Book Review - Baseball in the Garden of Eden - By John Thorn - NYTimes.com:
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| Image via NYT |
Thorn has a vexingly complicated story to tell, and one of the strengths of this book is that he shies from none of the complexities. The development of the game took place off the field as much as it did on, and Thorn scrupulously traces the influence of a variety of social forces on its progress and popularity, among them gambling, the emergence of star players and the rise of theosophy, a spiritualist movement whose adherents included Doubleday and his chief backer as the game’s inventor, Albert G. Spalding.
This review teases the role of
theosophists and their "determined schemes," presumably to promote baseball as the national pastime, but doesn't provide any of that detail. This one may make it onto my library list.
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| Excerpt via Amazon. |
