The Image of Their Greatness

by Donald Honig, Lawrence S. Ritter

A revised and updated edition of this illustrated classic, one of the most celebrated and informative books ever on the history of baseball, takes the reader decade by decade through the names and faces that have shaped America's favorite pastime. Illustrations.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction

374 pages, Hardcover

First published April 13, 1984

About the author

Donald Martin Honig is a novelist and historian who mostly writes about baseball.

Reviews

[MitchellSev · Rating 5 out of 5]

I give this book 5 stars because the book was very educational and interesting. It presents the information in a chronological way from about 1900 to 1979. If you want a recent history of baseball then you will need to choose a more recent book. Some of the best parts of the book are when they talk about the world series in a given year. The 1941 world series was one of my favorites to read.

The book does also contain an index so if you have a player from the time period or if you want to reread about a player or manager then you can look it up in the index. It also contains whole pages of pictures which helps you understand and envision what a player looked like and how they played. The pictures sometimes right after a page where they haven't finished the paragraph so you have to sometimes flip multiple pages. Overall though it was a good book. That is why I rated it 5 stars.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

A serviceable if surface history of Baseball from 1900-1990, this book is primarily notable for its photographs of Baseball’s greatest players. It is most interesting when discussing the early days of the game ( not surprising, given that co-author Ritter is the author of the magnificent oral history “The Glory of their Times”), but the text is of secondary importance. As the title clearly indicates, the images are what matter. This book has since been superseded by Geoffrey C.Ward’s beautiful book of the Ken Burns documentary series “Baseball”, but as an album of a past time (as well as a pastime), it is certainly worth a look.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book highlighting the key players and World Series games of each decade until the mid 80’s. Really cool black and white photos mixed in throughout too.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pictures alone are worth thumbing through the pages.