It Is Done!

No, not this blog, although anyone who used to read it might think so. Something keeps me from turning out the lights whenever the idea crops up in my head.

No, the thing that is done is the induction of John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Those poor benighted souls who prefer other sports to baseball or who are indifferent to them altogether may be tempted to ask why that matters. Partly it’s because Buck should have been in the HOF a long time ago, especially while he was still alive. None of the recent recognition of the work of the Negro Leagues would have happened without Buck. No museum, no recognition of the Negro National and Negro American Leagues as official Major Leagues right alongside the National and American Leagues, no awareness that as great a man as he was, Jackie Robinson was not the first African-American man to play organized baseball. Absolutely none of it.

And as to why it might matter outside the foul lines and beyond the bleachers? Read Buck’s autobiography, I Was Right on Time. Read Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball. Read Vahe Gregorian’s appreciation when Buck was voted in last year (No links because the Kansas City Star has a very steep paywall). Heck, read Anne Rogers’ feature piece from MLB’s own press shop today and get a sense of why a great man with a great and gentle view of the world is finally getting his due.

As Bob Kendrick, manager of the Negro League Baseball Museum said in more than one article and as this space has put forth before: The Hall of Fame now matters once again.

Testimony

When Rachel Denhollander stood during Dr. Larry Nassar's sentencing hearing in January 2018 and spoke of his abuse, its effects on her and on his hundreds of other victims, she included notes of her pity for him and hopes he would seek forgiveness for his wrong, because she knew that God would accept his genuine repentance as he accepts any who repent. Many Christian writers highlighted her words, even though they had to squirm a little uncomfortably later when Denhollander described how her own church did not support her stands on dealing with the reality of abusers in their midst.

Both aspects of this story are laid out in her 2019 memoir, What Is a Girl Worth? which she titled based on a phrase and idea from her victim impact statement. She asked the judge in the case to impose the maximum sentence possible on Nassar as a sign to other abused and assaulted women and girls that they were not worthless, despite their treatment by those who exploited and manipulated them.

Denhollander doesn't limit her book to just the time she spent competing in gymnastics and was Nassar's victim, and then the later years of the trial and its impact on Nassar's employer, Michigan State University and the United States Gymnastics Association which used him as a staff physician. She offers a brief sketch of her career as a gymnast, including the nagging injuries that developed for which she was sent to Nassar for treatment. She also outlines how she met and then developed a relationship with her husband, trying to describe how the abuse she suffered at 15 affected her ability to trust and relate to him. She notes that the long-distance quality of their relationship may have actually helped them because they could advance in levels of intimacy at a distance that didn't set off as many of her alarms and flight responses.

When the story gets to the initial newspaper account about Nassar that began to uncover the depth of his crimes and the complicity of supposedly controlling organizations in covering up the abuse, Denhollander moves to more of a diary format, walking through the phases that moved from news story to accusation to trial to testimony and then to her sentencing speech. Here her voice is that of a strong adult rather than a victimized child; her abuse affected who she is and left her with scars that may not disappear for a long time but it does not define her. She can note the irony her discovery that her research on the therapy Nassar claimed he was using meant that she knows more about it than he ever did, since nothing of how he abused his victims is a part of that technique.

The story may seem a little unfocused to some readers, but Denhollander wants to try to answer people who legitimately wonder how abuse victims such as herself don't go to authorities and how the abusers might get away with their crimes in full view of parents, guardians or chaperones. She offers a powerful story of how predators such as Nassar capitalize on the trust of their positions and the desire of good people to believe that no one could really be that kind of a monster. She also highlights how his enablers, even though they might have been deceived themselves, can effectively render the powerlessness victims feel permanent by not fulfilling their roles of governance and protection.

Her book is something of a hybrid of reporting and memoir, an attempt to show the impact of these events on a larger public scale and on her own personal history. It includes the significant role played by her faith, both as a place of unfortunate human failing and the eventual source of the true answer to her title question: Everything.

Basepath Books!

