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War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War
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About This Book
A "richly detailed" portrait of the three men whose lives were forever changed by WWI-era Boston (Michael S. Neiberg): baseball star Babe Ruth, symphony conductor Karl Muck, and Harvard Law student Charles Whittlesey.In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German. And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as the radical lecturing workers about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek.War Fever explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval.
Reviews
"Ruth's legend is one of the most overplayed in American lore: the carousing overgrown boy who changed the game with his prodigious power."
"An entertaining reminder that American hero worship, media hype, and fierce nationalism haven't changed much in a century."
"Maybe with a little historical distance, Roberts and Smith will have a different book to write about the two moments in American history when baseball and xenophobia met up with a pandemic."
"The authors combine detailed research and solid storytelling to illustrate the ways in which these three German-Americans, however tangentially connected, were defined—as 'war hero, war villain, and war athlete.' Despite the tenuous connections between the main characters, this is a solid story of early-20th-century immigrant life."
"The passages on Muck's internment and the Lost Battalion are among this book's best, but on the whole War Fever remains less than the sum of its too-many parts."
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