A Nice Little Place on the North Side; Wrigley Field at One Hundred

New York: Crown Archetype, 2014. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Format is approximately 5.75 inches by 8.5 inches. 223, [1] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Text Credits, Photo Credits. Index. George Frederick Will (born May 4, 1941) is an American political commentator. He writes regular columns for The Washington Post and provides commentary for NBC News and MSNBC. In 1986, The Wall Street Journal called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America," in a league with Walter Lippmann (1889-1974). He won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. Will, a Chicago Cubs fan, has written extensively on baseball, including his best-selling book Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. He was one of the interview subjects for Ken Burns's PBS documentary series Baseball. Derived from a Kirkus review: Will writes an affectionate birthday card to the home of his beloved Chicago Cubs. The author, traces his Cub fandom back to 1948, when he was 7. This is not a traditional, chronological history but an emotional one; in fact, readers will find little about the construction of the place-though 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, and some discoveries by baseball statistician Bill James. He dispels a few myths along the way. He waxes philosophical a bit, ruminating about how fandom is like tribalism. Digressive, amusing, anecdotal, legend-shattering, and passionate-just what you want.