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.

... lively.