Gerald Early

Alou is one of the best baseball autobiographies of recent years because it offers the story of race and baseball not from a non-American perspective, but from someone who got to know the United States very well as both a resident and a subject of its foreign policy, as both insider and outsider.

The basic facts are here, from Spahn’s upbringing in Buffalo to his last year in baseball with the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants, as well as some useful quotes but there are two problems with Freedman’s book.

Slugfest is a fun book for anyone interested in comic books, in American popular culture generally, or in the obsessive and sometimes pathological nature of business competition. But it is not the incisive book about this industry that still awaits its author.

William J. Ryczek aptly documents baseball’s generation of conflict through 1968, the year “America’s pastime” confronted racial militancy, Vietnam, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and also the growing dominance of football.

Kyle Longley’s book on LBJ mixes two rich elements: one of the most remarkable, and remarkably flawed men, ever to be U.S. president, plus one of the most troubling, tragic, and turbulent years of the 20th century.

Those familiar with Sowell’s major works will find little here that has not been argued in his other books. For his fans, this consistency gives his arguments greater validity and provides greater comfort.

What we have in Black Fortune is not just a proto-black version of the Rich and the Famous, although it is on some level precisely that, but also another kind of origin story of the black elite or of a black economic elite or leisure class and how it saw its racial duties, this last being a major obsession with successful blacks.

There was a time when I had dreams, infrequently but strikingly, that my mother had died. These occurred some years ago when I did not talk to her very regularly or see her often.

Corrigan’s book is well-conceived and well-executed, written with a polemical chip on its shoulder, to be sure, but with an earnest intelligence that makes it a compelling and at times even absorbing read, revealing a striking self-awareness of the stakes and the drama of the psy-war that prison custodians and their prisoners engage in.

Craig Shirley makes a solid case for the importance of Gingrich in revamping both the Republican Party and American conservatism.