The program to eradicate smallpox was always underfunded, encountered numerous obstacles from obstructionist, incompetent governments to floods, civil wars, famines, and droughts. It is a story that makes one believe that human beings are worth believing in.
As Cohan perceptively notes, fans tend to consider their sporting loyalties as matters of “nonfiction,” rooted in actual people and real action. In fact, our fandom consists of interpretative storytelling. We consume the tales generated by sports competition, and we refashion them to suit our personal needs.
Kevin Winkler titled his book Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical to assert Fosse’s major role in four decades of development in American musical theater and in contemporary pop culture. Big Deal is also the title of Fosse’s last Broadway show and his first Broadway flop.
Rocky Marciano’s fights were wars of attrition, not tactical contests. This meant that he was a gate attraction even for people who were not fans of boxing.
To seek a more cautious understanding of fascism through scholarly literature, there is probably no place to start more respected than Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, now more than a decade old.
All in all, Roberts and Smith have offered us popular, rather than scholarly, history. Reading about Mantle and the Yankees is a pleasant exercise for anyone who likes baseball, and particularly for those who enjoyed some of those 1950s seasons.
It will take some patience, concentration, and interest to ferret out and connect the pieces of this pugilistic pie, but it is worth the effort.
Hitchcock’s biography imparts a great deal of information about Ike and his times, enough so that the reader can make his or her own judgment about his career. One of the work’s weaknesses is that it does not set Eisenhower’s presidential choices within the context of the times, namely public opinion.
What the Eyes Don't See is a deeply-readable tale of science, public health sleuthing, and a fight for social justice for some of America’s most disfranchised citizens.
Rich manages to capture the messiness of the human experience, having his characters live in the gray moral reality rather than the black-and-white dichotomies presented in the abstract.