George Will Hits a Home Run

It has long been a dream of mine to attend a baseball game (any teams, I'm not choosy) seated between George Will and Charles Krauthammer. My idea of heaven on earth. 

Comes now George Will's in-depth, beautifully researched study of Wrigley Field on the occasion of the 100th birthday of that "nice little place on the north side."

Will describes Wrigley Field as a frame for a picture--the subject of the picture being the Chicago Cubs. And so he constructs the frame (the history of the field) while painting the picture (the history of the team). That is no easy task but he has accomplished it with patience, an immense amount of intricacy and a certain aplomb. A caveat: If you are not willing to pay close attention (even jotting a note or two will help), you are not going to like the way he jumps around.  That jumping is necessary, however, to present a complete picture of the ball park and its community, history and fans. And that is the purpose of the book, a purpose that is accomplished here with authority and wit. 

Stories of the Cubs's owners, players, coaches and broadcasters are told with empathy and spirit. He describes the field's ethos as "golly-the-ivy-is-so-green-and-the-sun-is-so-warm-and-the-beer-is-so-cold-and-the-ambience-is-so-gosh-darned-friendly-that-who-cares-what-the-score-is." 

If you are a baseball fan you'll enjoy this book. If you're a Cubs fan you'll love it. 

Introduction

In the mid-1980s, husband Herb and I were living in Oklahoma, with busy lives as empty nesters. I was writing and publishing poetry, short stories and lots of newspaper and magazine articles. On a whim, I asked the publisher of a local newspaper if I might write a weekly column on books and writers. The column was to mainly feature reviews of new and favorite books. To my complete surprise, he took a look at a couple of reviews I had published for a major newspaper and said, okay. So for ten years I wrote and published two or three reviews a week under the column title, "Booknotes." Then life intervened, we move and undertook some projects that no longer left me time to write, I no longer had time to read. At least not enough to write reviews because you can lead a bookaholic away from books, but you can't make her stop reading. Now life has changed again and now I have time to read and ponder and write again. So this blog will be about books and authors and maybe my own literary experiences. Blogs seem to develop their own lives, so we shall see. I hope you will join me in a blogging adventure into the literary world, which is one of my favorite places in the universe. Sunnye Tiedemann