THE BOOKS
"Fans will savor Larry Ruttman’s Fenway Park memoir. Ruttman’s love affair with this iconic ballpark extends from the Great Depression to the present. Along with Harvard, the Commons, and the Freedom Trail, Fenway Park animates the soul of Boston. In Ruttman’s warm, observant, and compelling personal account, the reader experiences Fenway Park as a living, breathing entity. The affair began with a 5-year-old Ruttman accompanying his father to a 1936 game. As the decades rolled by, the unique caroms, angles, and dimensions of this green cathedral domiciled many of baseball’s indelible moments. Ruttman, a master storyteller, captures the highs and lows with a mix of drama, detail, anecdote, and humor. From bleacher and box seats—and a luxury suite stint—the defining seasons, games, plays, and ballplayers remain vivid in Ruttman’s telling recollections. 'The Beast,' Teddy Ballgame, Yaz, Tiant, Lynn, Rice, Dewey, Clemens, Dustin, Mookie, and so many more inhabit Ruttman’s pages as do the fans, some as celebrated as the ballplayers, others friends as well as strangers transformed into part of a common Greek chorus. Pick up the book to hear the crowd cheer, jeer, and moan. Reading Ruttman is the next best thing to going to a game at Fenway, hot dog in hand."
—Bill Simons, Professor Emeritus, SUNY Oneonta
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Intimate Conversations: Face to Face with Matchless Musicians
For praise and other information on Intimate Conversations: Face to Face with Matchless Musicians, please click here to visit Praise for Larry's Books.
Larry Ruttman: A Life Lived Backwards
An Existential Triad of Friendship, Maturation, and Inquisitiveness
For praise and other information on Larry Ruttman: A Life Lived Backwards, please click here to visit Praise for Larry's Books.
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From the back cover of Larry Ruttman: A Life Lived Backwards:
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"Probably the best way to briefly tell what this memoir is about is to quote the author himself in his notes to his first podcast on what he meant by its title, A Life Lived Backwards.
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"How could I know the best part of my life would begin at age seventy? That then I would become an interviewer, an author, a story teller, sort of a personality, and for the first time ever become so immersed in what I was doing, that at those moments I was doing it, nothing else seemed to matter. What a feeling! I still feel it at ninety. That gives meaning to my life. That extends life! And it's something YOU can experience. I think that is the main reason why I wrote the memoir. I'm not a special person, I'm just a person like any of you listening to this podcast. So I'm hoping my life, and my use of my particular characteristics of Friendship, Inquisitiveness, and Maturation, may help you find meaning at any time of life. I tell here how my second career unfolded in the last twenty years or so, leading to this memoir, and the plethora of incredible famous and regular people in my life.
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People, always people!"
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American Jews and America's Game (AJAG)
ISBN-13-978-0803264755
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Most fans don’t know how far the Jewish presence in baseball extends beyond a few famous players such as Greenberg, Rosen, Koufax, Holtzman, Green, Ausmus, Youkilis, Braun, and Kinsler. In fact, that presence extends to the baseball commissioner Bud Selig, labor leaders Marvin Miller and Don Fehr, owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Stuart Sternberg, officials Theo Epstein and Mark Shapiro, sportswriters Murray Chass, Ross Newhan, Ira Berkow, and Roger Kahn, and even famous Jewish baseball fans like Alan Dershowitz and Barney Frank.
The life stories of these and many others, on and off the field, have been compiled from nearly fifty in-depth interviews and arranged by decade in this edifying and entertaining work of oral and cultural history. In American Jews and America’s Game each person talks about growing up Jewish and dealing with Jewish identity, assimilation, intermarriage, future viability, religious observance, anti-Semitism, and Israel. Each tells about being in the midst of the colorful pantheon of players who, over the past seventy-five years or more, have made baseball what it is. Their stories tell, as no previous book has, the history of the larger-than-life role of Jews in America’s pastime.
Voices of Brookline
ISBN-13-978-1931807395
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Larry Ruttman gathers the entertaining, historical, and incisive testimony of seventy diverse Brookline citizens and weaves it into a rich oral history. The result is a colorful portrait of a town deeply committed to all that America strives for: multicultural harmony, excellence in public education, the democratic ideals inherent in Brookline’s spirited Town Meeting, economic prosperity, and historic and environmental preservation.
Voices of Brookline is itself a beautiful exercise in democracy. Here are the voices of famous authors, single moms, Red Sox fans, celebrated musicians, Holocaust survivors, a distinguished conductor, a world class chef, high school kids, renowned politicians, the chief of police, octogenarian jazz performers, pioneering entrepreneurs, nationally celebrated TV journalists, and many more.
My Eighty-Two Year Love Affair with Fenway Park
“....It is with something approaching incredulity that we arrive at the end of Ruttman’s memoir, marveling at the obvious love he has sustained for the game, and for the Sox, through good times and bad. There is just one thing missing: A 'TO BE CONTINUED’ line at the end. The Sox, and Larry Ruttman, remain an interlocking work in progress.
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“Follow this link to read Larry Ruttman’s memoir.
http://www.americanjewsandamericasgame.com/fenway-memoir.html"
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—Gordon Edes, former historian of the Boston Red Sox
June 7, 201