BOOKS THREAD

A heads up for anyone interested in "Best American Sportswriting 2011" or the other books in the "Best American" series:

Today only, they are on sale in the Amazon Kindle store for $1.99 each.

The Kindle format doesn't always work best for an anthology, but at $1.99 I'll deal with it.

 

It's impossible to understate just how close the riots came to Comiskey Park hours after the game on July 27: There were skirmishes at 35th and State; the stadium was/is a couple blocks away, a 5-minute walk. It's interesting to wonder whether games would have been postponed later in the week if the White Sox were at home instead of the Cubs. I'm not convinced Charles Comiskey would have called them off — games just weren't cancelled in those days for the same culturally sensitive/significant reasons that they might be today. For instance, the Boston police strike didn't affect the Red Sox's long homestand in September 1919, and the police actually patrolled Fenway Park. Miles away from any violence, the Wms. Wrigley and Veeck had zero reason to cancel any Cubs games during the riots.

I agree completely that baseball could never have been successfully/permanently integrated until at least the Great Depression. There were two periods when baseball had a real opportunity to change race relations: the 1870s, when the professional game first blossomed and Reconstruction still had a chance of being enforced; and any time after 1930, after the Great Migration allowed blacks to build a strong support system throughout the major metro areas of the North.

By the way, does that book at all mention whatever happened to the white kid (err, 20-something) who reportedly instigated the whole thing, George Stauber? I know he was targeted by black rioters in the immediate aftermath, escaping with cuts and bruises, but he was never arrested and a cursory Internet search doesn't reveal any information about the rest of his life. The only post-1919 mention of any George Stauber in the Chicago Tribune comes from a death notice in 1958 of a guy who was buried out near O'Hare. Could be the same guy, but there's no obituary. This was an era when people could effectively disappear and start over, but it's hard to believe nobody digging into the riots has ever found a trace of him — his name was clearly associated with the riots from the beginning. Where did he go?

 

I don't have the book in front of me (it was a library book) but I think Stauber tried to slink away after he realized what he had done and he was surrounded by a group of people (both black and white) who may have roughed him up. A black cop arrested him but a white cop assaulted the black cop and freed Stauber and that's when Stauber disapeared from the narrative. There was an inquest after the riots but, like most of the riots that year, the riot was blamed on militant blacks (read: WWI veterans) and Communist agitation. Evey riot that year was started by whites but whites weren't blamed for a single riot.

I think the best chance that baseball had to integrate before around 1946 was during the Grant Administration (3/1869-3/1877). The Grant Administration has a deservedly smelly reputation but Grant himself was the best and most pro-active President regarding Civil Rights until LBJ almost 100 years later.

 

Sirs, Madames.

Reading Red Harvest by Hammett, the original hard-boiled detective novel. (So long as you dispense with Conan Doyle, etc.) It's remarkable how well it stands up. Ahead of its time. Closer to Ross Macdonald than to Chandler. Also reading Hard-boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories. Shorter fiction. Big revelation: Paul Cain, not a well-celebrated guy, darkest stuff.

YHS, etc

 

I have read the Maltese Falcon and the Thin Man, two all-time classics but I have not read any other Hammett novel. The Glass Key was supposedly his favorite.

 

Mr Horn,

Critical consensus is that Red Harvest had the greatest influence on the genre, but I had heard that about TGK.

YHS, etc

 

Thomas Pynchon's 'Vineland' pleasantly surprised me. I'd been steered away from it by people telling me it so deeply paled in comparison to 'Gravity's Rainbow' and 'V' that it wasn't worth my time. So for a long time I just read those two and left everything else out there unread until now.

Instead, while it isn't the unvarnished brilliance of 'Gravity's Rainbow' I found 'Vineland' fascinating given the 22-year period between its publishing and reading it. His criticism of both the right and left seems more on point in hindsight than it would've in 1990. I love how he teases with the notion of Thanatoids and never explores it any deeper, letting us decide who these undead are who live amongst us.

It's still dizzying for me to read Pynchon. I have to be mentally prepared to tackle one of his books, but this one seemed like his most mature work. A book that has me alternately convinced the writer is disillusioned and in love with a movement and a time period did its job perfectly.

 

I'll have to read that at some point fotf.

I also recently read "Making of the President 1972" and thought it was okay. I had never read any of White's stuff. His style fell out of favor after the Watergate era but the "campaign book" has been a staple of American journalism because of him. I'm sure many here have read Game Change. I wonder what the big book from this year will be.

 

Just finished Steven Tyler's memoir, Does The Noise In My Head Bother You? Not in the same class as Keith Richards' book, but an entertaining, if, at times, frustrating read.

Like Tyler's legendary raps it veers all over the place and it can be tough to get a sense of where you are in the story chronologically. There is little about Aerosmith's music, but plenty about the band's rampant dysfunction, off-the-charts drug use and Tyler's many failed relationships and rehab visits.

To me, Walk This Way, the band's autobiography which Tyler trashes a time or two along the way, remains the definitive Aerosmith read.

 

Been reading a lot of Helen Dewitt ("The Last Samurai" and "Lightning Rods")

Love her style and snark

 

Starting Bill James' "Popular Crime," for when I have a few minutes here and there to read.

 

Just finished The Bullpen Gospels, former MLB pitcher Dirk Hayhurst's first book about his life in the minors. A great, at times very funny, book about baseball, life and a life in baseball. He has a new book out about his MLB days called Out Of My League.