As Yale senior Matt McCarthy neared graduation, he was like a lot of his classmates in trying to figure out what was next for him in life. The only difference was that he was looking to find a baseball organization to pay him to pitch for them, something he managed when he was drafted in 2002 by the Anaheim Angels organization. He spent a year playing for the rookie-ball Provo Angels in the Pioneer League and went to spring training in 2003 before being cut. In 2009, now a practicing doctor, he wrote about those experiences in Odd Man Out.

Rookie-level ball features a wide mix of players -- hot high school prospects who've been signed for seven-figure contracts, unknowns that the organization is willing to risk the rookie ball salary on, college grads who are seeing if their college stuff is really something someone wants to pay money to see happen, players really too old but who the organization is giving one last chance to show something. McCarthy meets them all during his year in Provo, a tee-totaling Utah community that is not an exact fit for a group of young men with a lot of time and testosterone on their hands. Odd Man relates the long bus rides across the northern plains and the colorful lineup of the Provo Angels. McCarthy finds himself questioning his commitment to baseball when it seems has no way to solve the problem of consistency -- he'll pitch well one night and serve up batting practice the next. Different coaches in the program offer him different solutions (no one suggests breathing through his eyelids) but none seem to work. Although his Yale education would seem to set him apart from his teammates, it's really just one of the quirks they all have, which McCarthy detailed in journals he kept through the season and used when he wrote his book.

Or did he? After an excerpt was published in Sports Illustrated, some of the people McCarthy names said that they didn't remember doing or saying anything like what he wrote that they did or said. New York Times writers did some investigating and saw that McCarthy said some things happened when they couldn't realistically have happened. For his part, McCarthy stood by his manuscript even though he wouldn't produce the journals he said were contemporary accounts of the events he wrote about.

My guess is spotty memories, exaggerated and embellished tales and journal entries that aren't as detailed as McCarthy says they are combine to cause most of the inaccuracies and disputed stories. Plus some of his teammates might not have known they were being documented and acted in ways they would rather not admit to. Odd Man Out is an easy and largely fun read with a mostly likable if quirky cast that show a few cracks here and there. Given that McCarthy took his notes and is writing about experiences that happened when he barely into his 20s, there's not a lot of reflection going on or much to add to other books about of the weird world of minor league baseball. The largely surface-level narrative and questions about some of the just-a-little-too-perfect sequences and events make this an excellent buy when you pick it up at the local library's "clear the shelves" $1.00 apiece book sale.

-----

Although different incarnations of the Negro National and Negro American Leagues had as many as eight teams apiece, there were two or possibly three teams that stood out from the rest in terms of success on and off the field. The Kansas City Monarchs and their portable lighting system ruled the western area of the Negro Leagues playing area, but back east the Homestead Grays rode the mighty bats of first baseman Buck Leonard and catcher Josh Gibson to dominance. In Beyond the Shadow of the Senators, Brad Snyder explores the history of the team and its connection to Washington, D.C. baseball. He also traces the decline of the team as Major League Baseball began raiding the Negro League teams for talent following integration in 1947.

Cumberland Posey was the principal owner of the team when it stepped up its competitive level from a semipro club of Pennsylvania coal miners to full-time ballplayers. From that date in 1912, the team operated continuously for the next 38 years, surviving the Great Depression and World War II when many other Negro League teams folded. They began playing in Pittsburgh but in 1940 they started playing a significant part of their home schedule at Griffith Stadium in the nation's capital. Washington had a vibrant African-American community that featured all levels of society from wealthy elite to working class, and once the Grays connected with them full stadiums were a regularity. Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith worked well with Posey and cleared more profits from his Grays dates than he did from some of his lowly Senators' home stands.

African-American sportswriters often tried to suggest Griffith be the one to integrated major league baseball, given that Grays standouts like Leonard, Gibson and James "Cool Papa" Bell were better than anyone he was putting in a Senators' uniform. Griffith often weaseled around the unofficial color barrier by hiring Cuban players who might be as dark-skinned as any American player who suited up with a G on his hat instead of a W. Snyder points out the work especially of Sam Lacy, who during stints with the Washington Tribune, Chicago Defender and Baltimore's Afro-American pushed Griffith especially hard on the issue.

