The Chicago Cubs

September 1, 2017
In 2016, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series for the first time since 1908--and thereby hangs this tale.Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone contributing editor Cohen (The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones, 2016, etc.), a lifelong Cubs fan, rehearses in swift, entertaining fashion the genesis of the team and its glory years (there were many early on) and long decades of mediocrity, and he introduces us to some key players over the years. Grover Cleveland Alexander, Ernie Banks, Bill Buckner, Hack Wilson, Ron Santo, Sammy Sosa: these and many other celebrated, even infamous names populate the early pages of this love story so full of broken hearts, the author's included. The Cubs frequent losses--and the dominance of the curse, whose origins and manifestations Cohen considers throughout--eventually drove the author to give up on the team and to quit following them. Until, of course, the resurrection, which, Cohen shows, began in 2009 when the Ricketts family purchased the franchise, and made key hires, including team president Theo Epstein and manager Joe Maddon, and promising acquisitions. Finally, hope returned to reign at Wrigley Field, whose story the author also tells us. The concluding 60 or so pages deal with the newly risen Cubs, who didn't quite make it in 2015 but who defeated the Cleveland Indians in seven games in 2016 to finally break the curse. The author provides smooth summaries of each of the seven contests, calling Game 7 "the greatest baseball game of all time." (Tribe fans may disagree.) Cohen's accounts of the team, the players, the games and the culture surrounding the Cubs are brisk and informative, and his many personal stories, strung like holiday lights throughout the narrative, illuminate a fan's frangible heart that annually repaired itself.

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September 15, 2017

In his new book, Cohen (Monsters: The 1985 Bears and the Wild Heart of Football) takes a spin through the history of the Chicago Cubs, including the team's numerous curses and the already legendary roster that finally broke them all in 2016. The Curse of the Billy Goat is as much a part of the team's lore as first baseman Ernie Banks, Wrigley Fields's ivy, and announcer Harry Caray declaring that someday the Cubs would win the World Series. Cohen, who is known for writing about popular music as well as sports, brings a brash, kinetic style to his many stories of the figures in Cub history. The people he writes about--Ron Santo, Hack Wilson, Mordecai Brown, Grover Cleveland Alexander--almost feel like rock stars in Cohen's hands. This book moves along rapidly through Cubs history up to the 2016 team, to which the volume's largest portion is dedicated. Cohen's love for the Cubs and baseball, along with his well-developed style, put this book above other recent Cubs-related releases. VERDICT Baseball fans will devour this all-too-brief review of the Cubs' frustrating history yet joyous present.--Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 23, 2017
Cohen (Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football) offers an energetic account of the drought between the Chicago Cubs’ 1908 World Series win and their incredible triumph in 2016. He nicely details the team’s ups and downs over those 108 years and intersperses his narrative with recollections from his own childhood and early-adult obsession in the 1970s and 80s with the team. His depiction of Cubs lore (“some worldly, some mystical”), such as the glory of first baseman Ernie Banks (“the perfect cub, ideally suited for the role of a great player on a terrible team” from 1953 to 1971) and the near misses of the 1969, 1984, and 2003 seasons, is coupled with informative writing that’s infused with the fatalism of a long-suffering Cubs fan. (He notes that Cubs General Manager Epstein said it would take five years to win a World series, “the same amount of time Stalin said he’d need to create a workers’ paradise.”) He shows how the legendary “curse” on the Cubs has taken many forms over 100 years, such as the curse of the billy goat in the 1945 World Series. The final third of the book is an exciting look at the Cubs’ winning 2016 season that includes a game-by-game description of the playoffs. This book has something new even for the most hardcore Cubs fans.

Starred review from September 1, 2017
This is but one in what is already a succession of books on the Chicago Cubs' historic 2016 World Series championshipbooks that include Scott Simon's My Cubs and David Kaplan's The Planbut it might be the best, since it's both a deeply satisfying historical account of that colorful franchise and a compelling, all-too-painful personal narrative of one longtime, besotted Cubs fan. It's a question we ask at Sunday school, Cohen writes. Why? Why were the Cubs so bad for so long? He names the possible culprits: the ballpark, day baseball, the 1908 team riding to their title by playing gotcha on a boneheaded New York Giants play, a spurned billy goat, the team's slow acceptance of African American players, the ritual post-game click of Ron Santo's heels after a win during the ill-fated 1969 season, Sammy Sosa, Steve Bartman, and on and on. The Cubs were not good because they focused on the wrong things, Cubs president Theo Epstein, perhaps the most qualified to offer an explanation, told Cohen. They always wanted to make sure next year's team looked like it had a chance to win because the team was going to be up for sale at any moment . . . It means lack of long-term planning. Who knew that all it took to break a 108-year-old curse was plain old common senseand talent?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)