1princessgarnet
Happy Labor Day to US readers!
Finished from the library: Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers by Anne Somerset (2024)
An in depth look at Queen Victoria and the prime ministers who served during her reign.
The book was released here in the US in Nov. 2024.
Finished from the library: Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers by Anne Somerset (2024)
An in depth look at Queen Victoria and the prime ministers who served during her reign.
The book was released here in the US in Nov. 2024.
2jztemple
>1 princessgarnet: I just picked this up on a Kindle sale. What did you think of the book?
3jztemple
Finished the Kindle version of Supplying the British Army in the Second World War by Janet Macdonald
4Shrike58
Just finished Rome is Burning, which is really a deep-dive by the author about our limits of knowledge of what he calls Rome's "Chernobyl."
5jztemple
Completed an unusual Be Very Afraid!: The Scurrilous History of the Invasion-Scare Novel by Richard Freeman
6AndreasJ
A good, pretty short book whose reading I dragged out far too long: The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades:
7Shrike58
Knocked off Tiger in the Sea, an account of a then famous aviation catastrophe that is the proverbial triumph of the human experience (which all involved survivors would have cheerfully skipped out on).
8Shrike58
Wrapped up Saving Michelangelo's Dome. Not sure how much I trust the author's take on Rome in the 18th century, but his account of the period repair work on the dome of St. Peter's seemed on the money. A little too gushy for my taste.
9princessgarnet
>2 jztemple: I thought it was interesting. Some of Queen Victoria's later prime ministers (such as Gladstone and Disraeli) were in and out of office depending on the electoral cycle.
10AndreasJ
Last week I finished Ptolemaic Itanos and Hellenistic Crete:
12rocketjk
The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City by Kevin Baker
This excellent history basically brand new, published just this year. I'd looked it over several times in bookstores but ended up being very happy I didn't buy it, as my lovely wife took care of that for me by giving it to me as a 70th birthday present. The book is a bit of a doorstop, checking in a 475 pages, but I soon found that I didn't care much about that at all, as this history is extremely well written and quite interesting. Baker, who has written extensively--novels as well as histories--about New York City, does a great job here of not just writing about the history of baseball in New York, but skillfully weaving that history with the story of the city itself. In so doing, Baker puts baseball in its proper social context through the various city eras, letting us know what the game and its stars meant to the city's baseball fans, and why. The book covers the period from the Civil War through the end of World War 2, stopping just short of Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color line in 1947. We get pocket biographies of the New York game's great stars and managers, of course, including Christy Mathewson, Joe McCarthy, Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Casey Stengel, John McGraw, Joe Dimaggio, Carl Hubbell and many others. Also we read about the owners: how they came to own their teams, who they had to deal with to do business in the city, and how they succeeded or failed as owners, and why. Baker also give us entertaining chronologies of some of the great seasons, pennant races and World Series. Descriptions of the rise of the Negro Leagues, and the Major League owners consistent refusal over many decades to integrate their league, are also well done.
But somewhat unusually (and admirably) for a baseball history, he also places the game within a firm political context, often turning away from baseball itself for long stretches to explain some of the city's (and country's) most important political/economic eras. For example:
Baker does a great job exploring the confluence of baseball and organized crime in the city, including the game's early problems with gambling, the mobsters who had so much influence over every facet of city life, and the fact that the early 20th Century baseball owners had to play ball with corrupt city officials in order to find places to build their ballparks. In the days when Manhattan and the other boroughs were still being built up, owners found that city officials on the take often had to be put on their teams' boards of directors, for example, in order to keep the city government from running streets through the lots the owners had purchased for ballfields. Of course, when one thinks of corruption in New York City, one thinks of the infamous political machine, Tammany Hall. Baker devotes an entire chapter to the corruption, rot and violence that the Tammany machine represented through the 1920s in particular. Pointing out that because of the rampant avarice inherent in the machine, the needs of the city itself began to be ignored. The docks were rotting, the hospitals in fetid disrepair and so forth. This was all taking place during the Roaring 20s, when New York City was ostensibly enjoying high times. But when the Depression hit, the veil was ripped away, the city administration revealed to be almost entirely hollow, with essentially no infrastructure able to provide a safety net for the widespread poverty that ensued. Interestingly, as Baker observes, in future New Yorkers' sense of nostalgia would focus much more on these hard times than on the high living of the 20s that had preceded them. Fiorelo LaGuardia's reformist mayoralty gets a detailed description, as well. And, of course, the role that baseball served in helping people enjoy the high times and get through the tough times, and the ways in which particular players and teams fit in with the tenor of their times (or failed to) is prominently baked into the narrative.
Baker concludes his history with a full chapter on the ever-increasing oppression experienced by New York's African American population, especially within Harlem, including the many anti-Black pogroms that took place, and the riots that ran through Harlem based on rumors of violence or actual violence, on the part of the police.
Normally in the case of a baseball history or biography, I include the phrase somewhere: "For baseball fans only." In this case, I'd say that anyone with an interest in the history of New York City as well as at least a passing interest in baseball history might enjoy this excellent work.