As Snyder tells it, Griffith didn't want to bring the Grays greats onto his roster because integration would be the first step in the disintegration of the Negro Leagues. Money, not altruism, drove his feelings, since Posey and the Grays could draw more fans to a two-day stand with the visiting Kansas City Monarchs and their ace Satchel Paige than the hapless Senators might manage during a whole week at home. His cut of that revenue came without any real expense on his part. Snyder also suggests that greed among some of the Negro League team owners kept them from organizing a more united front when Branch Rickey first signed Jackie Robinson, in order to gain concessions that might have helped their teams survive.

Had Posey and Monarchs owner J.L. Wilkinson joined forces, perhaps along with Newark Eagles owner Effa Manley and Indianapolis Clowns' Abe Saperstein, they might have been able to muscle the loosely organized Negro Leagues into organizations that more resembled major league operations. It would guarantee nothing but would have strengthened the Negro Leagues owners in arguments to integrate their existing teams into the major league system, perhaps at the farm club level. As it was, Posey didn't begin a real hard push in that direction until too late. He died in 1946 and his team disbanded in 1950, a collection of aging players that paying crowds had little desire to see.

Snyder is a lawyer by trade and also the author of the Curt Flood biography A Well-Paid Slave, giving him some good insight into baseball's turbulent history with race. He also offers great sketches of Leonard, Gibson, Lacy, Posey, Griffith and the Washington, D.C. African-American community to help fill out his story. He seems to operate with a little bit of a chip on his shoulder vis á vis the Monarchs and Paige, frequently elevating the Grays at their expense even though their last matchup was some 70 years ago.

But those are quibbles with a detailed and cleanly written story of the relationship between two baseball teams -- one stocked with stars kept from playing at the highest level and the other full of also-rans who managed exactly one World Series win in 60 years at Washington before moving to Minnesota. Although integration following World War II sometimes carries an aura of inevitability as we look back, Beyond offers a clear view of the many missed chances to have done the right thing many years before.

Based on a True Story

Try this story pitch: Illegitimate son of an aristocrat and slave returns to his father's native land to live the life of a privileged son until the surrounding revolutionary fervor convinces him to volunteer as a buck private -- who will rise to the rank of general by the time seven years have passed and be feared by his nation's enemies while lauded by its leaders. Then treachery on the part of jealous men results in his imprisonment and obscurity upon being freed.

Sound like a tough sell? It has the advantage of actually happening. Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was born in 1762 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, later known as Haiti. His father was Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a minor French nobleman who returned to France after a 30-year sojourn under the radar in Saint-Domingue accompanied by a tall, handsome and undeniably African young man who was later found to be his son by a woman named Marie-Cessette Dumas. Marie had been Alexandre's slave in Saint-Domingue, and although he claimed to have married her, he sold her and two children to another farmer before returning to France. For reasons of his own, when the young Thomas-Alexandre embarked on his military career, he began using only the second part of his first name and took his mother's surname, rising to fame and honor as Alexandre Dumas. He would name his third child and only son the same, and that young man grew to some fame himself as a novelist.

Prior to Tom Reiss's 2012 biography The Black Count, the historical record on General Dumas was spotty and relied heavily on the versions promoted by his son. The only trouble there was that the elder Dumas perished when the younger was only four, and most of the versions of events relayed by the son are significantly influenced by the kind of hero-worship a four-year-old boy maintains of his father. Reiss began with that information, adding in and correcting as he uncovered mentions of General Dumas in military correspondence of the time. He eventually located a cache of material about as well as by the General, which helped round out the personal details of his life.

General Dumas and other mixed-race persons like him were known in Revolutionary France as "Americans," given that most of them had a parent or at least a grandparent who was either a slave or African-descended freedman or freedwoman from France's New World colonies. Several such officers combined to serve in the "Free Legion of Mixed Americans," which earned approval and fame for its daring and risky operations and became known as The Black Legion, both in reference to its members and the fear and despair it inspired in its enemies. Reiss details how the French Revolution itself, in one of the few things it got right (my words and not his), eliminated some of the restrictive segregationist laws on its books. Given this move and Dumas' acumen as a military leader, it isn't surprising that he dedicated himself to fighting for the idea of republic-style government both in France and in neighboring countries. His courage on the battlefield, strategic genius and determination helped Republican France conquer territory in Italy where it set up new democratic governments.

