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War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War
Bottom of the pile
23
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
41/100Critics
6/100Scholars
Author:
Randy W. Roberts, John Smith
Publisher:
Basic Books
Date:
March 24, 2020
Explores a delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved.
What The Reviewers Say
Ruth’s legend is one of the most overplayed in American lore: the carousing overgrown boy who changed the game with his prodigious power. In the context of war and pandemic, however, his story gets a fresh scrub..
The passages on Muck’s internment and the Lost Battalion are among this book’s best, but on the whole War Fever remains less than the sum of its too-many parts. In fact, only the war connects our headliners. Baseball certainly doesn’t. Beyond that, there are enough false notes to give a careful reader pause.
Though it’s hard to find good fortune in the midst of a global pandemic, War Fever authors Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith have been given the gift of relevance. Their book is about a disease that is suddenly an apt historical parallel, about baseball when we are starved for sports, and about xenophobia and ginned-up controversies at a moment when people in power are demonizing outsiders and decrying real news as fake. But if serendipity can make a middling book timely, chance can’t raise an okay one to greatness.
... well-researched if flimsily connected.
