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The Celebrant
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
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Publisher's summary
The first two decades of the 20th century were a time of promise and innocence in America. Hardworking immigrants could achieve the American dream; heroes were truly heroic. Eric Rolfe Greenberg brilliantly and authentically chronicles the real-life saga of the first national baseball hero, Christy Mathewson, and the fictional story of a Jewish immigrant family of jewelers. In this audio, Mathewson and other great players like John McGraw, Honus Wagner, and Connie Mack discover the realities behind the shining illusions: the burdens of being a hero and the temptations that taint success.
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Pete Rose played baseball with a singular and headfirst abandon that endeared him to fans and peers, even as it riled others--a figure at once magnetic, beloved and polarizing. Rose has more base hits than anyone in history, yet he is not in the Hall of Fame. Twenty-five years ago he was banished from baseball for gambling, then ruled ineligible for Cooperstown; today, the question "Does Pete Rose belong in the Hall of Fame?" has evolved into perhaps the most provocative in sports, a layered, slippery and ever-relevant moral conundrum.
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Classic book!
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The Summer of Beer and Whiskey
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- By: Edward Achorn
- Narrated by: Ax Norman
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Chris Von der Ahe knew next to nothing about baseball when he risked his life’s savings to found the St. Louis Browns, the franchise that would become the St. Louis Cardinals. Yet the German-born beer garden proprietor would become one of the most important - and funniest - figures in the game’s history.
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Well written and extensive research but just not interesting
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Bottom of the 33rd
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On April 18, 1981, a ball game sprang eternal. What began as a modestly attended minor-league game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings became not only the longest ever played in baseball history, but something else entirely. The first pitch was thrown after dusk on Holy Saturday, and for the next eight hours the night seemed to suspend its participants between their collective pasts and futures, between their collective sorrows and joys....
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I love baseball
- By Sher from Provo on 04-08-13
By: Dan Barry
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The definitive biography of Babe Ruth
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Opening Day
- The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season
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Great book, not so great reading
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By: Jonathan Eig
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Pete Rose
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Pete Rose played baseball with a singular and headfirst abandon that endeared him to fans and peers, even as it riled others--a figure at once magnetic, beloved and polarizing. Rose has more base hits than anyone in history, yet he is not in the Hall of Fame. Twenty-five years ago he was banished from baseball for gambling, then ruled ineligible for Cooperstown; today, the question "Does Pete Rose belong in the Hall of Fame?" has evolved into perhaps the most provocative in sports, a layered, slippery and ever-relevant moral conundrum.
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The Big Bam
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Babe Ruth was more than baseball's original superstar. For 85 years, he has remained the sport's reigning titan. He has been named Athlete of the Century...more than once. But who was this large, loud, enigmatic man? In The Big Bam, Leigh Montville brings his trademark touch to this groundbreaking, revelatory portrait of the Babe.
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The Big Bam
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The Chicago Cubs
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Story
For Rich Cohen and millions of other fans, the Chicago Cubs have always been more than a team: they've been the protagonists of a King Arthur epic, in search of the Holy Grail that is winning the World Series. A chronicle of the last few miraculous seasons as experienced through the prism of Cubs history, The Chicago Cubs tracks the famous curse, which was placed on the team in 1945 by the infamous owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, who was ejected from Wrigley Field when he tried to bring his goat into the grandstand for the fifth game of the World Series.
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just listen and it all happens again
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The Bad Guys Won
- A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put on a New York Uniform - and Maybe the Best
- By: Jeff Pearlman
- Narrated by: Jeff Pearlman
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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It was 1986, and the New York Mets won 108 regular-season games and the World Series, capturing the hearts (and other assorted body parts) of fans everywhere. But their greatness on the field was nearly eclipsed by how bad they were off it. Led by the indomitable Keith Hernandez and the young dynamic duo of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, along with the gallant Scum Bunch, the Amazin's left a wide trail of wreckage in their wake-hotel rooms, charter planes, a bar in Houston, and most famously Bill Buckner and the hated Boston Red Sox.
