This book is a great story of true adventure. Great reading, great pictures...but there's more than meets the eye here. The real adventure is what you are not told about...the plight of the pilot. Stay tuned for a true story told to me from the actual pilot, a best friend, who manned the helicopter and his version...only time separates the story from the reader.

The year 1919. The city is Chicago. Eight men enter the room of "Sleepy" Bill Burns and conspire to fix the World Series. The money was coming from Arnold Rothstein or "AR" to his friends. Eight men were about to rock the foundations of baseball for greed and the hatred of Charles Comiskey - or was there another story?

Asinoff recounts the months leading to, the days during and the years after the 1919 World Series with amazing detail and clarity. His story is told and as you listen you'll think you are actually there. This audio book is by far much better than the movie.

What you get is 8; count them 8, how ironic, tapes that weave a story of deceit, corruption, and conspiracy on both sides of the law. From Joe Jackson and Eddie Cicotte to Lefty Williams, Chick Ghandl, Buck Weaver, Happy Felsch and Swede Risberg the tragedy is unraveled.

The recording was a true pleasure and the actual use of transcripts, reports and other material adds major credibility to the exposing of baseball worst nightmare. Asinoff is to be commended on this first rate work and baseball needs more men like him. A real standout performance!

This review refers to the audio book version.

The problem with most academic writing isn't that the ideas are too complex for the general reader to grasp; the problem is that most of it's too poorly written for the general reader to grasp what's being written about. Academic Richard Peterson, however, has defied the odds and written a highly accessible collection of essays in which he analyzes baseball literature -- the baseball short story and baseball novel, in particular. The book opens with a personal essay about a trip to Cooperstown with his wife, and this sets the tone of the book, which is, even in the analytical parts, personal. Here is a man who clearly loves both literature AND baseball, and in an age when so many literature scholars seem to hate the literature that they write about, Peterson's love of both is one of the great pleasures of this book. If reading about the art of writing baseball interests you, I highly recommend EXTRA INNINGS.

Good detail about the crimes committed by Mr James B Garretti aka Garrett Brock Trapnell in and around Montreal as well as the carribean,shows just how bad the airport security and the banking industry was back then

I really enjoyed this book. The life of Garret Trapnell fascinates me. I hope he behaves so he has a chance for a real life sometime in the next decade or so.

Garrett happens to be a family memeber of mine, and the book is wonderful. It is wierd to see things form the other side. Reading about your family can be very interesting.

Unfortunately, it has been labelled a baseball story, and this limits the amount of people who would be even remotely interested in it. And while it is probably true that if you don't like baseball, or know little or nothing about how the game is played on the field, then this book is probably not for you. Nonetheless, Asinof does a wonderful job of chronicling the career of an athlete who never got a break, but in the end the long descriptions of game situations scattered throughout the book will quickly wear on the reader who isn't interested in baseball, and this dooms the book to a limited audience. What's interesting about the novel is how each of the chapters is really a self-contained short story. If you find yourself not liking the first chapter, jump to some of the other ones and give them a try; you can easily do this without losing the thread of anything, because it's not a novel at all but a series of situations which put together can make up a bigger picture. I'm giving it a four because, again, the game descriptions get tiring, even for a baseball fan like me.

This is a must-read book! Very well written and insightful. It gives a realistic view of baseball in America as opposed to the usual romantic view presented in other books and films.

This is one of the best books I have read with baseball as it's central focus. It is a grity story of one ballplayer's long time struggles in the minor leagues trying to make it to the majors. I would strongly recommend this title to anyone interested in baseball!

The scandal of the 1919 Black Sox is probably the most disilluisioning chapter in the history of baseball. Asinof captured the feeling of America and its reaction to the scandal on and off field. The story is told accurately and with great insight. "Shoeless" Joe was a wonderful player who made bad decisions. He can be both admired and loathed by fans who now know that he wasn't completely innocent as the Sox threw the Worl d Series. It shows how baseball perserviered throught the gambling. Baseball tradition has kept the game alive through many adverse situtations and when gathered together make the history of baseball very rich. A must read for ALL baseball historians and fans.

A great book that shows what led to this infamous scandel with the 8 White Sox ballplayers. Not only will baseball fans want to read this book but anyone who likes to read. It also makes you wonder if throwing games is still going on today.

Although not a work of fiction, Asinof establishes the antagonist, or scapegoat, in the fixing of the 1919 World Series as the owner of the Chicago White Sox, Charles Comisky. He blames Comisky and the low wages he provided as the reason the eight sold out on one of the great ballclubs of all-time. Asinof also puts the blame on the gamblers who used the ballplayers as pawns to get rich. But, ultimately participation in the scheme was the final and fatal decision that was made by 8 of the Sox. Some parts of the book, such as the post-trial, are a bit dry, but overall this is an easy-to-read, informative novel. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about such White Sox greats as Buck Weaver and Shoeless Joe Jackson and the 1919 World Series scandal in which they participated

In its time (1965) this book really blew the lid off the long-sanitized version of the Black Sox scandal available to the public. Its readability, depth and refusal to glorify any of the participants are what make it the starting point for any baseball lover seeking the true story of the whole sordid affair. Its placement in greater historical context is especially well done; the reader is reminded that it did not occur in a vacuum. WWI was just over, Prohibition was coming, and the dominant national mood was 'we're very noble, we won the Great War' (all historical debatability of that point aside). Game-throwing was nothing new to baseball, as Asinof points out, but the idea that a full third of a team would throw a World Series was a body blow to what had become somewhat of an egotistical nation.

