In My TBR Stack:

Deep Water Blues
by Fred Waitzkin
Open Road Media
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Charismatic expat Bobby Little built his own funky version of paradise on the remote island of Rum Cay, a place where ambitious sport fishermen docked their yachts for fine French cuisine and crowded the bar to boast of big blue marlin catches while Bobby refilled their cognac on the house. Larger than life, Bobby was really the main attraction: a visionary entrepreneur, expert archer, reef surfer, bush pilot, master chef, seductive conversationalist.

But after tragedy shatters the tranquility of Bobby’s marina, tourists stop visiting and simmering jealousies flare among island residents. And when a cruel, different kind of self-made entrepreneur challenges Bobby for control of the docks, all hell breaks loose. As the cobalt blue Bahamian waters run red with blood, the man who made Rum Cay his home will be lucky if he gets off the island alive . . .

When the Ebb Tide cruises four hundred miles southeast from Fort Lauderdale to Rum Cay, its captain finds the Bahamian island paradise he so fondly remembers drastically altered. Shoal covers the marina entrance, the beaches are deserted, and on shore there is a small cemetery with headstones overturned and bones sticking up through the sand. What happened to Bobby’s paradise?

On My Radar:

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come: One Introvert's Year of Saying Yes
by Jessica Pan
Andrews McMeel
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

What would happen if a shy introvert lived like a gregarious extrovert for one year? If she knowingly and willingly put herself in perilous social situations that she’d normally avoid at all costs? Writer Jessica Pan intends to find out. With the help of various extrovert mentors, Jessica sets up a series of personal challenges (talk to strangers, perform stand-up comedy, host a dinner party, travel alone, make friends on the road, and much, much worse) to explore whether living like an extrovert can teach her lessons that might improve the quality of her life. Chronicling the author’s hilarious and painful year of misadventures, this book explores what happens when one introvert fights her natural tendencies, takes the plunge, and tries (and sometimes fails) to be a little bit braver.

On My Radar:

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
Alfred A. Knopf
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the one-time multibillion-dollar biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes—now the subject of the HBO documentary The Inventor—by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end.

“The story is even crazier than I expected, and I found myself unable to put it down once I started. This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, magazine cover stories, ruined family relationships, and the demise of a company once valued at nearly $10 billion.” —Bill Gates

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

In My TBR Stack:

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of  Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
by Ben Mezrich
Flatiron Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Ben Mezrich's 2009 bestseller The Accidental Billionaires is the definitive account of Facebook's founding and the basis for the Academy Award–winning film The Social Network. Two of the story's iconic characters are Harvard students Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss: identical twins, Olympic rowers, and foils to Mark Zuckerberg. Bitcoin Billionaires is the story of the brothers’ redemption and revenge in the wake of their epic legal battle with Facebook. 

Planning to start careers as venture capitalists, the brothers quickly discover that no one will take their money after their fight with Zuckerberg. While nursing their wounds in Ibiza, they accidentally run into an eccentric character who tells them about a brand-new idea: cryptocurrency. Immersing themselves in what is then an obscure and sometimes sinister world, they begin to realize “crypto” is, in their own words, "either the next big thing or total bulls--t." There’s nothing left to do but make a bet. 

From the Silk Road to the halls of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bitcoin Billionaires will take us on a wild and surprising ride while illuminating a tantalizing economic future. On November 26, 2017, the Winklevoss brothers became the first bitcoin billionaires. Here’s the story of how they got there—as only Ben Mezrich could tell it.

On My Radar:

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BookSpin Excerpt:

Excerpt from:

The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record
by Jonathan Scott
Bloomsbury Sigma
Hardcover

©Jonathan Scott, 2019   I would like to thank Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.  for facilitating this excerpt publication, with special thanks to Emily Willette.

CHAPTER ONE 

The Naked Pioneers 

‘Ad astra per aspera’ – ‘Through difficulties to the stars’ 

Carl Sagan 

Two space probes called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were sent to the outer planets in the late 1970s to beam back lots of lovely images and data of the gas giants and their moons. Primary mission complete, and with no way of being controlled, the probes were doomed to drift forever in the unimaginable void of interstellar space.

