Baseball and Other Matters in 1941

Such was the state of the game--and the world--the summer that Bob Creamer turned 19. For a baseball fan, so much was happening, you hardly knew where to look. Over the next half-century, Creamer would emerge as one of the game's most respected and astute writers, a longtime fixture at Sports Illustrated and biographer of Babe Ruth and Casey Stengel, but in this thankfully resurrected memoir--originally published in 1991--he was just a fan growing up and trying to make sense of things. In 1941, he doesn't so much look back on this pivotal year as take us back to relive it with him by interweaving the marvelous, improbable, and memorable events on the field with the darker threads being manipulated off of it by Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and Mussolini. For a 19-year-old, this was a heady, thrilling, and scary time. Creamer not only reports it, he helps us experience it--with immediacy, passion, insight, perspective, and, indeed, a fair share of youthful exuberance and awe. --Jeff Silverman