The memory of place is a strong one, especially in childhood. And for many Americans, one of the quintessential places to remember is where we watched baseball being played.
The arrival of "The Ballpark Book: A Journey Through the Fields of Baseball Magic'' (Sporting News, $39.95), then, comes as something of a plate of literary comfort food for the baseball sentimentalist.
Author Ron Smith, a Sporting News senior editor, has put together an interesting hybrid of coffee-table book and -- appropriate for statistics-minded baseball fans -- jam-packed package of facts and numbers about America's ball yards.
Here you'll find old standards -- not just Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, but Shibe Park in Philadelphia, where Athletics' manager Connie Mack presided in business suit and tie, and League Park in Cleveland, where the ''illogical dimensions'' gave birth to a kind of play known as ''wall ball.''
But here, too, are odes to modern parks: the Astrodome, which spawned a small army of domed parks throughout the major leagues, and Arlington Stadium, the Texas Rangers' home where the nickname, Turnpike Stadium, didn't really evoke romantic memories of Elysian fields. And the new wave of old-style ballparks, including Baltimore's Camden Yards and Cleveland's Jacobs Field, are represented, too.
Smith and illustrator Kevin Belford have done an admirable job of tracking down facts and photos that will capture any fan's dreams of baseball brick and mortar.
''Of course you remember,'' Smith writes. And we do.
Ode to the outhouse
It's not exactly a big topic of discussion these days. But before indoor plumbing, most American houses had another house out back, and relieving yourself meant trudging, sometimes through darkness and inclement weather, to that little wooden hut.
"The Vanishing American Outhouse: Privy Plans, Photographs, Poems and Folklore'' (Viking Studio, $19.95, paperback) by folk architecture historian Ronald S. Barlow is a surprisingly comprehensive (given the material) look at this one-time institution that has since passed on. It is, shall we say, flush with facts and figures.
You'll read tales of spiders in the outhouse. You'll see blueprints for new outhouses. You'll view pictures of Texas roadside outhouses shaped like teepees. You'll learn about the outhouse's relationship to the Saturday night bath. And you'll see old advertisements for outhouses and outhouse accessories. You'll learn more than you ever dreamed possible about toilet tissue -- and some of its rough-hewn progenitors.
Crude? Not really. It's part of our culture -- an important part and thus worth exploring. Cleanliness and technological innovation are an integral part of American history, and this book treats its subject in a way that is both humorous and serious, and always an interesting trip.
Little burger, come to me
Four, five, six, seven. Nine?
A dozen?
Maybe more?
That's what can happen when a diner with a big appetite visits the renowned hamburger chain White Castle. The burgers are tiny -- ''sliders,'' they're commonly called, for how easily they slip down your throat -- and the consumption is often quite abundant.
In "Selling 'Em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food'' (NYU Press, $50 hardcover, $18.95 paperback), David Gerard Hogan, an associate professor of history at Heidelberg College in Ohio, undertakes the history of the slider and how this odd offshoot of the full-sized burger burrowed its way into American popular culture.
Along the way, you'll learn about White Castle founder Billy Ingram, who was instrumental in selling the American hamburger to an initially reluctant public. ''Buy 'em by the sack,'' Ingram advised, and Americans did -- long before anyone ever heard of a Big Mac or a Whopper.
But it's not only about food. ''This is a more complicated story than just that of a man opening a hamburger stand,'' Hogan writes, and he's right. Though the automobile probably made the fast-food era inevitable, White Castle was integral in ushering it in. And the way the business has been run -- both initially and, later, in a corporate foodscape of burger big shots -- is a fascinating American tale unto itself.
''Selling 'Em by the Sack'' is no mere ode to the hamburger. It represents the best of what can happen when popular culture and academia collide -- a readable, relevant and credible look at an American phenomenon that may operate in the background, but helps shape what we are.
Unusual tales about
unusual comestibles
Food is, of course, weird to begin with -- as weird as human tastes themselves. Who would have thought, for example, that we'd ever be eating something called a ''turducken'' -- a chicken stuffed into a duck that is stuffed, in turn, into a turkey.
It is in this particular fertile soil that author Alan Ridenour has produced "Offbeat Food: Adventures in an Omnivorous World'' (Santa Monica Press, $19.95, paperback), the latest in a series of ''Offbeat'' books that delve into the weirder side of life.
This is a catalog of sorts -- a guided tour through some of the facts and figures and anecdotes associated with popular and not-so-popular foodstuff.
Did you know that M&Ms, for example, owe their origin to something eaten by soldiers during the Spanish Civil War? Or that Nikita Khrushchev was a Spam fan? Or that one French dish involves calves' eyes stuffed with truffles and mushrooms, and is deep-fried in batter? (Did you really need to know that last one?)
Behind the weirdness, though, is some truly interesting research about the ways and whys of what we eat. The book takes its rightful place next to ''Offbeat Museums'' and ''Offbeat Golf.'' In a tour of world foodways, this is a side trip in an off-road vehicle.
