Prager, Joshua 1971- (Joshua Harris Prager)

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Prager, Joshua 1971- (Joshua Harris Prager)

PERSONAL:

Born 1971. Education: Graduated from Columbia College, 1994.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Journalist. Wall Street Journal, New York, NY, senior special writer.

WRITINGS:

The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard round the World, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joshua Prager is the nephew of conservative commentator Dennis Prager. After studying music theory at Columbia College, Prager became a journalist and eventually began working for the Wall Street Journal as a senior special writer. An investigative writer, Prager spent much of 2005 and 2006 tracking down the only anonymous Pulitzer Prize winner in the award's history—Jahangir Razmi, who photographed Kurdish executions in Iran.

Prager published his first book, The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard round the World, in 2006. His debut book discusses the rumors surrounding the 1951 baseball play-off between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, namely the accusation that the Giants were stealing the opposing catcher's signs by using a telescope. The book got its start from a 2001 article Prager published in the Wall Street Journal uncovering proof to this long-standing claim. Elliott Vanskike, reviewing the work in the Washington Post Book World, commented that despite some "quirks of style and pace," Prager writes "with novelistic detail and cinematic sweep," and "captures the enduring impact of the memorable moments that mark our lives." While questioning some of the author's syntactic choices, New York Times Book Review contributor John Thorn commended the book's "glorious passages," and deemed the work "a revelation and a page turner, a group character study unequaled in baseball writing since Roger Kahn's Boys of Summer some three decades ago." A contributor to Kirkus Reviews labeled the book "a masterful blend of journalism, sports history, social history, and even literature" and called it "one of the best baseball books to appear in a long time."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 2006, Bill Ott, review of The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard round the World, p. 48.

Entertainment Weekly, September 29, 2006, Chris Nashawaty, review of The Echoing Green, p. 89.

Gelf Magazine, December 5, 2006, David Downs, author interview.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2006, review of The Echoing Green, p. 716.

New York Observer, September 25, 2006, Evan Hughes, review of The Echoing Green.

New York Times Book Review, October 8, 2006, John Thorn, review of The Echoing Green.

Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2006, review of The Echoing Green, p. 50.

Vogue, October, 2006, Megan O'Grady, review of The Echoing Green, p. 308.

Washington Post Book World, November 23, 2006, Elliott Vanskike, review of The Echoing Green, p. C3.