The book would have benefitted from a stronger edit, for length as well as overwriting, but the story is worth telling.
A sweeping saga of baseball during World War II: of the players who enlisted and fought overseas, of the ones who replaced them and of the significant changes in the culture.
Most fans know that the war deprived Hall of Famers such as Hank Greenberg, Bob Feller and Ted Williams of what could have been prime seasons and that the motley crew who replaced them was a ragtag assemblage. Former Los Angeles Daily News baseball columnist Klima (Bushville Wins!: The Wild Saga of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves and the Screwballs, Sluggers, and Beer Swiggers Who Canned the New York Yankees and Changed Baseball, 2012, etc.) has a broader scope: “The war created who we are and it created modern baseball, and from that came the evolution of modern professional sports today, because the games we play change because of the battles we fought.” Florid prose accompanies such big claims, as the author attempts to get inside the heads of players he never met, indulges in sportswriter sentiment (“He was generously listed at five foot nine, but he had a smile wider than his height”), and jumps around a little too much from character to character. Yet he makes a persuasive case that the war ushered baseball into the modern era, that night baseball, integration, TV, planes replacing trains, the hint of free agency and the proliferation of baseball wherever the soldiers went all have at least some connection with the war and that baseball helped boost morale among soldiers fighting overseas as well as the fans back home. The author delivers some compelling narrative threads: the enlistments and returns of Greenberg, Feller and the others; the battle to the majors of one-armed Pete Gray, and, most movingly, the death of pilot Billy Southworth Jr., who sacrificed his baseball aspirations and life for his country, and the devastation of his father, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals.
The book would have benefitted from a stronger edit, for length as well as overwriting, but the story is worth telling.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06479-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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