It's hard to go wrong when you write a book about old-time baseball, and the Pacific Coast League might have been the best of the best.

Paul Zingg's and Mark Medeiros's book is in much the same vein as the equally classic Dick Dobbins books on this subject. However, "Runs, Hits and an Era" is a little more fortified with statistics. The names of Jigger Statz and Buzz Arlett are hardly household words today, but they truly must have been the Henry Aaron and Barry Bonds of their league and era.

And the authors rely less on interviews with the participants and more on traditional written sources - newspaper articles and other books written on the subject. In this book, there is perhaps slightly more emphasis on the Pacific Coast League's relationship to the other professional baseball leagues, major and minor, and on its relationship to the world at large.

This book has the usual collection of wonderful baseball photos from that era but also some photographs from the historical period in general. On page 3, there's a photograph from 1869 of the meeting of the rails of the Transcontinental Railroad that joined the eastern and western parts of the country. This enabled professional eastern teams to compete on the West Coast. The barnstorming tour of the first Cincinnati Reds baseball team took them to the West Coast, and while they bowled over the local teams with the same regularity that they bowled over everyone else during their incredible 130 game win streak, their visit did help set into motion the forces that would promote professional baseball on the West Coast.

Zingg and Medeiros also provide more information on the "color line", which was practiced by the PCL as unjustly and almost as rigidly as that practiced by the majors. Its existence was also just as predictably doomed, as the influx of "colored" talent would prove to be too overwhelming to be denied. Names such as Luke Easter, Minnie Minoso, and Artie Wilson might be familiar to many, but I was surprised to see the name of Piper Davis alongside these others.

A mainstay of the old Negro Leagues that played in the shadows of the white major league teams in the east, Piper Davis is largely known for having first signed Willie Mays to a Birmingham Black Baron contract in the 1940's. I had not known that he made his way to the Pacific Coast afterwards and established himself as a PCL pioneer.

Who hit the longest home run in the history of professional baseball in the San Francisco Bay Area? The first five names that likely came to your mind were Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Reggie Jackson and Willie McCovey. The name Roy Carlyle of the Oakland Oaks probably wouldn't have ranked high on your list, but with the immortal Buzz Arlett waiting his turn on-deck, Carlyle's 618-foot Fourth of July blast in 1929 off of the San Francisco Missions' Ernie Nevers (yes, the old football star) probably traveled farther than any "splash down". Carlyle looks like an ordinary-sized chap in his picture, and presumably, he accomplished this without the assistance of andro.

The description of radio recreations of PCL games sounds a little too familiar: if the telegraph or telephone became temporarily inoperative, the "recreater" would have to have the hitter foul off pitches endlessly until the problem was fixed. That sounds a lot like the legend of how "Dutch" Reagan prolonged Billy Jurges's trip to home plate for a half hour. Did these things really happen or are the stories apocryphal? A delay in transmission sounds more like an excuse for giving the advertisers their money's worth than for a succession of foul balls.

Interestingly enough, these authors seem to disagree with Dobbins on the attitude of the major leagues toward PCL absorption. The PCL made a strong bid for major league membership after World War II, and Dobbins seems to feel that the major league owners thwarted this with an intent of possibly themselves relocating or expanding to the Pacific Coast some day. But Zingg and Medeiros argue that skepticism about the West Coast as a major league locale and about the adequacy of the PCL ballparks was genuine and that relocation to the West Coast really was initially regarded as prohibitively expensive, noting that the marginal teams that did relocate first chose locations in the Midwest such as Milwaukee and Kansas City.

Notwithstanding the title, this book has a brief recapitulation of the league's post-1958 history. It yet exists today as a wholly-controlled minor league adjunct to the majors and even has expanded INTO the Pacific Ocean by adding a team in Hawaii. Even Little Rock has a team - Little Rock, Alaska, that is. But it seems universally agreed that when the Giants and the Dodgers arrived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, in 1958, this was the end of the PCL as traditionally conceived, as the original franchises moved and changed their names.

