Sports Fact and Book Rec of the Day 8/21/2007

8/21/1977:
Batting .336, second in the National League behind teammate Dave Parker, Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Rennie Stennett breaks his right ankle sliding into second base to break up a double play and is lost for the season. He'll never hit above .244 again, and much of his base-stealing speed and fielding mobility will be gone when he returns next year. He'll lose his job to Phil Garner in 1979, move on to the Giants as a free agent and by 1981, at age 30, be out of baseball.

Birthdays:
Toe Blake b. 1912
Wilt Chamberlain b. 1936
Archie Griffin b. 1954
John Wetteland b. 1966
Craig Counsell b. 1970


The spiritualism craze of the 1920s is the rich fodder for Gangemi’s colorful first novel. Mina Crawley is a Philadelphia medium so convincing in her art that she will win a whopping $5,000 in a contest sponsored by Scientific American. Unless she can be exposed as a fraud. Harvard psychology student Martin Finch has unmasked many other phonies as one of the contest judges, but he falls in love with Mina and lands in prison for murder. A spellbinding tale based closely on a true story.

INAMORATA, by Joseph Gangemi (Penguin, 2005)