With this gloomy-sounding outcome in mind, NASA decided to do something very optimistic. They would send with them a message, on the very slim chance that they would one day be recovered by some little green chap. The message took the form of a metal record. A record designed to convey something about our origins, our civilisation, our art, through sounds, images and music. CliffsNotes to Earthlings.

To tell the story of this record, its creators and the people who chose that moment to fall in love, we need to begin by backing up a little. You see, Voyager Golden Record is a sequel. It’s the more ambitious, bigger-budget sequel to Pioneer Plaque. Five years before Voyager, the Pioneer probes became the first man-made objects destined to reach interstellar space, to cast off the gravitational cloak of our solar system and head out into it forever. While this was known to everyone involved in the mission, it took an outsider looking in – a writer for Christian Science Monitor – to draw attention to the magnitude of this fact. Pioneer 10 and 11 were to be humankind’s first emissaries to the stars. Here was a first-time opportunity to send a message, a greeting to any intelligent beings who might chance upon them.

Armed with enthusiasm and a deadline of just three weeks, a three-strong team, comprising an artist, an astronomer and an astrophysicist, thrashed out a design for a modest metal plaque, complete with star map and naked human figures. However, one of the strangest aspects of the Pioneer plaques – the first of which was hurled towards Jupiter in March 1972 – was the absence of vulva.

The last-minute sanitising of the female figure, for fear of offending a domestic audience, captures an essence of the environment in which the Pioneer plaques were forged. These are not only messages to some imagined future alien interaction, they are also time capsules, snapshots of when they left Earth. The removal of the vulva is a lens through which we can view America nearly 50 years ago. Despite the swinging sixties, despite mass movements, protests, social reforms and upheavals, despite convention-busting cinema coming out of the American New Wave, America in 1972 remained a conservative environment. NASA was in the glare of the public gaze, at the mercy of popular opinion. It was funded by American tax dollars, and everyone knew it. And to tell the story of the missing vulva, we need to back up just a little bit further.

In 1964 a graduate student working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory2 noticed something
important. His name was Gary Flandro. He had finished school in 1957, just before Sputnik, perfectly timing his arrival at JPL with the start of the space race. The first of the Pioneer missions took place the following year, when a probe designed to achieve moon orbit, failed some 73.6 seconds after launch. A steady stream continued to punch holes in the atmosphere. Some were lost at launch, others failed to reach their desired orbit, others did very well. A personal favourite is Pioneer 5 from March 1960 – a spherical probe sent to measure magnetic forces in the space between the orbits of Earth and Venus – that looks very similar to the intimidating black ball that approaches Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope.

Flandro had been investigating the knotty problem of how an object might be sent further, towards the outer planets. The general consensus at the time was that this was virtually impossible without something called gravity assist. Jupiter held the keys to the outer planets. Without Jupiter’s gravity, any object sent in that direction would eventually fall back to Earth’s orbit. But with Jupiter there, an object could fly past, pick up an enormous boost of energy, and then be hurled out towards Saturn. Then, in theory, it could do the same thing at Saturn, and head off further towards Uranus, Neptune and so on.

While working on trajectories, Flandro realised something mind-blowing: that by the late 1970s all the outer planets would be on the same side of the Sun. This alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune could enable a single craft to visit all four outer planets by using gravity assists in what would be dubbed the ‘Grand Tour’. This wasn’t quite a single one-time option – there were various possible iterations and trajectories – but such an advantageous planetary arrangement would not occur again for another 175 years. Flandro had uncovered a chance to explore a number of planets in one go, at a fraction of the cost. Suddenly NASA had been given the mother of all deadlines.