But as Napoleon Bonaparte began to use the new government's own ambivalence and tendency to dither against it in order to gain and consolidate power, Dumas' dedication to the ideals of the Republic would prove a source of friction between them. Napoleon didn't move against Dumas directly, but when a shipwreck on the journey home from Egypt put Dumas in enemy hands, the rapidly-rising "First Consul" of France didn't do much to win his freedom, either. Dumas was imprisoned for two years, almost completely incommunicado -- as though he had vanished from the Earth. The novelist son would use the theme of unjust imprisonment to advance the fortunes of the unscrupulous as the theme for his 1844 novel The Count of Monte Cristo.

Reiss's research and determination uncovered an absolutely fascinating story of an absolutely fascinating man -- the highest-ranking officer of African descent in the military of any Western nation until Gen. Daniel James Jr. received his fourth star in the United States Air Force in 1975. His writing style is a little breezier than most biographies and includes probably a little more room than necessary for his own little asides. But his thorough explanation of the life and economics of French colonial Haiti, racial politics and cultural feelings in France leading up to the Revolution of 1789 and of the wastrel role played by General Dumas' father more than makes up for this minor quibble.

Reiss justifiably won the 2013 Pulitzer Price for Biography or Autobiography, and as of late 2014, The Black Count was in development as a movie. He successfully manages to make his subject, General Alexandre Dumas, both the larger-than-life hero he became in the pages of his son's novels and the real man he was. The Black Count is worthy of the effort Reiss put into it and worth the time to take a few afternoons and read it.

Whether you like swashbuckling adventurers or not.

Screen Lives

In his explanatory afterward to American Titan, celebrity multi-biographer Marc Eliot says he sought to write the story of John Wayne using his work in movies, treating Wayne as an auteur according to the theory of film criticism given that name. Usually, the label is restricted to directors, who are seen as the source of a movie's creative vision in the same way that an author is the source of a novel's creative vision. Actors usually aren't seen as auteurs, since they are responsible for only the part of the movie they're in.

The idea that an actor could create a body of work that speaks of his or her creative vision and views about the human condition in the way directors do isn't outlandish. And Wayne, who directed two movies and served as an uncredited assistant director on three others where the director fell ill, does have something that might indicate his vision as an auteur. His essentially unchanged character in the latter part of his career could also help establish that vision -- no matter who the director was or what the movie was called, he was pretty much John Wayne from dimmed lights to end credits.

The problem is that Eliot doesn't really do that. He explores Wayne's early career with some detail, but once he begins the "famous years" following Wayne's breakout in Stagecoach, he recites a fairly standard newspaper account of the Duke's career, throwing in some personal-life anecdotes. In Eliot's telling, Wayne's preference for the free and easy time of shooting movies and location living made him a most unreliable husband to each of his three wives, although he he participated as fully as possible in raising his children. His unflinching anti-Communist and pro-American viewpoint fueled both of his directorial efforts, which were slammed by critics and one of which, The Alamo, nearly bankrupted him.

Again, while it's most definitely possible to look at Wayne's work, understand how he saw humanity and the questions it faced and from that draw some understanding of his life, Eliot's book doesn't dig into that work enough to really accomplish that. He references too many movies briefly and too few important ones deeply to offer much more than the history on top. Titan also suffers by competing for shelf space with Scott Eyman's much more thoroughly researched and extensive John Wayne: The Life and Legend, also released in 2014.

As a tool for understanding the impact of Wayne the actor on the movie business and cinematic storytelling, American Titan is a metric wrench turning an English-measurement nut -- it creates as much, if not more, work in doing its job than you'd have if you used no tools at all. The presence of better equipment for the job means it can be set aside without much care or loss.

-----

April 1997 also saw dueling biographies of a famous move icon, as celebrity biographer Jeffrey Meyers' Bogart: A Life in Hollywood arrived almost the same day as Eric Lax's completion of A. M. Sperber's Bogart.

