Winner of the 2023 SABR Larry Ritter Book Award Finalist for the 2022 CASEY Award You don't know the history of the Chicago Cubs until you know the story of Charles Webb Murphy, the ebullient and mercurial owner of this historic franchise from 1905 through 1914. Originally a sportswriter in Cincinnati, he joined the New York Giants front office ......
When Jason Brown's mother is arrested for stealing $38,000, he agrees to serve as a character witness for her, hoping to keep her out of prison. Thus begins Character Witness, a memoir, a chronicle of a mother's struggle with mental illness, addiction, and poverty, and an inquiry into whether we can escape the legacy of the past. Brown realizes ......
Although it has long been claimed that Willa Cather destroyed most of her letters in order to protect her privacy, the record now makes clear that this is largely myth: The Complete Letters of Willa Cather digital archive has collected more than three thousand letters, and more are regularly being located. What can we learn about Cather and her ......
American author Willa Cather was born and spent her first nine years in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, as an observant daughter of a privileged white family, Cather first encountered differences and dislocations that remained lively, productive, and sometimes deeply troubling sites of tension and energy throughout her writing life. The ......
Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Butterfly Nebula reaches from the depths of the sea to the edges of space to chart intersections of the physical universe, the divine, the human, and the constantly unfolding experience of being "one thing in the act of becoming another." This collection of poems teems with creatures and cosmic phenomena ......
With radical candor and sardonic wit, Randolph Lewis offers an autopsy of the recent past, looking for glimmers of hope and redemption among the detritus strewn about by neo-Gilded Age billionaires, Big Tech, and political extremes during the first Trump administration and the pandemic era. American life took a weird turn in June 2015, when an ......
How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent
Antarctica is, and has always been, very much "for sale." Whales, seals, and ice have all been marketed as valuable commodities, but so have the stories of explorers. The modern media industry developed in parallel with land-based Antarctic exploration, and early expedition leaders needed publicity to generate support for their endeavors. Their ......
He was not much of a player and not much more of a manager, but by the time Branch Rickey (1881-1965) finished with baseball, he had revolutionized the sport-not just once but three times. In this definitive biography of Rickey-the man sportswriters dubbed "The Brain," "The Mahatma," and, on occasion, "El Cheapo"-Lee Lowenfish tells the full and ......
The Plains Indian Wars were always front-page news in frontier newspapers, and it was to such local newspapers that the public invariably turned for information about the fighting. The vivid, colorful accounts there captivated the nation-and in hindsight reveal much about the attitudes and prejudices of the public and the press. Bound to Have ......