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Maybe 3.5
- By Lifeisshort on 02-15-22
By: Jeff Pearlman
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Ty Cobb
- A Terrible Beauty
- By: Charles Leerhsen
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 15 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Ty Cobb is baseball royalty, maybe even the greatest player who ever lived. His lifetime batting average is still the highest of all time, and when he retired in 1928, after twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics, he held more than ninety records. But the numbers don't tell half of Cobb's tale. The Georgia Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: "Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls than Babe Ruth could with a grand slam," one columnist wrote.
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Two Cobb Books, One Review of a Maligned Legacy
- By Jonathan Love on 05-17-16
By: Charles Leerhsen
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Pull Up a Chair
- The Vin Scully Story
- By: Curt Smith
- Narrated by: Don Leslie
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Since 1950, the instantly recognizable voice of Vin Scully has invited listeners to “pull up a chair” for his peerless play-by-play sports reporting. Recruited and mentored by the legendary Red Barber, Scully has narrated NBC’s Game of the Week, twelve All-Star Games, eighteen no-hitters, and twenty-five World Series, describing players from Duke Snider to Orel Hershiser to Manny Ramirez, with hundreds in between.
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Almost perfect
- By steve finkelstein on 02-06-21
By: Curt Smith
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The Last Boy
- Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood
- By: Jane Leavy
- Narrated by: Jane Leavy, John Bedford Lloyd
- Length: 17 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on more than 500 interviews with friends and family, teammates, and opponents, she delivers the definitive account of Mantle's life, mining the mythology of The Mick for the true story of a luminous and illustrious talent with an achingly damaged soul.
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The Man Behind the Myth
- By Ray on 11-12-10
By: Jane Leavy
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Molina
- The Story of the Father Who Raised an Unlikely Baseball Dynasty
- By: Bengie Molina, Joan Ryan
- Narrated by: Henry Leyva
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A baseball rules book. A tape measure. A lottery ticket. These were in the pocket of Bengie Molina's father when he died of a heart attack on the rutted Little League field in his Puerto Rican barrio. The items serve as thematic guideposts in Molina's beautiful memoir about his father, who, through baseball, taught his three sons about loyalty, humility, courage, and the true meaning of success.
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A book about life
- By P. Griswold on 06-11-15
By: Bengie Molina, and others
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Bums
- An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers
- By: Peter Golenbock
- Narrated by: Raymond Todd
- Length: 19 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Before the team headed to Los Angeles in 1957, the Brooklyn Dodgers were one of the most colorful and beloved teams in baseball. In Bums, best-selling author Peter Golenbock has compiled a fascinating oral history of the Ebbets Field heroes with recollections from former players, writers, front-office executives, and faithful fans.
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A MUST for the true Dodgers or Giants fan!!
- By Karen on 02-25-07
By: Peter Golenbock
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One Shot at Forever
- A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach, and a Magical Baseball Season
- By: Chris Ballard
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1971, a small-town high school baseball team from rural Illinois playing with hand-me-down uniforms and peace signs on their hats defied convention and the odds. Led by an English teacher with no coaching experience, the Macon Ironmen emerged from a field of 370 teams to become the smallest school in Illinois history to make the state final, a distinction that still stands. There, sporting long hair, and warming up to "Jesus Christ Superstar", the Ironmen would play a dramatic game that would change their lives forever.
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Outstanding.
- By Cartman18 on 08-02-13
By: Chris Ballard
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42 Faith
- The Rest of the Jackie Robinson Story
- By: Ed Henry
- Narrated by: Ed Henry
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Journalist and baseball lover Ed Henry reveals for the first time the backstory of faith that guided Jackie Robinson into not only the baseball record books but the annals of civil rights advancement as well. Through recently discovered sermons, interviews with Robinson's family and friends, and even an unpublished book by the player himself, Henry details a side of Jackie's humanity that few have taken the time to see.
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42Faith
- By Phillip L. on 04-11-17
By: Ed Henry
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The Last Innocents
- The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers
- By: Michael Leahy
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Legendary Dodgers Maury Wills, Sandy Koufax, Wes Parker, Jeff Torborg, Dick Tracewski, and Tommy Davis encapsulated 1960s America: white and black, Jewish and Christian, wealthy and working class, pro-Vietnam and anti-war, golden boy and seasoned veteran. The Last Innocents is a thoughtful, technicolor portrait of these seven players - friends, mentors, confidants, rivals, and allies - and their storied team that offers an intriguing look at a sport and a nation in transition.
