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Summary
Summary
"George Will on baseball. Perfect."-- Los Angeles Times
In A Nice Little Place on the North Side, leading columnist George Will returns to baseball with a deeply personal look at his hapless Chicago Cubs and their often beatified home, Wrigley Field, as it turns one hundred years old. Baseball, Will argues, is full of metaphors for life, religion, and happiness, and Wrigley is considered one of its sacred spaces. But what is its true, hyperbole-free history?
Winding beautifully like Wrigley's iconic ivy, Will's meditation on "The Friendly Confines" examines both the unforgettable stories that forged the field's legend and the larger-than-life characters--from Wrigley and Ruth to Veeck, Durocher, and Banks--who brought it glory, heartbreak, and scandal. Drawing upon his trademark knowledge and inimitable sense of humor, Will also explores his childhood connections to the team, the Cubs' future, and what keeps long-suffering fans rooting for the home team after so many years of futility.
In the end, A Nice Little Place on the North Side is more than just the history of a ballpark. It is the story of Chicago, of baseball, and of America itself.
Author Notes
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column that is syndicated in over 450 newspapers and a biweekly column in Newsweek. He has received several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, the Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement, the National Headliners Award, and a Silurian Award. Five collections of his Newsweek and newspaper columns have been published and he has written several other works including A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred. He also appears each Sunday on the ABC News program This Week.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
More than just about a ballpark with a powerful mystique, Will's (Men at Work) book on Wrigley Field offers a rich history of the city of Chicago through its hapless baseball team. In celebration of the ballpark's 100th year, Will compiles a random batch of anecdotes and history about the franchise that inhabits this much loved though antiquated structure with its famous ivy-covered walls. ("It is not a good sign for fans when their team's venue is better known for the attractiveness of its flora than for the excellence of the athletes who have played there," Will quips.) Broad-ranging topics include beer and its legendary importance in baseball, the long-standing resistance to installing lights for night games, personality quirks of the father-son owners, chewing gum kings William and P.K. Wrigley, and colorful takes on famed Cub Ernie Banks and (mostly) beloved sportscaster Harry Caray. The reader will learn about numbers--attendance, beer prices, stadium stats, monies paid for the team-and enjoy reflections by the author, who understands firsthand the trials and tribulations of being a Cubs fan. Rooting for the Cubs, he writes, is "a lifelong tutorial in delay gratification." As Will illustrates in his book, there's plenty for Cubs fans to celebrate from the past 100 years, even if a world series isn't one of them. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Veteran conservative political pundit Will (One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation, 2009, etc.) writes an affectionate birthday card to the home of his beloved Chicago Cubs. The author, who has written often about baseball (Bunts: Pete Rose, Curt Flood, Camden Yards and Other Reflections on Baseball, 1997, etc.) as well as issuing his periodic poundings of liberals and celebrations of conservatives, traces his Cub fandom back to 1948, when he was 7. He notes that since his birth, the Cubs are nearly 700 games below .500, a sad record that in a perverse way unites their fans. (Will compares the Cubs to Miss Havisham, the jilted bride in Great Expectations.) This is not a traditional, chronological history but an emotional one; in fact, greedy readers will find little about the construction of the placethough there is a nice little section about the decision to plant ivy to crawl along the outfield wall. Along the way, readers will learn about a baseball-related shooting that inspired Bernard Malamud's The Natural (1952), some history of the odd Wrigley family, the relationship between beer and attendance at baseball games, some discoveries by baseball statistician Bill James, the surprising news that Jack Ruby (yes, he who shot Lee Harvey Oswald) once was a vendor at Wrigley and that the Cubs used to train on Santa Catalina Island. Of course, it wouldn't be George-Will-on-baseball without allusions to Dickens, Aristotle and some other luminaries. He dispels a few myths along the way. For example, the famed double-play combo (Tinker to Evers to Chance) actually turned two very rarely, and he waxes philosophical a bit, ruminating about how fandom is like tribalism. Digressive, amusing, anecdotal, legend-shattering, self-deprecating and passionatejust what you want in a friend sitting beside you at the ballpark.