The Lax-Sperber Humphrey Bogart bio was by far the more detailed and almost twice the size of its competitor, drawing on the 200 interviews Sperber conducted with Bogie associates, friends and family before her 1994 death. Lax finished the manuscript and had Bogart ready for publication during the year marking the 40th anniversary of the actor's death.

Bogart details the actor's early life as the son of a well-to-do surgeon and commerical illustrator who did not show much affection to their three children and whose own indifferent academic and naval career didn't promise much. Beginning onstage in New York City, he found himself drawn to the fun of acting and the late-night lifestyle of show business. He drifted to Hollywood after the stock market crash diminished theater work in New York. His depression over a stalled career, a bad second marriage and the loss of his father eventually fueled his switch to heavier and darker roles, culminating as Duke Mantee in the play The Petrified Forest. When the play hit the screen, star Leslie Howard insisted Bogart play the role there as well, providing him the break his career had needed.

Sperber and Lax then detail how Bogie worked through a ream of B-movies until 1941's one-two punch of High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, followed in 1942 by Casablanca. Professional success didn't translate to personal happiness, as Bogie's third wife was an alcoholic whose jealousy of his leading ladies often reached paranoia levels. It wasn't until meeting the 19-year-old Lauren Bacall in 1944 that he was able to find a home life as good as his professional one; they wed three months after Bogie filed for divorce.

Bogart also describes Bogie's relationship with the House Un-American Activities Committee and its single-minded pursuit of Communists working in Hollywood. A liberal Democrat, he opposed what he saw as the harassment of people for their points of view even though he disagreed with many of the things they believed and said.

Lax, working with the Pulitzer-nominated Sperber's interviews and outline, writes clearly and efficiently, and the pair "collaborate" across time to create the definitive biography of the man who many have been America's most unique movie star.

Let's Read Two!

Since baseball season has started, leave us peruse and remark upon two books concerning America's national pastime. The title, of course, is in honor of Chicago Cubs great Ernie Banks, who always looked upon a great day with enthusiasm and was known for wanting to make almost every game a double-header, if he could.

-----

You might not know it if you've looked at any season's standings since about 1992 or so, but the Kansas City Royals used to be one of the power teams of the American League. Frequently division champs, twice American League champs and once World Champions (ah, 1985...). America's middle city was a semi-desirable place for a lot of ballplayers to ply their craft, and one of the reasons the team performed well was left-fielder Willie Wilson, whose tough bat and speedy legs fueled no few Royals wins (Wilson's .308 average in the 1980 American League Championship Series tied KC's premier batsman George Brett).

Wilson also dealt with some of fame's demons, and was one of four Royals who did time for a misdemeanor attempt to purchase cocaine in 1983. He rebounded from that to continue to be a vital part of the team in the 1985 Series win, but injuries hampered his career later in that decade and he went to Oakland as a free agent in 1990 before ending his career when the Chicago Cubs released him in 1994.

Inside the Park outlines this part of Wilson's life, as well as many of his post-baseball struggles and how he overcame them. He dealt with depression, financial setbacks and a second round of substance abuse, and was forced to sell his Series ring at a bankruptcy auction in 2001 (The board of his charitable foundation purchased and presented a replica of the ring to Wilson to mark Inside the Park's publication).  The book, which reads mostly like a transcription of several interviews, allows Wilson to own up to his faults, offer his side of a couple of issues and outline how he came back from his problems, finally managing to make his life outside the baseball stadium match the quality of his game inside it. It's a good redemption story, probably mostly of interest to Wilson fans and Royals fans but still offers something in its own right as an account of coming back from being very, very far down.

-----

And speaking of very very far down, we may cast our eyes upon the Chicago Cubs as they figure into George Will's centenary survey of Wrigley Field,  A Nice Little Place on the North Side.

Will is best-known as a conservative opinion columnist, so folks who like the idea of firing people because of what they believe would probably want to take a pass on his book, even though he inserts next to no politics and only a little free-market economics.

