Book Review

Author: Paul Goldberger. Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

With Father’s Day just around the corner, you might view Paul Goldberger’s new book, “Ballpark – Baseball in the American City,” as a well timed merchandising move, as well as a publishing event. But “Ballpark” is much more than another sports book aimed at the nostalgic male who yearns for the good old days of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn or Shibe Park in Philadelphia, and revels in the modern-day vestiges of that era at Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago. It is also a study in urbanism, using the history of the ballpark as an avenue to show the inner workings of American cities.

Authenticity in baseball, Goldberger writes, “should mean that each ballpark is a world unto itself, a place different from all the other places in which baseball is played: that all ballparks are not the same, and that the game played within them is therefore different in subtle ways from ballpark to ballpark.” The best ballparks, he adds, are the ones in which “the rural and the urban, the natural and the man-made, are in harmonic balance.”

Goldberger expresses the history of the ballpark in American cities through four phases, ones that urbanists will appreciate perhaps even more than baseball fans. “The ballpark is one of the greatest of all American building types, and it reveals as much about how we treat our cities today as it ever has in the past,” he writes.> Read More …

Here’s a story that sounds more like fiction than the nonfiction that it is. A young, adventurous American woman, Virginia Hall, frustrated by lack of advancement in the chauvinistic State Department in the grim days leading up to World War II, manages to throw herself into the action, first as an ambulance driver, then as a purported correspondent for the New York Post, and mostly as a secret agent employed by British intelligence and operating behind the lines in Nazi-occupied France. Overcoming resistance among British, French, and eventually American authorities to a woman serving in such a dangerous role, she eventually directs multiple networks of spies and French resistors to help turn the tide against the Nazis.

And Virginia Hall does it all despite being physically handicapped, outfitted with a wooden leg as a result of a hunting accident suffered when she was 27, a handicap that — in theory — made it even easier for the Gestapo to track her down. She thrives despite rampant chauvinism. When Hall’s intelligence reports conflict with those of a male colleague, his word is taken over hers by the powers in London.

You couldn’t make it up, but Sonia Purnell has documented the story in her bestselling book, “A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II,” published earlier this year by Viking.

And here’s another story that sounds more like fiction than the nonfiction that it is. An adventurous French woman and licensed pilot, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, frustrated by her country’s nonchalant response to Germany’s aggression, manages to throw herself into the action, working initially for a magazine covering military capabilities across Europe, then for a center supporting displaced French military veterans (and future resistors), and ultimately as the leader of France’s largest network of spies. Even as she also cares for her two young children, she eventually sees her efforts contribute to turning the tide against the Nazis.> Read More …