*** 

To plan for a planetary Grand Tour, NASA needed Pioneers 10 and 11 to dip their toes in the waters of the outer solar system, to see if such an endeavour was even possible. The idea to include a message with the Pioneers came relatively late in the day. Eric Burgess, an English freelancer, had been writing about space missions since 1957. He’s the one who held up his hand in class and pointed out to the world that NASA was about to throw something further than anything had ever been thrown. And during conversations with writers Richard Hoagland and Don Bane the idea for attaching some kind of physical message to the craft was forged. Burgess was unsure about pitching direct to NASA, so instead he approached Carl Sagan, whose eyes lit up.

Sagan was already a well-known astronomer, with a growing public profile, but he was not yet the household name he would become. He was a coal-face scientist, with acknowledged achievements, enthusiasms and specialisations under his belt. He would study the greenhouse effect on Venus, seasonal dust patterns on Mars, the environment of Saturn’s moon Titan. He would play a medal-winning role in NASA’s Mariner 9 mission, and contribute to the Viking, Voyager and Galileo missions.

On My Radar:

A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father

by David Maraniss
Simon and Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Elliott Maraniss, David’s father, a WWII veteran who had commanded an all-black company in the Pacific, was spied on by the FBI, named as a communist by an informant, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. Yet he never lost faith in America and emerged on the other side with his family and optimism intact.

In a sweeping drama that moves from the Depression and Spanish Civil War to the HUAC hearings and end of the McCarthy era, Maraniss weaves his father’s story through the lives of his inquisitors and defenders as they struggle with the vital twentieth-century issues of race, fascism, communism, and first amendment freedoms. A Good American Family powerfully evokes the political dysfunctions of the 1950s while underscoring what it really means to be an American. It is an unsparing yet moving tribute from a brilliant writer to his father and the family he protected in dangerous times.

On My Radar:

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide
by Tony Horwitz
Penguin Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times.

For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name “Yeoman,” the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners were revelatory for readers of his day, and Yeoman’s remarkable trek also reshaped the American landscape, as Olmsted sought to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central Park and Olmsted’s career as America’s first and foremost landscape architect.

Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country? In search of answers, and his own adventures, Horwitz follows Olmsted’s tracks and often his mode of transport (including muleback): through Appalachia, down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing far off beaten paths, Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges and strange new mutations of the Cotton Kingdom. Horwitz’s intrepid and often hilarious journey through an outsized American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author’s own classic, Confederates in the Attic.

On My Radar:

Comedy Sex God
by Pete Holmes
Harper Wave
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Pete Holmes is a sold-out-every-night stand-up comedian with two HBO specials and the host of the hugely successful podcast You Made It Weird, and he was the creator-star of the hit HBO show Crashing. But it wasn’t always roses for Pete. Growing up, Pete was raised an evangelical Christian, but his religion taught him that being “bad”—smoking, drinking, having doubts or premarital sex—would get him sent to an eternity in hell. So, terrified of the God he loved, Pete devoted his life to being “good,” even marrying his first girlfriend at the age of twenty-two only to discover a few years later he was being cheated on. Thanks for nothing, God.

Pete’s failed attempt at a picture-perfect life forced him to reexamine his beliefs, but neither atheism, nor Christianity, nor copious bottles of Yellow Tail led him to enlightenment. Pete longed for a model of faith that served him and his newfound uncertainties about the universe, so he embarked on a soul-seeking journey that continues to this day. Through encounters with mind-altering substances, honing his craft in front of thousands of his comedy fans, and spending time with savants like Ram Dass, Pete forged a new life—both spiritually and personally.

Beautifully written and often completely hilarious—imagine Dass’s Be Here Now if penned by one of the funniest people alive—Comedy Sex God reveals a man at the top of his game and a seeker in search of the deeper meanings of life, love, and comedy.

On My Radar:

The Shadow War: Inside Russia's and China's Secret Operations to Defeat America
by Jim Sciutto
Harper
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Poisoned dissidents. Election interference. Armed invasions. International treaties thrown into chaos. Secret military buildups. Hackers and viruses. Weapons deployed in space. China and Russia (and Iran and North Korea) spark news stories here by carrying out bold acts of aggression and violating international laws and norms. Isn’t this just bad actors acting badly? 

