No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing

by Joe Bonomo

Legendary New Yorker writer and editor Roger Angell is considered to be among the greatest baseball writers to date. He brought a fan’s love, a fiction writer’s eye, and an essayist’s sensibility to the game. No other baseball writer has a through line quite like Angell’ born in 1920, he was an avid fan of the game by the Depression era, when he watched Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig hit home runs at Yankee Stadium. He began writing about baseball in 1962 and continued through the decades, blogging about baseball’s postseasons, until shortly before his death in 2022.

No Place I Would Rather Be tells the story of Angell’s contribution to sportswriting, including his early short stories, pieces for the New Yorker , autobiographical essays, seven books, and the common threads that run through them. His work reflects rapidly changing mores as well as evolving forces on and off the field, reacting to a half century of cultural turmoil, shifts in trends and professional attitudes of ballplayers and executives, and a complex, discerning, and diverse audience. Baseball is both change and constancy, and Angell was the preeminent essayist of that paradox. His writing encompassed fondness for the past, a sober reckoning of the present, and hope for the future of the game. This edition features a new epilogue.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Biography, Biography Memoir

238 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2023

About the author

Joe Bonomo's books include Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life In Baseball Writing, Field Recordings from The Inside (essays), AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, and Conversations With Greil Marcus. A five-time "Notable Essays" selection at Best American Essays, he's the Music Columnist at The Normal School and Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

Reviews

[Lance · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most acclaimed writers of baseball literature and essays is Roger Angell, who had a long writing career with the magazine The New Yorker. When he began to write about baseball for the magazine, it launched a career filled with personal satisfaction, much praise and a litany of baseball writing for readers to devour. Angell’s career and life are portrayed in this excellent book by Joe Bonomo.

From the beginning, Bonomo emphasizes that this is NOT a biography. This is correct – while the book starts with a description of Angell’s childhood, early adult life and how he got his job at the magazine, the book is more of a sharing of Angell’s work and his thoughts about the game and his career.

Bonomo does a thorough job of covering all the major topics in baseball about which Angell wrote. Readers of this book will learn (if they doesn’t already know) about Angell’s love for both the Boston Red Sox AND the New York Mets. It makes sense – the Red Sox because he grew up in New England and the Mets as he wrote about them since the franchise began in 1962.

They will also see that Angell may have to adapt to some of the changes that the sport has undergone but he still holds the same opinions today, at age 99, that he did in his youth. These cover a wide range of topics from televised games to expansion teams to expanded playoffs. However, just as Angell always does with his essays, Bonomo makes sure that the reader understands that at the heart of if all, baseball is still described as the best game in a manner only Angell can communicate.

Whether or not one has read any of Angell’s work, this book is one that every baseball fan will want to pick up to learn more about this man who brings to life in words the feelings and memories that fans of the game cherish forever.

I wish to thank University of Nebraska Press for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

https://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/20...

[Hailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why am I obsessed with a deceased baseball writer?

[Marc Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book about my favorite baseball writer. I remember buying Five Seasons at a Sears in Greensburg, PA.

[Roger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprising number of typos.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was okay. Angell writes very well, but not sure it was enough to make a biography.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of typos and wrong information. Hiller Muggins Field?