Cubs fans are probably known for their love of Wrigley almost as much as they are known for being the victims of a team which abuses them anew every year. And Will, who now lives in Washington, D.C. and roots for the hometown Nationals, knows their pain. Born in downstate Illinois at just about the right time to take advantage of the rise of radio baseball, he followed the Cubs through most of his childhood and adolescence.

Once establishing his bona fides as a Cubs fan (the usual sign is considered to be permanent tear tracks down the cheeks), Will offers a quick but engaging skim of the century that Wrigley has spent at Clark and Addison, from the team's actual beginnings elsewhere in Chicago through its long, long post-World War II slide. He poses an interesting question: Has the team's emphasis on its ivied home played a part in its hapless history? Can a ballpark built when the only thing a ballpark was supposed to do was give people a place to sit and watch the game be what a team needs in the 21st century?

As expected of the erudite Will, we meet Greek philosophy and thinkers of many kinds and ages who would probably be surprised to find themselves tasked with explaining aspects of baseball, but the same skill that made Men at Work and Bunts engaging reads for thinkers and fans alike makes it all work. Possibly the only misfire is the book's dedication to current Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, who may have overseen an economic boom for the sport but is still guilty of many grievous sins. I'm thinking about writing the Washington Post to get Will fired because of that.

Hammerin' 80

An article in Slate this week shows how much of the early civil rights movement was driven by a desire for what author Tanner Colby calls "agency." African-Americans, he said, desired most of all to be able to live their lives as they chose, live where they chose, drink from whatever water fountains they chose, eat at whatever restaurants they chose, and so on. A push for such agency in education, however, was thwarted when the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case resulted in the closure of African-American schools and the shipping of their students to integrate previously white schools.

Whether or not Colby is right about the impact of busing and integration, his description of a desire for agency can be seen clearly in Hank Aaron's 1990 autobiography, co-written with Lonnie Wheeler, I Had a Hammer. Aaron, born in Alabama and subject to segregation through the first part of his baseball career and vicious racism as he closed in on Babe Ruth's home run record in 1973 and 1974, uses the metaphor of a hammer to describe his bat and what he accomplished with it -- both on the field and off. The title plays on the old folk song, "If I Had a Hammer."

Aaron actually began his career in the Negro Leagues, helping the Indianapolis Clowns win a title in 1952, and was one of the last African-American stars to play in the Negro Leagues before signing with a major league team. With their major stars no longer prevented from signing with major league teams, the Negro League teams were already declining and soon to disappear. The then-Boston Braves (coincidentally, the last team for which Babe Ruth made a major league appearance, in 1935) signed him to a minor-league contract in 1953, but they had moved to Milwaukee before he was called up in 1954. Aaron spent the next 20 years with the Braves, moving with them to Atlanta in 1965. The Braves traded him to the Milwaukee Brewers in 1975, and Aaron retired after the 1976 season ended.

Hammer spends a good amount of time describing the segregation and racism Aaron faced during early years on Southern minor-league teams -- frequently not being allowed to stay at the hotel with the team or eat in the restaurants where they dined. He describes assumptions made about his character because of his race -- sportswriters would call him a "natural hitter" rather than discuss how Aaron spent long hours reviewing opposing pitchers and their habits in given situations. The overt character of the racism he confronted waxed and waned over his career -- it increased when the Braves moved to Atlanta but by that time his own stature as a player had increased and insulated him from some of what he had faced earlier. It also follows up on Aaron's professional and public service work after his playing career ended. One of the first African-Americans to serve in upper management of a major league team, he used his position and influence -- his "hammer" -- to work against cultural prejudices as well as the remnants of legal racism in baseball and in the Atlanta community.

Hammer ends in 1990, so a reader wanting to know more about Aaron's life since then, including his thoughts on Barry Bonds' breaking of his home run mark and other issues connected to the steroid era, should seek out Howard Bryant's 2010 The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. 

Hank Aaron turns 80 today, having wielded his hammer and borne its weight both on and off the field with purpose, strength and grace. Baseball is certainly the better for his having played it, but baseball is not alone in that benefit.

Bookish Twinbill

About a year ago, I noted a poll which asked which of several hyper-specialized academic press books a person was likely to read. It may surprise you to read that I made fun of those books.

