The Morning News

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Currently: Afternoon headlines published a bit early today, but they include the new blue-ribbon Hot Chip video. http://tmne.ws/h
about 11 hours ago

Serious Fun • Playing Ball With Uncle Sam

Book Cover In case anyone is wondering (as they should) how it is that baseball came to be a significant element in a number of Caribbean national cultures—Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, etc.—University of San Francisco mentor Robert Elias (Baseball and the American Dream, The Deadly Tools of Ignorance) illuminates the relationship of our former national pastime and U.S. diplomacy in The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (New Press).

Historically, being a conservative sport ( remember the brouhaha when the Baseball Hall of Fame cancelled the appearance of Bull Durham stars Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins in 2003 for speaking out against the Iraq War?), baseball’s infiltration into the U.S.’s neighbors as an adjunct to our various military incursions and misadventures should come as no surprise (John Krich’s El Beisbol: Travels through the Pan-American Pastime is also a valuable account on this subject). The degree to which beisbol took hold may be—something I noted when I traveled to Nicaragua in 1989 to attend their World Series (which they modestly called their national tournament) in the midst of a bitter war sponsored by the U.S. Elias relates how the Washington-backed Contras attacked truckloads of native hardwoods headed to Nicaraguan baseball bat factories so the Sandinistas couldn’t use the game to boost morale.

Elias makes excellent use of numerous anecdotes like the one above to enlighten baseball fans and students of the game of the “long standing racism, jingoism, unbridled militarism, and insensitivity to other cultures” (to quote Roger Kahn), which, of course, makes it a perfect fit with the story of what William Appleman Williams has termed “the tragedy of American diplomacy.” Good stories and nimble prose along with original research (Elias debunks the myth that baseball is uniquely American) and (mostly) shrewd analysis and appropriate historical revision—(forgive me) this book hits it out of the park. —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 12, 2010
Discuss This • Tweet this • Post to Facebook • FILE UNDER: El beisbol, John Krich, Robert Elias, The Empire Strikes Out How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad, William Appleman Williams

Back in the Day • What a Year It Was!

Book Cover Former Boston Globe and Pulitzer Prize-winning scribe Fred Kaplan (who also writes for Slate) can be forgiven for the hyperbolic claim of the subtitle in 1959: The Year Everything Changed (Wiley), as there are at least two other books that pretty much claim the same thing—and, after all, overheated rhetoric has not yet been made a crime (though it would be fitting to give law and order types a taste of what they ladle out). Plus, I personally hate to quibble with a fellow admirer of the greatness of Miles Davis’s landmark recording Kind of Blue.

Kaplan’s list of landmarks, benchmarks, high times, and transformations serves to picture that year and the late ’50s and early ’60s as a quaint movie set. A partial list includes the launch of the Soviet Union’s Lunik I space capsule, Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (a precursor of the me journalism he would later perfect in The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago), hip (then referred to as “sick”) comedians Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, the rise of Alan Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the beat generation’s advance guard, the triumph of the Cuban (or at least Fidel Castro’s) Revolution, the recording of the above-mentioned classic from Miles Davis, the publication of William Appleman Williams’s seminal tome, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, photographer Robert Frank’s iconic monograph The Americans (with an introduction by Jack Kerouac), the founding of Motown Records by Berry Gordy—and, oh yeah, Jack St. Clair Kilby’s invention of the microchip.

Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame) concises masterfully, “Take a ride on the New Frontier with Fred Kaplan, your insightful (and hip) guide to the space race, thermonuclear war, the civil rights movement, the ‘sick comics,’ the Beats, and the beginnings of the Vietnam War, all to a soundtrack by Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Miles, and Motown.” —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 1, 2009
Discuss This • Tweet this • Post to Facebook • FILE UNDER: 1959, Back in the Day, Boston Globe, Cuba, Donald Fagen, Fidel Castro, Fred Kaplan, Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis, Motown, Norman Mailer, Pulitzer Prize, Robert Frank, William Appleman Williams
Our Man in Boston

» Advertise on TMN via the Deck

 
Our Man in Boston