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, turns 100 this season. Will, a lifelong Cubs fan originally from downstate Illinois, steps back from politics to indulge his passion for the generally hapless Cubs (last World Series win in 1908). In the context of Wrigley's centennial, Will offers a rambling, gently amusing history of the team since it moved in. With few triumphs to write about, Will focuses on some of the dominant and/or quirky personalities associated with the team through the years. He has a particular fondness for Ernie Banks, aka Mr. Cub, who performed heroically for some atrocious Cub teams from 1953 through 1971, laying out the case that Banks, a first-ballot Hall of Famer, hasn't lingered in the minds of today's fans the way he should have done. Will also delivers brief but revealing examinations of longtime team owner P. K. Wrigley, players Phil Cavarretta and Hack Wilson, and manager Leo Durocher. Will, who has a Pulitzer for commentary on his mantel as well as a roomful of other awards, is one of the nation's most visible Cub fans; this ode to the team and its home field will make a very pleasant read for baseball fans in general and Cub fans in particular. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Expect lots of television and other media promotion for this one, tied to various Wrigley Field celebrations.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BETWEEN 1921 AND 1970, the Chicago Bears won eight N.F.L. championships as tenants of Wrigley Field. The Yankees and Tigers have clinched the World Series there, but the Cubs, who have played in the park since 1916, never have. In fact, they haven't won a World Series since 1908, a stretch of futility longer than that of any other North American sports franchise. What's the problem? In "A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred," the columnist and Cubs fan George F. Will joins the chorus proclaiming that baseball-challenged owners and fans have fomented within the friendly confines an unholy potion of - no, not stale Old Style at $7.75 a pop, but a saccharine Cubs-blue Kool-Aid, sips of which somehow ensure, decade after decade, the team's premier status as "lovable losers." "Friendly" has been the watchword ever since the gum mogul William Wrigley became an owner in 1916. With ironic foreshadowing Will neglects to pick up on, Wrigley's club was the first to let fans keep foul balls that landed in the seats, while standing-room spectators, behind rope manned by Andy Frain ushers, often constituted a flexible right-field wall. When a visiting batter drove one their way, astute fans backed up, pulling the rope with them, or pushed it forward when a Cub did the same. Wrigley's son, Philip K., did not like baseball but inherited the team anyway in 1932. "God knows, I don't want the job," he complained, setting out to prove he didn't deserve it, either. Charlie Grimm, who managed the Cubs to three National League pennants, said that, concerning baseball, "P.K." was "absolutely wrong about everything." Will, wincing, sums up his business plan: "If the team is bad, strive mightily to improve ... the ballpark." To attract people like himself, "not interested in baseball," P. K. spent 200,000 Depression-era dollars (when his team's payroll was $250,000) to plant mature trees in the bleachers. When wind off Lake Michigan blew their leaves off, he settled for ivied walls and a park, Will grumbles, better known for "its flora than for the excellence of the athletes" who play there. P. K.'s point man was Bill Veeck Jr., perhaps the most tasteless gimmick-monger in baseball history. As vendors, he hired the unfriendly likes of Jacob Rubenstein, who later changed his name to Jack Ruby before opening sleazy nightclubs in Dallas. Rubenstein and his fellow "dukers" specialized in slapping programs into the hands of fans and demanding payment, or foisting paper birds on small children to pressure their parents to pay. In 1961, P. K. decreed, "There should be relief managers just like relief pitchers." The four coaches he hired to run his team in rotation promptly mismanaged it to 64-90 and 59-103 seasons. Will plausibly nominates this period as the "nadir of baseball foolishness," though it fails to encompass the 1964 trade, for Ernie Broglio, of Lou Brock to the archrival Cardinals, who, with Brock hitting .348, went on to win that fall's World Series, their seventh of 11 and counting. Three years after the Wrigleys sold the franchise to the Tribune Company in 1981, the Cubs made the playoffs for the first time in two generations. Though they blew the National League Championship Series to the Padres, they whetted fans' appetite for postseason baseball. What those famished fans wound up getting was the 2003 N.L.C.S. with the Marlins. Up three games to two and 3-0 late in Game 6, at home, the Cubs were five outs from their first World Series since 1945. Enter Steve Bartman, who, along with other fans seated near the left-field line, reached above the wall trying