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Reliving my youth
- By PJ on 05-24-17
By: Michael Leahy
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The Captain
- The Journey of Derek Jeter
- By: Ian O'Connor
- Narrated by: Nick Pollifrone
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Every spring, Little Leaguers across the country mimic his stance and squabble over the right to wear his number, 2, the next number to be retired by the world’s most famous ball team. Derek Jeter is their hero. He walks in the footsteps of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle, and someday his shadow will loom just as large. Yet he has never been the best player in baseball. In fact, he hasn’t always been the best player on his team. But his intangible grace and Jordanesque ability to play big in the biggest of postseason moments make him the face of the modern Yankee dynasty, and of America’s game.
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Great book, terrible narrator.
- By Butter on 05-09-14
By: Ian O'Connor
What listeners say about The Celebrant
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Eddie38
- 09-04-21
GREAT BOOK ... disappointing audio
A phenomenal book and story and Bronson Pinchot typically is a reliable narrator but whoever directed and produced this audiobook was awful. Pinchot mispronounces almost every historic baseball name starting with his butchering of Napoleon "Lajoie" (SHOULD BE "Lah-jho-way") and it keeps going from there. The edit spacing between sentences is almost nil allowing no shot to hear transitions in thought so the whole audio, to me, seemed like a near rum-on sentence. That said, this is one of the great novels so I recommend it but VERY MUCH WISH that author Greenberg would push to have a newer corrected version recorded.
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- Scott
- 05-27-16
Great speaker not so great book.
Couldn't have made it through the book without this audio book version. The speaker makes it interesting and bearable.
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- Isabelle
- 09-25-19
Excellent narration
Sad and beautiful poetry of baseball, gambling, family, business, jewelry, betrayal, friendship, love, and history.
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- Joe Kraus
- 05-18-18
Thoughtful Novel Never Develops Characters
In some ways, the most intriguing part of this novel is its title. Like “alienist,” celebrant is a word that once upon a time meant a combination of concepts that have since been refined and separated. Someone who was a celebrant was part fan, part artistic admirer of a performer, and part residual believer in some religious ritual.
In that way, this novel sets out to explore the entwined and sometimes conflicting dimensions in which a young man comes to appreciate the baseball world of pre-World War I, a time during which the great Christy Matthewson emerged as the first of the all-time legends of the game. Jake admires Matthewson so much that he refuses multiple opportunities to meet him, choosing instead to design a commemorative ring as part of his work with his family’s rapidly growing jewelry firm. He is, in that regard, a fan, someone taking pleasure at a distance from a man slowly being deified by a game that’s attracting more and more attention from the American public.
At the same time, Jake and his family are Jews, first-generation immigrants who – while growing in wealth – still experience anti-Semitism. (It’s mild, but the most clear-cut example of it, harassment at the hands of a couple of players, rankles Jake for years.) He’s still occasionally an observant Jew, and he seems confident his children will embrace the identity as well, but part of what he finds in baseball is the opportunity to embrace an American faith. He is, therefore, a ‘celebrant’ in the sense that he wants to bring out what he sees as the deep-seated purity of the game. He won’t take money for the ring, for instance, wanting to keep his admiration pure.
When you cross that insight with Greenberg’s own celebrant-like appreciation for the first era in which professional baseball became the nation’s real pastime, there are a lot of things to find interesting in the novel. The history is tight and clever; as a one-time committed adolescent baseball historian myself, I know a lot of these stories, and I’m impressed to see them from fresh angles. We get “Merkle’s Boner” in real-time, before it’s frozen into clear-cut history. We get the Black Sox scandal as it slowly unfolds, before Shoeless Joe Jackson gets cast as a tragic figure for the century that follows. And, above all, we get the apotheosis of Matthewson, the first of the first players elected to the Hall of Fame, while he is still a human and not yet an eternal.
In such a light, this book is exactly the sort I’ve been looking for in the class my friend Will and I are preparing about the intersection of fandom and faith. Maddeningly, though, it falls short. As rich as it is in history and concept, it misses out on the real drama of creating characters who shape a larger narrative. It not only makes present the lost moment of the turn of the last century, but it also embraces that period’s literary technology. This is a novel dominated by old-school Realism; it owes its style and form more to William Dean Howells than to the generations of innovators who’ve come since.
