saying goes, they don’t make ’em like Lardner anymore. But then you have to consider that when this all-star writer was plying his trade, there wasn’t much in the way of competition. No television and not even a whole lot of radio from which a baseball fan might get any dope about his favorite team or player. It mostly fell to the sportswriter to paint the mental pictures for them. And Lardner was perhaps the best of his era.

I recently shared with one of my younger co-workers, an aspiring singer/actor, a video of W.C. Fields based on a quote uttered by one of my older colleagues. I said that it was a take-off on a Fields line and asked the kid if she knew who that was (she was only vaguely aware). As I was sending it to her, it struck me that the humor of the 1930s might not stand up to the “sensibilities” of the modern era. Look at some of the old classic movies. Did you ever see blood when Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney got shot? Did you ever see anything more than a tongueless kiss between Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson? Same for humor. They’re not even dad jokes; they’re granddad jokes.

Rapoport made an honest assessment when he said the book might not be for general consumption but for (older) people like me, with perhaps a few younguns interested in semi-ancient history.

This is not Rapoport’s first book about the legendary writer: In 2017, he published The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner. He also wrote Let’s Play Two: The Legend of Mr. Cub, The Life of Ernie Banks which was released in 2019.