The scandal was a game-shattering event and cleansed baseball for a moment. Fountain writes of it with professional élan,...
An investigation of one of the most long-lived and still-living sports scandals: the possible throwing of the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds.
In this fine, stylish piece of reporting, Fountain (Journalism/Northeastern Univ.; Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training, 2009, etc.) aims to get to the truth, which is vexing. “Telling the story of the Black Sox [the Black Sox were the White Sox, who got the boot from the commissioner, though they were never found guilty by the grand jury] means acknowledging incompleteness and determining how best to deal with indeterminacy,” writes the author. There is just too much archival data missing; there are too many stories, and too many of the storytellers are dead; and contradictions are all over the evidence. What Fountain does so well is provide the surrounding circumstances—the background to the sport, the gambling, the owners’ greed, the timorous baseball front office, the shafting of the players, all the temptations that coax players to do wrong to gain an edge and make more money—at once shedding light on what is known but especially what has been ignored or underappreciated. The game-fixing routines—which date back to the Civil War—are stories in themselves, and Fountain reports it all. His profiles of the players, clubhouse men, gamblers (from Boss Tweed to Arnold Rothstein), and facilitators are meaty, informative vignettes. The author also includes the gripping story of Shoeless Joe Jackson, who "never played shoeless because he couldn’t afford shoes,” was no bumpkin, actually got along with Ty Cobb (a feat for any player of that era), and wound up with $5,000 without flubbing anything.
The scandal was a game-shattering event and cleansed baseball for a moment. Fountain writes of it with professional élan, which means letting the facts not speak but sing.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-979513-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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 Yorker staff 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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