If Jake is the character who embodies the central intellectual conflict of the novel, he does so as a mostly empty body. There’s no clear personal impetus, no explanation for why he in particular feels as he does. He’s the family artist – with no backstory on how he came to be so – and that casts him in a role separate from his siblings.
In contrast, Eli, comes to represent the serpent-like power of gambling in the face of baseball. He loves the game less for itself than for the prospect of using it to discover secret sources of income, to make it a joyful way to compete without paying the price of becoming an athlete himself. Eli is alive and energetic; he’s clearly Jake’s favorite brother, and he is the salesman primarily responsible for building the family business.
From the other side, we have brother Arthur, who has no affection at all for baseball but recognizes ways of using it to help with their corporate growth. He represents a different serpent, not the original one that devastated baseball with the Black Sox scandal but rather the one that threatens it now, the one that sees it as nothing more than a commercial opportunity, one where profits have to be maximized without respect to the joy that inspired the game in the first place.
Both brothers provide useful intellectual contrast to Jake’s quiet, religious-like appreciation of the game, but neither does so from the perspective of a fully formed character. Each is a stock figure, defined expressly for the purpose of offering that contrast rather than as a character who finds his way to such opposition. All three are brothers, for instance, yet there’s no explanation for how they turn out so differently.
(SPOILER: In one of the closing scenes of the novel, with Matthewson slowly dying from the gas he inhaled during World War I, Matthewson explicitly compares himself to a dying Christ and holds Jake to a difficult purity of faith, one that means the end of Eli’s hopes and, in effect, costs Eli his life. Just in case that point isn’t clear, the novel’s final words – as Jake reflects on what it meant to see his hero, possibly his savior, wither and die – are “Eli, Eli,” the same words the dying Christ speaks on the cross.)
It’s frustrating to find a book dealing with such compelling topics that does so with so heavy-handed an approach. I know there are many who admire this as one of the really fine baseball books of the last quarter century, but I’m afraid I don’t see it. It is a remarkable act of baseball historical fiction, and it poses a series of thoughtful questions about the nature of fandom. But at that other level – the level of taking material and finding fully formed characters who seem genuinely to live – I don’t find it all that compelling a novel.
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- Josh
- 08-02-18
Slow moving, great attempt at a good book
Greenberg is ambitious in his fictional dive into baseball lore and is to be commended for that effort. His character’s fawning over Mathewson gets a bit tedious - though I mostly enjoyed the stories of ball players through history. It was so highly recommended I wanted to give it a try, but it did not meet the hype.
Pinchot is a solid narrator but how they did not do quality control when he repeatedly read Cicotte as kah-KOTT instead of SEE-Kott was poorly researched. I cringed each time at the mispronunciation.
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- jwmnatl
- 04-21-16
For any fan of baseball history
An excellent work of baseball fiction that weaves in true accounts of Christy Matheson's first no-hitter in 1901, the Giants' pennant and World Series snub of 1904, the crazy finish in 1908, the 1912 Series, and climaxing with the Black Sox Series of 1919. Bronson Pinchot is a wonderful narrator, though he did mispronounced the names of Eddie Cicotte and Napoleon Lajoie. A+
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- Andrew Werle
- 05-24-24
Great history, better writing
It must be said out front that if you don’t like baseball — if you aren’t moved by the beauty of the game — this book is probably not for you. But if you are a baseball fan, you have a chance to connect with this special book. A wonderful, thoughtful main character, some of the best, most evocative baseball writing I’ve ever read (I am a professional sports writing editor!) and a meticulous grasp of history. Loved the narration by Pinchot. Highly recommend, especially as a companion to the summer months as the season ticks by.
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- M. Heinemann
- 03-14-22
Weird portrayal of Mathewson
Greenberg seems to think Mathewson was mentally ill. Yeah, the book is historical fiction, but this portrayal of Matty is completely different from the reported impressions of friends, opponents, teammates, journalists, and fans. Was Big Six flawed? Of course. But was he a madman? I don’t think so. Greenberg ruins his otherwise good read, imho, by his weird portrayal of an athlete whose exemplary character and career just don’t fit the author’s tale.
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