to catch a foul pop-up, instead of pulling back - as their roped-in forebears well might have - to give Cubs left fielder Moises Alou the best chance to catch it. Bartman deflected it away from Alou. Will, who was there, vividly recaptures the aftermath: collapse by the Cubs, threats against Bartman, Marlins in seven. Defending the scapegoat's honor, Will writes, "The umpires correctly ruled that what Bartman did was not fan interference." But still. No centennial salute to Wrigley Field can focus only on errors, and Will duly notes its convenience to El trains and sunlit asymmetry while revisiting dozens of milestones, Babe Ruth's "called" homer during the 1932 Series among them. Will himself weirdly calls Arnold Rothstein's fixing the 1919 Series "discordant with the narrative of Wrigley Field as a sonnet of sweetness and light," when it was the "Black Sox" who tanked to the Reds 71 blocks south, at Comiskey. He makes more sense defending the baseball I.Q. of Ernie Banks against his onetime manager Leo Durocher. "Your little boy knows that it's percentage baseball to get a runner moving on a 3-1 count," Durocher scoffed. "But not Mr. Cub." Reciting Banks's Hall of Fame stats, Will also praises his sunny disposition, "win or lose - and it was mostly lose," surely one reason No. 14 remains, four decades into retirement, the quintessential Cub. Relying on the economist-writer team of Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, Will indicts 21st-century Cubs fans for enabling more subpar baseball by filling "so many seats no matter what is happening on the field," noting that their attendance is four times more sensitive to beer prices than to their team's winning percentage. They remain so "incorrigible," in fact, that Will explores the possibility that pulling for the team causes mental illness, citing evidence that rats forced to experience persistent defeat suffer neurological damage. But where did he get the idea that "rooting for the Cubs is a minority taste"? The season after the White Sox won the 2005 World Series, their attendance almost tripled - yet was still a smaller fraction of capacity than the Cubs drew while finishing last. (Another fact he ignores: As baseball tickets get more expensive, the relative affluence of the North Side and northern suburbs favors the Cubs even more.) He is also with the majority in supporting decisions by the current owner, Tom Ricketts, to modernize Wrigley and grant the team president, Theo Epstein, the better part of a decade to rebuild the Cubs in the image of the Red Sox, while the Pale Hose again must retool on the fly. All that said, Will's bow-tied, button-down prose wears quite well in this, his third insightful book about baseball, after "Men at Work" and "Bunts." His eye for the game remains warm and acute, as do his conservative instincts. "At a baseball park," he writes, "the loudest noise should be supplied by the spectators," oblivious though they may be. For as much as he loves Wrigley Field, he has cast a cool eye on many who spin its new turnstiles. So we might be surprised when, after thoroughly persuading us that "Cub sentimentalists" are "too numerous for the team's own good," this 73-year-old die-hard sneaks one last nip of the P. K.-vintage Kool-Aid, squishily suggesting that a lifetime waiting for a championship in a place as "nice" as Wrigley might be just as much "fun" as witnessing one. I know a few serious Cubs fans, hungry as April bears for October hardball, who will corrigibly beg to differ. Are Cubs fans responsible for the terrible baseball their team has played over the decades? JAMES MCMANUS is the author of "Positively Fifth Street." His new collection of stories, "The Education of a Poker Player," will be published next year.
Library Journal Review
With his characteristic wit and wry perspective intact, Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist Will, an Illinois native, delivers what is effectively a color commentary on his beloved Cubs and their home. A good color man enhances the play-by-play with choice anecdotes, digressions, stats, allusions (including literary and political), and deductions; Will doesn't disappoint. With offerings both broad (the author knows his baseball and can effectively recall stats with the best of 'em) and local (he digs into Chicago history), Will is an enjoyable tour guide through the Cubs' ups and all-too-frequent downs. Though he keeps the tone light, he never shies from reflections, such as the "why" behind the psychological rationale of fans whose love has endured countless irritations and vexations. In doing so, Will sheds light on the uniquely transformative power of sports. VERDICT This is for all North Siders, naturally, but also for baseball fans who like to wax more literary. Though it certainly satisfies on its own (particularly if you know the Cubs' history), it resonates most effectively as a companion piece to the other Wrigley anniversary books reviewed here. [See Prepub Alert, 10/15/13.]-BM (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.