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

Reviewed by: No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing by Joe Bonomo Mitchell Nathanson Joe Bonomo. No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 232 pp. Cloth, $27.95. It could not have been easy to write about Roger Angell. First off, his life story certainly isn't out of the Horatio Alger mold. Angell was born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he soon traded in for gold. If privilege were a lake, he would have drowned by grade school. It's not every kid who could read about his parents' divorce in the pages of The New York Times (5) or of his mother's remarriage—to E. B. White—in a Walter Winchell column (5). Speaking of his mother, Katherine, she was the fiction and poetry editor at the New Yorker, so the fact that Roger would wind up there as well is hardly the sort of achievement that could possibly gobsmack readers. And then there is Angell's writing, that sways heavy like an anvil over the head of anybody who dares to compete with him, which a biographer has no choice but to do. "At a night game," Angell wrote in a 1964 New Yorker piece on [End Page 136] the Polo Grounds partially reprinted within the book, "the moon rising out of the scoreboard like a spongy, day-old orange balloon and then whitening over the waves of noise and the slow, shifting clouds of floodlit cigarette smoke" (49). Who would be crazy enough to try to top that? Thankfully, Joe Bonomo took on the task of writing about Angell and, just as thankfully, was not crazy enough to attempt to beat him in a war of the sentences. Instead, what he has produced is a lively take on Angell's baseball writing—enough to put it all in context and to do what all good literary biographies do: send the reader sprinting to the subject's work. Bonomo hedges a bit at the outset of his book, alleging that it's not so much a biography as a literary analysis (xiv), although he intersperses snippets of Angell's life story throughout. So let's call it a quasi-biography. Angell warned that he would not cooperate if Bonomo intended to do a deep dive into his life, and mercifully, Bonomo had no plans to do that anyway. There's only so much about a life ensconced within the Upper East Side/Harvard/the New Yorker that a reader can comfortably swallow. Instead, Bonomo, who teaches in the English department at Northern Illinois University when he's not writing about music, puts on his professor's cap and guides the reader through Angell's baseball writing, identifying themes, and even words ("startle" is an Angell favorite, as is "wintry") that run through his New Yorker pieces. He identifies Angell's "season of discontent" (57) in 1976 when Angell, for the first time, wrote that he no longer felt at home at the ballpark. Yankee Stadium had just reopened after a massive refurbishment and Angell had trouble recognizing it. Combined with the labor unrest that was percolating throughout baseball, Angell wondered if the game had irretrievably changed. "I don't know what to think," Angell wrote at the time, "because it may be that the money and the size of sport have grown too big for me after all" (57). Bonomo adeptly notes that while Angell recovered a bit, "the mid-decade malaise had left a mark. He was never quite the same fan again …" (58–59). Fans of Angell who might wonder why they need to read about their favorite baseball writer when they already have his work in front of them would do well to pick this book up anyway; for all of Angell's talents he cannot put his own work into context. Bonomo does and reading him here helps to deepen one's appreciation of Angell's writing and perspective. Perhaps the most striking insight I gained while reading this book is that although we tend to think of Angell...

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