Quick Review: Good summer reading

Since it is summertime, this is the time to read some relaxing books that are a short read and not inexpensive. I've read a few of late that I would suggest.

"Crazy 'O8: How a Cast of Cranks, Rougues, Boneheads and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History" pretty well tells the tale in the title. Author Cait Murphy (who has penned an additional Q&A for the paperback edition by Smithsonian Books, $14.95) wrote this dandy 300-page book a couple of years ago but it is easy to find in 2008 paperback edition. Essentially Murphy proposed this was baseball's best year and devotes detailed attention in the book to the season, save for a quick review of the World Series. Like baseball itself, the action along the way and the characters involved make for the real story. There is a lot of attention devoted to the New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs (when the Cubs was a real ballteam), but there are plenty of other teams and characters to devote time to. We learn about Tinkers to Evers to Chance (who didn't like each other but became famous because of a poem), battling John McGraw, the hated Ty Cobb, pitcher Christy Mathewson (who once went to the showers to early and had to be dragged out of the showers to save a game) and poor Fred Merkle, who's mistake on the field became known as "Merkle's Boner" and branded him for the rest of his life.

Best of all, Murphy takes time to examine how different the game was in those days, when pitchers were still the heroes, ballfields were starting to be replaced for becoming fire traps (and some still had crowds in the outfield). The equipment was primitive and catchers barely crouched instead of squated. Crowds would go into the streets to watch large signs that showed a game in progress by lights and other means. Of course, some things don't change: There was a financial panic in 1907 that sounds way too familiar in details and owners worried if patrons would come back to the ballpark. (They do.) Team owners and league presidents sweep their problems (in this era, gambling and fan violence) under the rug. Honus Wagner stages a walkout and doubles his salary--to $10,000. Fans, however, make only $7 a week on the average, and a 50 cent ticket is something that can only be afforded starting with the middle class.

There is a lot of rich detail and characters that I can't do justice to here, and I won't. I wouldn't want to spoil it for you anyway. It is a delight to read, even for the casual baseball fan, and there are many seventh-inning stretches to look at other events and circumstances outside of baseball. It is a fascinating time capsule that brings the era to life.

Also, at just over 300 pages, we have "The Groucho Letters," which is a paperback 2007 reprint from Simon and Schuster, reintroducing a 1967 classic. Here we sample the historic letters coming to and from Groucho Marx, who proved with pen to be mightier and merrier and and heck of a lot more wicked than the sword. Groucho needed no ghostwriters for this, as evidenced by the fact his letters at the time had been given to the Library of Congress, where they remain. Not only do we read Groucho writing to literary, stage and screen wits, but we get to read his mail, from the likes of E.B. White, Fred Allen, Goodman Ace, Nunnally Johnson, James Thurber, Harry Truman, S.J. Perelman and others. We see a serious side of Groucho in many of the letters, but we get the Groucho we know as well. On a tax matter, he said, "The government has some curious notion that I owe them $1,000,000. I claim I owe only $3.85." He winds up saying, "On this I expect to fight them tooth and nail (nail more than tooth, only because I have more nail than tooth." When Warner Brothers warns him not to use "Casablanca" in the Marx Brothers movie "A Night in Casablanca," he writes a grand series of letters confounding the Warner Brothers lawyers, saying he will sue over "brothers" because the Marx Brothers were around before Warner Brothers. That alone is worth the $16 price of the paperback.

In case you thought I didn't read serious stuff, I'm starting 2007's "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" by Amity Shlaes (paperback, Harper Perennial, 400 pages). It takes a new look at the Depression and will apparently try to paint Roosevelt and his business opponents as neither heroes nor saints, as they both do good and bad along the way. However, it is interesting that the book proposes some of Roosevelt's policies meddled too much and caused the crisis to linger long after it did in Europe, causing another sharp downturn late in the 1930s as he tried to raise taxes and balance the budget. Looks like it will be interesting.

I would also recommend "Presidential Courage" by Michael Beschloss (Simon and Schuster, 2007) as he looks at a series of presidential crisis situations and how men like George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan faced them. It makes for a good comparison of the presidency and the more than 300 pages goes quickly.