Mitchell, Lincoln A. Baseball Goes West: The Dodgers, the Giants, and the Shaping of the Major Leagues. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2018. 8 b/w photographs, 10 tables, acknowledgements, chapter notes, index. Pp. 264. $39.95 softcover. Reviewed by Michael T. Wood Lincoln A. Mitchell, a political science faculty member and research scholar at Columbia…
Burgess, Granville Wyche. The Last At-Bat of Shoeless Joe: A Novel. New York, NY: Chickadee Prince Books, 2019. Pp. 252. $12.99 trade paperback. Reviewed by Gavin J. Woltjer This fall will mark the 100-year anniversary of the notorious Black Sox scandal, arguably the worst scandal in the history of US professional sports. Fallout from the…
Stark, Douglas. Breaking Barriers: A History of Integration in Professional Basketball. Lanham, MD. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. Notes, bibliography, index. Reviewed by Murry Nelson This is a book that sounds better than it really is and that was a disappointment since Stark is a good writer with a background of curation at the Naismith Basketball…
Krell, David. Forward by Branch Rickey III. Our Bums: The Brooklyn Dodgers in History, Memory, and Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. Pp. 240. Notes, References, Index. $29.95 softcover. Reviewed by Rich Loosbrock Baseball and nostalgia go hand in hand. Mentions of baseball in popular culture, be it movies, documentaries, biographies, or memoirs, are bathed…
By Sam Schelfhout The collapse of the Soviet Union was predictable. Mikhail Gorbachev’s dual policies of glasnost and perestroika had introduced a sense of economic freedom and personal choice to citizens of the communist nation that inevitably hungered for more. After 1988, the Soviet Union was well along a path toward complete collapse, spurred on…
Sport in American History 