One of them I did not mock, though, and that was Thomas Aiello's The Kings of Casino Park, a brief history of the 1932 season of the Monroe Monarchs Negro Southern League Baseball team. I said that I might pick it up someday, but I was fortunate enough to receive it as a gift. Aiello, a history professor at Valdosta State University in Georgia, researched the short life of the Monarchs and some of their impact on community life in their small northwestern Louisiana town.

Like most southern towns, Monroe was highly segregated and had a reputation as the "lynch law center of Louisiana." Its newspapers routinely ignored African-Americans unless they were mentioned in arrest reports. But the 1932 baseball season of the Monarchs rallied the town together behind them as they took on and beat some of the premier Negro League teams of of the day and laid statistical claim to a berth in the NSL's World Series. For some games, as many as half the seats at the Casino Park stadium were set aside for white spectators, and Monroe's two newspapers regularly ran stories about the team's fortunes.

Statistically, the Monarchs finished the first half of the NSL season in first place. But according to Aiello, owner collusion among more powerful teams from the larger cities put the larger market Chicago American Giants in the lead instead, the owners reasoning that a championship series featuring the league's smallest city would be a box-office bust. Aiello suggests artfully designed forfeiting standards created the switch, but other works on Negro Leagues history disagree.

Aiello notes that the Monarchs success didn't solve Monroe's racial problems and that living patterns in the city today retain much of their segregated character. But the power of sports fandom was such that for about four or five hours each weekend, black and white Monroe united behind a group of black athletes who represented their town.

As a baseball nut, I would have liked some more baseball history of the Monarchs' players. Although they produced only a couple of Negro Leagues superstars, Hall of Fame pitcher Hilton Smith and outfielder Willard Brown, they had several of the era's better players, either on their way up or on their way back down. Aiello also could have spent less time speculating on the league owners' shenanigans and more time examining the direct impact of the team on their segregated town. He interviews the team owner's granddaughter, but few others who might remember that time or hearing their parents talk about it. But he's produced an excellent introductory sketch of a hidden chapter of the Negro Leagues' history and one worth checking out.

-----

Susannah Cahalan was a 24-year-old reporter for the New York Post. She was one of the paper's better young writers and had a pretty bright career arc ahead of her. Then one day in early 2009, she started experiencing strange behavior -- paranoia, drastic mood swings, nausea, visual and auditory hallucinations, seizures and exhaustion. Not many days after that, she was checked into a hospital.

She remembers nothing of what happened until almost a month later.

In Brain on Fire, Cahalan retells her story, piecing together the missing month from medical notes, diary entries from her friends and family and security tape footage. Although she displayed all the symptoms of mental illness, she was actually suffering from a rare auto-immune disorder. An infection had produced antibodies, and those antibodies were for some reason attacking her own brain. As they fought against the chemicals that allowed her brain to process the world and respond to it in a normal fashion, Cahalan's brain created symptoms in her that literally mimicked mental illness.

Her condition baffled doctors until a new neurologist performed an older test on a spur-of-the-moment whim. It showed him that Cahalan's brain was somehow disordered, and that gave doctors the clue to her condition that allowed them to treat her.

The first two sections of the book, in which Cahalan tells about the onset of her symptoms and then about the missing month, are probably the strongest. She uses a basic, no-frills writing style instead of trying to overwrite the events and that serves her well; they're already pretty intense.

In the third section, Cahalan describes some of her recovery from the point where she starts remembering things again, as well as some of the things she learned about her condition and others who have had it. It's not as strong as the others; suffering from a lack of a single focus. She starts some interesting reflection on memory and how even the normally functioning brain can create memories of events that didn't actually happen, as well as some explorations of how the brain operates and how hers was affected, but she doesn't follow either very far and they end just as they start to get interesting.

Brain on Fire, though, is still an excellent memoir of a harrowing time in Cahalan's life, related with wit, grace and skill. Even though she may not pursue reflection on what it might mean to understand that a simple chemical imbalance in the brain can duplicate almost exactly the symptoms of serious mental illness, or on what it means when we consider the plain ol' electrical origins of our experiences and memories, her books offers the reader a chance to do so and some good places to start.