While some new information has come to light in the last thirty-five years, it has only supplemented what Asinof learned--to my knowledge none of it has been refuted. Considering the number of basements and old offices likely cleared out in the intervening time, and at least one definitely pertinent discovery that I'm aware of (the Grabiner notes), this is quite an accomplishment. Recommended both as baseball history and as a portrait of a lusty, turbulent time.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I only knew of the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 on a superficial level. This book gives you the details of all the conversations, meetings, and actions that took place between the players, gamblers, and management which led to 8 players of the Chicago White Sox baseball susposedly throwing the 1919 World Series. Asinof has surprising detail of conversations that took place and talks about each person involved as if he knew them personally. You wonder how he received all this info in the age before tape recorders and microphones were prevalent. He certainly did impressive research and the book should be commended for that.

What he doesn't do is take sides and seems to write the book as a distant observer. But at the end you seem to feel somewhat sorry for some of the players involved, especially the ones among the eight (Buck Weaver, Joe Jackson) who didn't necessarily throw their games but were banned for life anyway because of their knowledge of the conspiracy. What would you have done in their position?

Overall, it's most likely the best summary of one of the most incredible and darkest events in sports history. It's must read for all sports fans.

If you are looking for a baseball page turner, this book is tough to put down. But if you are looking for the real life baseball insights found in Bouton's classic "Ball Four" you won't find them here.

Bouton and Asinof's "Strike Zone" is a surprisingly good book. I didn't think that a novel written in alternating chapters by two authors would even be readable, much less absorbing, but this book is both. The two parallel story-lines are simple but affecting: a journeyman pitcher's efforts in a crucial game and the plate umpire's moral dilemma about whether or not to define the strike zone in a way that will "throw" the game and thus allow an old friend to pay off a gambling debt. The action takes place in one 24-hour period, but with flashbacks effectively
worked in to fill out the two men's lives. Particularly when the action moves to the baseball diamond, the novel perfectly captures both the leisurely pace and rhythms and the terrific tensions of the game.

Anyone who's read "Ball Four" would know that the pitcher, Sam Ward, is closely based on Bouton himself--all the stuff about knuckleballs is a tip-off--and the stone wall building as therapy after a marital separation comes directly out of Bouton's own experience, as described in the Epilogue to "Ball Four." Sam Ward is Bouton in the same way that Father Blackie Riley is a kind of fantasy stand-in for Father Andrew Greeley in the latter's novels.

Maybe the most difficult thing to write in a novel is a good sex scene and Bouton succeeds with what seems like unpromising material: an anecdote about Ward relieving his pre-game tensions by masturbating in his hotel room before going to the ballpark to pitch. Bouton spares the reader any description of what Ward is actually doing; instead he recounts in rapid succession the series of vivid fantasies that pass through his character's mind, then ends with a humorous zinger that picks up a punch line from earlier in the story. The episode is very sexy (as well as romantic, since he's fantasizing about his estranged wife) and very funny--a rare combination that few writers could capture so successfully.

Not a great book, but a worthwhile read for baseball lovers. (I think the pitch-by-pitch description of the crucial game would drive non-fans out of their minds!)

"Strike Zone" is a book that tells the story of a pitcher of the Chicago Cubs named Sam Ward. Sam is a middle-aged guy who has never pitched a major league game before. Sam gets the chance to pitch for one of the Cubs biggest games of the year. Sam and the umpire Ernie Kolacka tell the story; the chapters go on in detail about everything that is going on from their point of view.

The authors of this book really went into detail about everything, making the book more understandable. A bad thing about the detail is the it makes the book longer than it should have been, because the book takes place in a twenty-four hour period and there is so much detail it made it kind of drag on. "Strike Zone" is very well-written and things are written as if one could actually see them. The authors convey their purpose very well by telling every single detail, but once again a little too much detail can be bad.

I first read this sad, touching account of two teenagers taking their lives in the name of peace almost thirty years ago, when I was a teenager myself, and I have never forgotten it. Having recently acquired a copy once more, I find that it has lost none of its quiet power. While countless books deal with the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, and the cultural upheaval of the 60's, most are written on a wider scale. This small, contemplative book provides a more intimate look, telling how two sensitive, middle-of-the-road, "nice" teenagers were torn by the war dividing their country, and how they were ultimately moved to a tragic act of despairing protest. While the war that claimed them is over, the issues they confronted still remain: How does a feeling human being deal with and live in an often harsh and uncaring world? Do we attempt to grapple with pain and meaning, or do we shut out everything that disturbs us and go about Business As Usual? This is a book still worth reading, and deserves to be reprinted.

I first read this sad, touching account of two teenagers taking their lives in the name of peace almost thirty years ago, when I was a teenager myself, and I have never forgotten it. Having recently acquired a copy once more, I find that it has lost none of its quiet power. While countless books deal with the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, and the cultural upheaval of the 60's, most are written on a wider scale. This small, contemplative book provides a more intimate look, telling how two sensitive, middle-of-the-road, "nice" teenagers were torn by the war dividing their country, and how they were ultimately moved to a tragic act of despairing protest. While the war that claimed them is over, the issues they confronted still remain: How does a feeling human being deal with and live in an often harsh and uncaring world? Do we attempt to grapple with pain and meaning, or do we shut out everything that disturbs us and go about Business As Usual? This is a book still worth reading, and deserves to be reprinted.

Contrary to those who babble on about America losing its "innocence" in the '60s, Asinof presents a deeply researched thesis positing that one year after WWI ended, America changed, mostly for the worse, on a number of fronts. Areas examined include the failure of America to join and sustain the League of Nations, Prohibition, and the "Black Sox" World Series scandal. Asinof is at his best on that last one (since he drew from the same sources when he wrote his classic "Eight Men Out"), but he provides great insight into all of the events chronicled. For most of us, this all happened well before we were born, so this volume provides a needed overview of a crucial year in American history.