This excellent history basically brand new, published just this year. I'd looked it over several times in bookstores but ended up being very happy I didn't buy it, as my lovely wife took care of that for me by giving it to me as a 70th birthday present. The book is a bit of a doorstop, checking in a 475 pages, but I soon found that I didn't care much about that at all, as this history is extremely well written and quite interesting. Baker, who has written extensively--novels as well as histories--about New York City, does a great job here of not just writing about the history of baseball in New York, but skillfully weaving that history with the story of the city itself. In so doing, Baker puts baseball in its proper social context through the various city eras, letting us know what the game and its stars meant to the city's baseball fans, and why. The book covers the period from the Civil War through the end of World War 2, stopping just short of Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color line in 1947. We get pocket biographies of the New York game's great stars and managers, of course, including Christy Mathewson, Joe McCarthy, Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Casey Stengel, John McGraw, Joe Dimaggio, Carl Hubbell and many others. Also we read about the owners: how they came to own their teams, who they had to deal with to do business in the city, and how they succeeded or failed as owners, and why. Baker also give us entertaining chronologies of some of the great seasons, pennant races and World Series. Descriptions of the rise of the Negro Leagues, and the Major League owners consistent refusal over many decades to integrate their league, are also well done.
But somewhat unusually (and admirably) for a baseball history, he also places the game within a firm political context, often turning away from baseball itself for long stretches to explain some of the city's (and country's) most important political/economic eras. For example:
Baker does a great job exploring the confluence of baseball and organized crime in the city, including the game's early problems with gambling, the mobsters who had so much influence over every facet of city life, and the fact that the early 20th Century baseball owners had to play ball with corrupt city officials in order to find places to build their ballparks. In the days when Manhattan and the other boroughs were still being built up, owners found that city officials on the take often had to be put on their teams' boards of directors, for example, in order to keep the city government from running streets through the lots the owners had purchased for ballfields. Of course, when one thinks of corruption in New York City, one thinks of the infamous political machine, Tammany Hall. Baker devotes an entire chapter to the corruption, rot and violence that the Tammany machine represented through the 1920s in particular. Pointing out that because of the rampant avarice inherent in the machine, the needs of the city itself began to be ignored. The docks were rotting, the hospitals in fetid disrepair and so forth. This was all taking place during the Roaring 20s, when New York City was ostensibly enjoying high times. But when the Depression hit, the veil was ripped away, the city administration revealed to be almost entirely hollow, with essentially no infrastructure able to provide a safety net for the widespread poverty that ensued. Interestingly, as Baker observes, in future New Yorkers' sense of nostalgia would focus much more on these hard times than on the high living of the 20s that had preceded them. Fiorelo LaGuardia's reformist mayoralty gets a detailed description, as well. And, of course, the role that baseball served in helping people enjoy the high times and get through the tough times, and the ways in which particular players and teams fit in with the tenor of their times (or failed to) is prominently baked into the narrative.
Baker concludes his history with a full chapter on the ever-increasing oppression experienced by New York's African American population, especially within Harlem, including the many anti-Black pogroms that took place, and the riots that ran through Harlem based on rumors of violence or actual violence, on the part of the police.
Normally in the case of a baseball history or biography, I include the phrase somewhere: "For baseball fans only." In this case, I'd say that anyone with an interest in the history of New York City as well as at least a passing interest in baseball history might enjoy this excellent work.
13Rome753
>12 rocketjk: Sounds like a very interesting book. It sounds like quite a task having to tie baseball into the other areas.
14Rome753
I finished reading The Middle Kingdoms by Martyn Rady. It covers the history of Central Europe (Germany, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Ukraine, etc.) from about the time of the Roman Empire through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting fallout. Overall, I felt that Rady did reasonably well in covering the history, politics, and culture in a very broad way. He doesn't go into extreme depth on several points, but the book still serves as a good introduction to the history of the region.
15rocketjk
>13 Rome753: The book can seem a bit disjointed, I guess, as there are whole sections that barely mention baseball at all. But those sections were so interesting and well done that I didn't really mind. But, for example, the ways in which the early New York baseball owners were forced to interact with Tammany Hall fit naturally enough into the overall narrative such that the relatively detailed description of how the Tammany machine worked seemed a natural fit as well.
16Rome753
>15 rocketjk: Very interesting.
17Shrike58
Finished Watching Darkness Fall, which in between talking about the relationship between FDR and his main diplomats, did a pretty good job of putting the contingency into the story of the countdown to World War II in Europe. Nothing that dramatic for the long-time student of conflict, but I think the proverbial general reader is well-served by this work.
18jztemple
Just finished a couple of books, the first is Chivalry and Command: 500 years of Horse Guards by Brian Harwood
19jztemple
And the other book was Sumter is Avenged: The Siege and Reduction of Fort Pulaski by Herbert M. Schiller
20Shrike58
>14 Rome753: I had intended to read that for awhile, but I've done so much reading about the region my initial skim suggested that I might be beyond it; we'll see.
21Rome753
>20 Shrike58: Were there any books that you read on the region that you particularly liked?
22Shrike58
>21 Rome753: I'll get back to you on that during the course of the week.
23Shrike58
I'm done with The Empress of Art, which had the Borders chain still been a thing when it was published, I might have not kept it entrenched on Mount TBR as long as I had, given the opportunity to have a perusal. It's interesting, but I'm not really sure it hangs together as a narrative.
24rocketjk
Finished up September with the brief but interesting Plunkitt of Tammany Hall a series of infamous "talks" given by George Washington Plunkitt, a major operative of the infamous Tammany Hall political machine that ran New York City for decades. The talks, given from the seat of a shoeshine stand outside a New York City courthouse in the first years of the 20th century, were written down and published in 1905 by journalist William L. Riordon. Explanations and defenses of the machine/patronage system of government, they are often humorous on the surface, but the message is chilling. My full review is up on my Club Read thread.
25Rome753
>22 Shrike58: Sounds good.
26Shrike58
>25 Rome753: I sent you a private response.