That kind of thinking is outdated and dangerous. Emboldened by their successes, these countries are, in fact, waging a brazen, global war on the US and the West. This is a new Cold War, which will not be won by those who fail to realize they are fighting it. The enemies of the West understand that while they are unlikely to win a shooting war, they have another path to victory. And what we see as our greatest strengths—open societies, military innovation, dominance of technology on Earth and in space, longstanding leadership in global institutions—these countries are undermining or turning into weaknesses.

In The Shadow War, CNN anchor and chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto provides us with a revealing and at times disturbing guide to this new international conflict. This Shadow War is already the greatest threat to America’s national security, even though most Americans know little or nothing about it. With on-the-ground reporting from Ukraine to the South China Sea, from a sub under the Arctic to unprecedented access to America’s Space Command, Sciutto draws on his deep knowledge, high-level contacts, and personal experience as a journalist and diplomat to paint the most comprehensive and vivid picture of a nation targeted by a new and disturbing brand of warfare.

Thankfully, America is adapting and fighting back. In The Shadow War, Sciutto introduces readers to the dizzying array of soldiers, sailors, submariners and their commanders, space engineers, computer scientists, civilians, and senior intelligence officials who are on the front lines of this new kind of forever war. Intensive and disturbing, this invaluable and important work opens our eyes and makes clear that the war of the future is already here.

On My Radar:

Forever and Ever, Amen: A Memoir of Music, Faith, and Braving the Storms of Life
by Randy Travis with Ken Abraham
Thomas Nelson Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The long-awaited, deeply personal story of one of American music's greatest icons, a remarkable tale of the utmost heights of fame and success, the deepest lows of life's sorrows, and a miraculous return from the brink of death—told as only Randy Travis can.

Beloved around the world, Randy Travis has sold more than 25 million albums in both country and gospel and is considered one of the finest performers of his generation, admired by superstars across the musical landscape, from Garth Brooks to Mick Jagger.

From a working-class background in North Carolina to a job as a cook and club singer in Nashville to his "overnight success" with his smash 1986 album Storms of Life--which launched the neotraditional movement in country music--Randy’s first three decades are a true rags-to-riches story.

But in 2009, this seemingly charmed life began a downward spiral. His marriage dissolved, he discovered that his finances had unraveled, and his struggles with anger led to alcohol abuse, public embarrassment, and even police arrest in 2012.

Then, just as he was putting his life back together, Randy suffered a devastating viral cardiomyopathy that led to a massive stroke which he was not expected to survive.  Yet he not only survived but also learned to walk again and in 2016 accepted his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame by singing the hymn that explains his life today: "Amazing Grace."

Filled with never-before-told stories, Forever and Ever, Amen is a riveting tale of unfathomable success, great joy, deep pain, and redemption that can come only from above.

On My Radar:

Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins
by Annie Jacobsen
Little Brown and Co.
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Surprise... your target.Kill... your enemy.
Vanish... without a trace.

When diplomacy fails, and war is unwise, the president calls on the CIA's Special Activities Division, a highly-classified branch of the CIA and the most effective, black operations force in the world.

Originally known as the president's guerrilla warfare corps, SAD conducts risky and ruthless operations that have evolved over time to defend America from its enemies. Almost every American president since World War II has asked the CIA to conduct sabotage, subversion and, yes, assassination.

With unprecedented access to forty-two men and women who proudly and secretly worked on CIA covert operations from the dawn of the Cold War to the present day, along with declassified documents and deep historical research, Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen unveils-like never before-a complex world of individuals working in treacherous environments populated with killers, connivers and saboteurs.

Despite Hollywood notions of off-book operations and external secret hires, covert action is actually one piece in a colossal foreign policy machine.

