Dan McLaughlin, National Review, March 29, 2020:
Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith didn't set out to write a book about the Spanish-flu pandemic of 1918, but the outbreak looms like the ghost at the banquet over their new book War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War. A recurring storyline that runs through the book's narrative has a much more urgent feel today as America is in the grips of the worst pandemic since that terrible autumn.
War Fever looks at America in the First World War through the lens of three interwoven stories, all tied to Boston in 1918: baseball legend Babe Ruth, Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Karl Muck, and Charles Whittlesey, the commander of the "Lost Battalion" in the Argonne Forest. ...
Babe Ruth's story is the best-known of the three, although readers who know his years as a Red Sox pitcher and Yankee slugger will be interested in a closer focus on the season when he was truly a two-way player, making the transition to the everyday lineup while remaining a key contributor on the mound. Allan Wood covered much of the same ground in his excellent 2000 book Babe Ruth and the 1918 Red Sox, but Roberts and Smith integrate Ruth's story more thoroughly into the wartime context.
2 comments:
Correction: My book arrived in 2001.
I found an entertaining excerpt:
Even drunk in the early morning, driving an unfamiliar automobile with another man’s wife on the seat beside him, Babe thought he could make it. Close to the Kenmore Street subway station, two trolley cars of the Newton and Brighton lines were approaching each other and going entirely too slowly for the Red Sox ace. Judging the distance between the two trolleys, Babe entertained the notion that there was just enough time for him to speed between them. He was wrong. He struck one streetcar, knocking it off its tracks, and ricocheted into the other. Both trolleys sustained considerable damage, and the car was “smashed to a shapeless mass.” Babe escaped from the vehicle with booze on his breath but unscratched.
The same could not be said for two women in the accident. The crash hurled Cora Walker off her trolley seat into the side of the car, injuring her chest and hip, and sending her to the City Hospital. Mrs. Harriet Crane, Ruth’s late-night companion and the owner of the automobile, suffered facial lacerations and bruises. She took a taxi to the hospital, apparently without Babe. From the brief reports in the next day’s papers, the reader could only glean that he drove as he pitched — fast and with great dash. One reporter even applauded the ballplayer’s nerve, commenting that throughout the wreck, he “heroically stuck to the wheel,” attempting through sheer willpower to salvage a winning result.
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