The Whiz Kids And The 1950 Pennant – Robin Roberts and C. Paul Rogers III, 1996 ★★½

And Now a Word from the Rest of the Country

For much of the 20^th century, American baseball was largely the property of one city. So when another city’s ballclub, one shut out of the World Series for 35 years, finally did play in one, it made for a season to remember, regardless of the final outcome.

Perhaps that was why they called the 1950 Philadelphia Phillies “the Whiz Kids,” not just because they were so young but because they whizzed across the sports landscape for a bright, quick moment.

Robin Roberts was a young pitcher on that National League Champion team. Forty-six years later, he published a memoir with co-writer C. Paul Rogers III about the experience which serves as a serviceable sports history of a team easily overlooked amid the behemoth legacies of Yankees, Giants, and Dodger teams from that era.

Orpheus Descending – Tennessee Williams, 1957 ★★½

Hot for the Hired Help

Some authors test your tolerance for excess. Because they work at a higher pitch than more realistic writers, you know better than complain when that approach comes off as a bit extreme, even for them.

Tennessee Williams didn’t write normal plays, whatever those are. He wrote plays about desperate, decadent people struggling for love trapped in social orders that refuse to understand or accept them. Understand this, and you can see Orpheus Descending for what it is, a template for everything that followed in his glorious career.

For that, it is fascinating and revealing. Never mind it is a hot mess, too.

This Side Of Paradise – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920 ★★

Chasing Girls and Glory

“I don’t know how to run a newspaper, Mr. Thatcher, I just try everything I can think of.”

I kept flashing on this classic line from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane reading this debut of another young man eager to make his mark. This Side Of Paradise is someone trying everything he can think of.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel runs the gamut from the meaning of life to capitalism. Snappy phrases and clever barbs are in ready supply, as are finely-drawn settings so sumptuous you feel enveloped by them. Yet very much unlike Citizen Kane, there is an overall unpleasant, chaotic feeling about this debut, a preening eagerness to impress by trying to do too much too soon, rather than settle on telling a story.

George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon – Stephen W. Sears, 1988 ★★½

General Delay

Terrible military leaders grab history’s attention like a car wreck on the highway, albeit with a much higher body count. Whether as monuments of supreme idiocy or just poor luck, they live on in a way only the best of the good leaders do.

Think of Custer or Crassus or Conrad von Hötzendorf, who all married bad judgment and wanton disregard for life to leave us eternal reminders of the folly of war. But there are others not as spectacular but every bit as deadly.

Take, for example, George McClellan, whose leadership can be blamed for extending the U. S. Civil War. This at least is the impression left by Stephen W. Sears in this biography of McClellan.