Written with the pacing of a thriller, SURPRISE, KILL, VANISH brings to vivid life the sheer pandemonium and chaos, as well as the unforgettable human will to survive and the intellectual challenge of not giving up hope that define paramilitary and intelligence work. Jacobsen's exclusive interviews-with members of the CIA's Senior Intelligence Service (equivalent to the Pentagon's generals), its counterterrorism chiefs, targeting officers, and Special Activities Division's Ground Branch operators who conduct today's close-quarters killing operations around the world reveal, for the first time, the enormity of this shocking, controversial and morally complex terrain. Is the CIA's paramilitary army America's weaponized strength, or a liability to its principled standing in the world?

Every operation reported in this book, however unsettling, is legal.

In My TBR Stack:

The DNA of Democracy: Volume 1
by Richard C. Lyons
LYLEA Creative

From the book publicity:


Have you ever wondered how democracy came to fruition? How it differs from all the brands of tyranny? In today’s ever turbulent and changing political climate, understanding democracy’s evolution and the ways it has been beneficial to individuals compared to other forms of government is essential. In an epic new series ofhistorical vignettes and political commentary, Nautilus and Foreword award-winning author Richard C. Lyons, expertly retells the histories of democracy and deconstructs humanity’s living democratic masterpieces in his new book, “The DNA of Democracy” (May 14, 2019). In this historical and telling guide, Lyons chronicles democratic societies, tracing their beginnings back to rebellions against tyranny, from Athens to Rome to England and America. Through true historical narratives, the book also relates the growth of democracy and how it differs from tyranny. By the end of “The DNA of Democracy,” readers will better understand the blueprint necessary for successful democratic government, how American democracy was uniquely founded and what comprises the DNA of our modern-day democracy.

On My Radar:

Every Tool's a Hammer: Life is What You Make It
by Adam Savage
Atria Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Every Tool’s a Hammer is a chronicle of my life as a maker. It’s an exploration of making and of my own productive obsessions, but it’s also a permission slip of sorts from me to you. Permission to grab hold of the things you’re interested in, that fascinate you, and to dive deeper into them to see where they lead you.

Through stories from forty-plus years of making and molding, building and break­ing, along with the lessons I learned along the way, this book is meant to be a toolbox of problem solving, complete with a shop’s worth of notes on the tools, techniques, and materials that I use most often. Things like: In Every Tool There Is a Hammer—don’t wait until everything is perfect to begin a project, and if you don’t have the exact right tool for a task, just use whatever’s handy; Increase Your Loose Tolerance—making is messy and filled with screwups, but that’s okay, as creativity is a path with twists and turns and not a straight line to be found; Use More Cooling Fluid—it prolongs the life of blades and bits, and it prevents tool failure, but beyond that it’s a reminder to slow down and reduce the fric­tion in your work and relationships; Screw Before You Glue—mechanical fasteners allow you to change and modify a project while glue is forever but sometimes you just need the right glue, so I dig into which ones will do the job with the least harm and best effects.

This toolbox also includes lessons from many other incredible makers and creators, including: Jamie Hyneman, Nick Offerman, Pixar director Andrew Stanton, Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro, artist Tom Sachs, and chef Traci Des Jardins. And if everything goes well, we will hopefully save you a few mistakes (and maybe fingers) as well as help you turn your curiosities into creations.

I hope this book inspires you to build, make, invent, explore, and—most of all—enjoy the thrills of being a creator.

In My TBR Stack:

How to Not Be a Dick: And Other Essential Truths About Work, Sex, Love — and Everything Else That Matters
by Brother
William Morrow
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Life can be complicated. From the classroom to the bedroom, the office to the DM, we could all use a little guidance—young guys especially. No one actually wants to be dick, but from time to time, everyone is. How do we know? Because we at Brother have spent years studying dickishness in all its forms, and we’re finally ready to present our findings, including:

-The terrible people you should avoid at all costs

-How to make more money (without working all that hard)

-The dos and don'ts of sex

-How to not be a dick at the gym

-Acceptable coping mechanisms for adults

-How to get your sh*t together in 10 steps

And so much more. Don’t worry, there are plenty of illustrations, too.

In My TBR Stack:

The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America
by Daniel Okrent
Scribner Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.

Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his characteristic style, both lively and authoritative, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is an important, insightful tale that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.

In My TBR Stack:

The World's Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America's First Black Sports Hero
by Michael Kranish
Scribner
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In the 1890s, the nation’s promise of equality had failed spectacularly. While slavery had ended with the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws still separated blacks from whites, and the excesses of the Gilded Age created an elite upper class. Amidst this world arrived Major Taylor, a young black man who wanted to compete in the nation’s most popular and mostly white man’s sport, cycling. Birdie Munger, a white cyclist who once was the world’s fastest man, declared that he could help turn the young black athlete into a champion.

Twelve years before boxer Jack Johnson and fifty years before baseball player Jackie Robinson, Taylor faced racism at nearly every turn—especially by whites who feared he would disprove their stereotypes of blacks. In The World’s Fastest Man, years in the writing, investigative journalist Michael Kranish reveals new information about Major Taylor based on a rare interview with his daughter and other never-before-uncovered details from Taylor’s life. Kranish shows how Taylor indeed became a world champion, traveled the world, was the toast of Paris, and was one of the most chronicled black men of his day.

From a moment in time just before the arrival of the automobile when bicycles were king, the populace was booming with immigrants, and enormous societal changes were about to take place, The World’s Fastest Man shines a light on a dramatic moment in American history—the gateway to the twentieth century.

Excerpt:

Excerpt from:

Ten Innings at Wrigley: The Wildest Baseball Game Ever, with Baseball on the Brink
by Kevin Cook
Henry Holt and Co.
Hardcover

Excerpt published with permission from Henry Holt and Co.  Copyright 2019 by Kevin Cook

THE CUBS: FOILED AGAIN

The Chicago Cubs were born to lose. They were cursed. Their die-hard fans said so. It wasn’t just that Chicago’s National League franchise hadn’t won a World Series since 1908. Other teams had gone decades without winning, too. The Philadelphia Phillies had been in the league since 1883 and still hadn’t won a World Series. What distinguished the Cubs was how consistently and entertainingly they stunk.

They were winners before they were lovable losers and traced their ancestry to a different animal—the whale. Their home diamond started out with a different name, too. Wrigley Field began its long life as Weeghman Park, named for the luncheonette tycoon who built it.

In the early 1900s Charlie Weeghman strolled the busy sidewalks of the Loop with a gardenia in his lapel, tipping his bowler hat to the ladies. Lucky Charlie, they called him. He had landed a restaurant job as a boy, filling coffee mugs for the builders, bankers, lawyers, aldermen, priests, and mobsters who made the town go. He soon moved up to maître d’ and then manager, saving his wages and tips until he could open his own place. Weeghman’s Lunch Room was a spotless, white-tiled cafeteria where working people could get a sandwich and a glass of milk for twenty-five cents. Chicagoans lined up to get in. Before long he had a chain of Lunch Rooms—America’s first fast-food chain—that launched what the Tribunecalled a “cafeteria craze.” By the time he turned thirty-five, his fortune amounted to $8 million (about $200 million today), more than enough to build a baseball park.

As a boy he’d pictured himself knocking doubles and triples like Cap Anson, the great first baseman of Chicago’s National League baseball club, which played home games at the rat-infested West Side Grounds. After making his millions, Weeghman tried to buy the St. Louis Cardinals, but his wealth was a little too fresh for the silver-haired men who ran Major League Baseball. They turned him down. So he poured his money into a new league.

For the 1914 season the upstart Federal League of Base Ball Clubs placed teams in eight cities, including Chicago, to challenge the monopoly of the National and American Leagues. Their players were mostly big-league castoffs and never-wuzzes, but Weeghman had big plans for his Chicago Federals, cleverly nicknamed the Chi-Feds. As a first salvo against the game’s establishment, he signed the Cubs’ famous shortstop Joe Tinker.

