BabeWatch: Barnstorming Against Negro League Teams
Partly because he loved to play baseball, partly because he loved to spend money, Babe Ruth played lots of exhibition games in the offseason across the country and in the Caribbean. After his astonishing 1921 season, the formed the Babe Ruth All Stars, which played against multiple Negro League teams, including the Kansas City Monarchs and…
Read MoreTheater of the Near-Real: Cop Chases in L.A.
It’s completely weird. They can go on forever, the only time Southern California TV stations never break for commercials. The first one on Monday morning lasted more than two hours. Later in the day, a second one lasted two hours. It sounds mind-numbing. Helicopter cameras track a single car speeding down interstates and freeways while…
Read MoreHamilton’s Pulitzer Prize: Listen to the Words
Now that he’s won the Pulitzer Prize for it, maybe we’ll pay attention to the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, the genre-smashing Broadway hit that costs a monthly car payment to attend. When we listen to the words – really listen – we can appreciate his achievement. Magic can happen when story and words and…
Read MoreOf Charles Sumner, David Donald, and Used Bookstores
The serendipity of the used bookstore — its ability to provide unexpected pleasures — is gaining attention recently. Even the Washington Post (owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos) has noticed. I offer Exhibit A in support. Last month, at the recently-expanded Rockville store of the Friends of the Library of Montgomery County, I snapped up…
Read MoreThe Time Justice Scalia Caught Me Out
The death last weekend of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia brought to mind the time when he turned over a stone in the legal rockpile only to reveal an awkward bit of half-smart maneuvering by me — though until now my name was never publicly associated with it. The case involved the Equal Access to…
Read MorePutting on the Show: Eight Rules for Book Talks
One of the surprising parts of writing books, for me, has been the amount of performance involved — I mean performance: standing up and putting on a show. My experience is, of course, framed by the kind of writer I’ve become. I’m “midlist,” which is a term that describes all the writers who fall between…
Read MoreMaking President Clinton's Reading List
It’s not the best photo of me that’s ever been taken, but there are definite virtues to this one, particularly President Clinton’s savvy placement of the copy of Madison’s Gift that I presented to him. Our conversation? I said that I imagined that he had not found time to read Lynne Cheney’s biography of Madison. He smiled…
Read MoreTriumph of the Book!
The recent press accounts have been heartening to devotees of the book — which had been disdained as the “printed book” or “hard-copy book,” or even the “dead tree book.” It turns out that lots of readers prefer reading old-fashioned books to new-fangled e-readers. That’s what college students say. They want to read a “real”…
Read MoreEight Knockout Reads from 2015
Year’s end brings a geyser of lists of the year’s “best books.” I choose to modify this approach to report the best books that I read over the last year, since I get to few newly-issued books — pretty much only ones by friends or ones I’m writing a review of. Otherwise, I’m either reading something…
Read MoreEven Woodrow Wilson? The "Purge Moment" Runs Amok
Over the summer of 2015, the argument over displaying the Confederate flag in public grounds galvanized public opinion. Many conservative Southern Republicans agreed that such displays contradict our basic principles and publicly endorse bigotry. Even South Carolina, birthplace of secession, relented on the Confederate flag. That argument swiftly metastasized into a full-throated uproar over public…
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