A useful, informative presentation. (38 photos, not seen)
Baseball historian and biographer Alexander (Rogers Hornsby, 1995, etc.) takes a breathless tour through the national pastime as it adapted to the harsh economy of the Great Depression.
Detroit Tiger star Hank Greenberg lost his $6,000 signing bonus when the stock market collapsed in October 1929, but baseball business remained robust through the 1930 season. The Yankees drew 1.6 million fans that year, a record that stood until 1946. Alexander combines anecdotes and statistics to summarize the pennant races and World Series for each year of the decade. In 1931, when teams trimmed rosters to 23 and salaries were declining, the National League adopted a “dead ball” to decrease scoring. Hack Wilson, the Cub slugger whose 1930 record of 190 RBIs still stands, suffered with the unresponsive ball and began drinking heavily. Dizzy and Paul Dean, members of the St. Louis Cardinals Gas House Gang pitched beautifully and quarreled endlessly with umpires and management. A declining Babe Ruth, a healthy (until 1939) Lou Gehrig, and an emerging Joe DiMaggio led the Yankees to five World Series in the 1930s. Alexander (History/Ohio Univ.) uses the teams’ financials to reveal the economic strain. Cleveland business manager Billy Evans provided a budget for 1932. Team costs were $535,000, with $235,000 going to player salaries; hotel rooms ($5 per night), meals ($4 per player per day), and transportation totaled $30,000. To break even, a team had to draw 500,000 fans at home and the same amount on the road. Of eight teams in the American League, only the Yankees made money. Macroeconomic data paints the big picture: the Roosevelt Recession of 1938 undermined the 1935–37 improvement; auto and steel production were down; unemployment was back up to 11 million people. Alexander concludes with an analysis of the demographic changes in the player population and a long chapter on the popular Negro Leagues.
A useful, informative presentation. (38 photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-231-11342-0
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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