Tinker had black hair spilling over a unibrow so pronounced you can see it on his Hall of Fame plaque. The Cubs’ catalyst when they won four pennants and a pair of World Series, he had crossed into folklore in a 1910 poem by newspaperman Franklin Pierce Adams, a New York Giants fan:

These are the saddest of possible words:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,

Tinker and Evers and Chance.

Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

Making a Giant hit into a double—

Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

Weeghman signed the thirty-three-year-old Tinker as the Chi-Feds’ player-manager for an unheard-of twelve thousand dollars a year. Four days later, he leased nine acres in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood. The land had been home to the city’s Lutheran Theological Seminary until the seminarians decided their neighborhood was going to hell. They could barely hear themselves pray over the noise from trains clattering through the new El station on Addison Street. One seminarian recalled “smoke, dust, grime, soot, dirt, foul gases, railroading by night and day, whistles, ding-donging of bells.” Weeghman leased the land for sixteen thousand dollars a year and hired architect Zachary Taylor Davis to build a ballpark there.

Davis had gotten his start at Louis Sullivan’s firm, working alongside a twenty-one-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright. With $250,000 of Weeghman’s lunch money to spend (about $6.3 million in today’s dollars), he started from scratch less than two months before the Chi-Feds’ 1914 season began. Davis and Weeghman hired hundreds of Chicago men to wield shovels, wheelbarrows, hammers, and saws and run mule teams and steam- and gasoline-powered engines on double shifts through February and March. From groundbreaking to Opening Day, they built the park in seven weeks.

They couldn’t have done it without the sort of friends who can help a construction job. One of Weeghman’s friends, New York mobster Arnold Rothstein, paraded around Chicago with flunkies like Legs Diamond, who enjoyed stabbing people who crossed his boss and cut out their tongues if they griped about it. This was five years before Rothstein fixed the 1919 World Series.

On April 23, 1914, a mile-long parade of motorcars and merrymakers led from the Loop to Weeghman Park to celebrate Opening Day. Ten brass bands played. A dozen fans in sombreros brought a live bull to the game. The park was built to hold fourteen thousand baseball bugs, as fans were called in those days, but more than twenty thousand packed the place that afternoon. Just before the game began, a car festooned with roses and carnations drove onto the field. Joe Tinker stepped out and waved to the crowd.

Tinker singled in three trips to the plate as the home team thumped the Kansas City Packers, 9–1. Chicago won again the next day. The Chi-Feds often outdrew the Cubs and White Sox—not only because they won but because Weeghman made baseball a bug-friendly experience. His concession stands sold the best ballpark food at fair prices. His team was the first to let fans keep foul balls, a policy that irked other owners, who had ushers chase down foul balls and return them to the field. Weeghman also pioneered Ladies’ Day, letting women in free every Friday.

In the winter of 1915 he held a newspaper contest to give his Chi-Feds a better name. With Charlie’s luncheonettes in mind, readers suggested that the team should be the Chicago Buns, Beefers, Doughnuts, or Pies. Windy Lads was another contender. In the end he decided to call his team the Whales. Weeghman’s Chicago Whales chased the 1915 Federal League pennant with help from another former Cubs star, Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown.

Born in 1876, the hundredth anniversary of American independence, Mordecai Brown was a Hoosier who had lost much of his pitching hand in a boyhood accident. A mechanical corn shredder tore off most of the index finger and part of the pinkie on his throwing hand. To his delight he discovered that the accident didn't keep him from playing ball. In fact, the stubs of his fingers helped put spin on his curveball. After signing a minor-league contract with the Terre Haute Hottentots, “Three-Finger” Brown climbed quickly to the majors, landing with the Chicago Cubs. He won 26 games with a league-best 1.04 earned run average in 1906, when the Cubs won 116 games, running away with the National League pennant. Nine years later he helped lead Weeghman’s Whales to a Federal League pennant on the last day of the season. Somehow the little ballpark held 34,212 fans that day, more than twice its official capacity. In one account, Chicago’s baseball bugs “went Borneo” when the Whales clinched, rushing the field to mob Tinker, Brown, and the rest of the players.

After that season, Major League Baseball—the established National League and American League owners—bought out the Federal League. Each Federal League owner received $600,000 to disband his team. (One club, the Baltimore Terrapins, refused and sued the major leagues for violation of federal antitrust laws. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, where the Terrapins lost. In an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the Court ruled that baseball was a game, not a business engaged in interstate commerce.) As part of the buyout settlement, Charlie Weeghman was allowed to buy the Chicago Cubs. Not only that, he got to add his Federal League players to the Cubs’ roster. Tinker and Brown rejoined their former teammates, who were glad to move from the dilapidated West Side Grounds to the new baseball palace on the North Side.

Lucky Charlie was having the time of his life. He watched his Cubs from the owner’s box and sometimes stayed after night fell on Weeghman Park. He kept a stable of horses in stalls under the grandstand. His favorite was Queen Bess, described by the Chicago Tribuneas “an old, gentle bay mare.” On summer nights the owner let Queen Bess run and graze on the field.

Copyright © 2019 by Kevin Cook

On My Radar:

The Big Book of Rock & Roll Names: How Arcade Fire, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Vampire Weekend, and 532 Other Bands Got Their Names

by Adam Dolgins

Abrams Image

Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

The Big Book of Rock & Roll Names tells the behind-the-scenes stories of how the world’s most popular and influential rock and pop acts got their names. By turns fascinating, funny, and bizarre, the pages offer insight into the peculiar choices and idiosyncratic psychologies of hundreds of top musicians from the 1960s to the present. Originally published more than two decades ago to great success, it’s been out of print for years and has now been completely updated and expanded to feature dozens of exclusive interviews including conversations with groups like The Black Keys, The Killers, Twenty One Pilots, Coldplay, Cage the Elephant, and Vampire Weekend. From Arcade Fire to ZZ Top, this diverting and handsome collection reveals the often overlooked but defining histories of hundreds of the biggest names in rock and pop.

In My TBR Stack:

Scenes from the Heartland: Stories Based on Lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton
by Donna Baier Stein
Serving House Books
Trade Paperback

From the book publicity:

When a contemporary writer turns her imagination loose inside the images of an iconic artist of the past, the result is storytelling magic at its best. Here are nine tales that bring to vivid life the early decades of the 20th century as witnessed by one of America's most well-known painters. Thomas Hart Benton sketched fiddlers and farm wives, preachers and soldiers, folks gathering in dance halls and tent meetings. Though his lithographs depict the past, the real-life people he portrayed face issues that are front and center today: corruption, women's rights, racial inequality. 

In these stories we enter the imagined lives of Midwesterners in the late 1930s and early 1940s. A mysterious woman dancing to fiddle music makes one small gesture of kindness that helps heal the rift of racial tensions in her small town. A man leaves his childhood home after a tragic accident and becomes involved with the big-time gamblers who have made Hot Springs, Arkansas, their summer playground. After watching her mother being sent to an insane asylum simply for grieving over a miscarriage, a girl determines to never let any man have any say over her body.

Then as now, Americans have struggled with poverty, illness, and betrayal. These fictions reveal our fellow countrymen and women living with grace and strong leanings toward virtue, despite the troubles that face them.

In My TBR Stack:

Forging an Iron Clad Brand: A Leader's Guide
by Lindsay Pedersen
Lioncrest Publishing
Hardcover

From the book's website:

Good brand is just good business.

Brand is the intentional leader’s North Star. It helps us engage customers and employees, unleash our competitive advantage, and fuel enduring growth.

And yet, despite this power, brand is grossly underused. Few leaders leverage brand fully, believing (wrongly) that brand is squishy and elusive. But when a tool this vital is dismissed, the business suffers mightily.

The good news is that all leaders can ignite brand to create value. Lindsay Pedersen deconstructs what brand is and why it is indispensable for leaders. Then she shares her step-by-step process to tame the infinite possibilities and pinpoint a brand positioning that is true and robust – in fact, ironclad – to unlock the most value.