Still, books like this whet the reader's appetite for more. Surely it isn't too late to ship the Dodgers back to Brooklyn, the Giants to a city like Montreal that might deserve a perennial non-champion, the A's back to Philly or Kansas City, and the other major league West Coast expansion upstarts to oblivion. When the shopping center on 16th and Bryant in San Francisco is torn down to rebuild Seals Stadium and when the studio on Beverly and Fairfax is torn down to rebuild Gilmore Field and when the community center on 42nd and Avalon is torn down to rebuild Wrigley Field and when Oaks Park is rebuilt even alongside the plaque in Emeryville that STILL commemorates the Roy Carlyle blast, the Pacific Coast League can be reborn, and West Coast baseball can awake from its prolonged slumber and begin again in earnest.

I'm proud to say that I read William P. Wanker's book when it first came out, many years ago, and it changed my life. Despite it not becoming the literary classic I had expected it to become, I'm glad to know that Wanker's popularity is again rising amoung young readers, making him, despite his age, an up and coming author. I highly recommend the book to anyone, whether an urban or rural resident, since its importance cannot be understated. Excellent. William P. Wanker, we salute you!

This is an exceptional little book which tells the story of the four largest peasant revolts in Russian history all of which were named for the leaders who inspired the revolts--Bolotnikov in 1606-1607, Razin in 1670-1671, Bulavin in 1707-1708, and Pugachev in 1773-1774.

Readers have always wondered why Russia has traditionally felt the need for a strong authoritarian central government. This book answers that question in part. The huge Russian empire was made up of many different ethnic groups. Ethnic jealousies, resulting in civil wars and foreign invasions were always the result of a weak Czar or a change of dynasty. Thus the social compact of the Russian state was that all groups must submit to the power of a Czar in order to survive. This is the reason for the god-like status and supreme power given to the Czar in the old Russian empire.

This is an amazing work. A mostly autobiographical parody, Barnes uses Ryder as sort of a twisted extended metaphor for the rest of the world. The beautiful and inventive prose, though often obscure, illustrates the life of the Ryder family poignantly and indignantly. Written in various styles, the book is bound to touch each and every reader.

Paul Motwani's books are stimulating, and I find myself able to work through long variations in his books more than I can in the works of other authors, because of a certain contagious enthusiasm that he has for the game. I like how he ties chess into life, and somehow he gets me to work through his books, while many so-called classics put me to sleep. STAR Chess (low-priced here at Amazon) is a wonderful book. Working through the chapter on the Sicilian Dragon (focused on the Yugoslav) is alone worth the price of the book. This is along book packed with chess, and with other fun things, such as word and math problems, thrown in to keep you alert. One gets the feeling that this author really wants his readers to love and aimprove at chess. I heartily recommend all of his books. Grab them while you still can!

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Paul Avrich has made a career out of anarchist history -- anarchistory, I suppose you'd call it. He's an excellent writer and this book is a welcome addition to his series. The title is a little misleading, as Sacco and Vanzetti, who were executed in the late 20's in one of the most controversial criminal cases of this century, aren't really dealt with too much.

What is dealt with are the Galleanists, the followers of Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani, who really framed American anti-radical policy (unintentionally) by way of a series of bombings that occurred in 1919 and 1920. These bombings offered the government the pretext for the unlawful series of police actions called the "Red Scare". These events are important even today because they framed American policy toward domestic leftist radicalism, much of which remains in force today.

The book follows the lives (and deaths) of many Italian anarchists, including Galleani himself, and is a fascinating exploration of their lives and their anarchist subculture at a time when anarchism was on the wane everywhere except Spain.

To the modern anarchist, the book offers as much of a sense of what anarchism shouldn't be as what it used to be. The Galleanist use of bombs did anarchism a considerable disservice as it gave the press something sensational to latch onto -- even today, some 70 years later, people still link anarchism with bombs. This is a direct offshoot of the Galleanists' activities, as explored in this book.

Avrich has a very readable writing style, and the book is jam-packed with historical references and interesting stories. Like all of his anarchist books, this one is worth your time.

This is my favorite of the many books by this well respected yoga scholar. It's a series of original essays on many different facets of Yoga. Extremely informative and simply a joy to read. For example, anyone who has struggled to gain a perspective on the many Indians who have so influenced Yoga in the West will love Chapter 3, "East Meets West: A Historical Perspective." It places many famous yogis in context: Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Theo Bernard's unknown teacher-Yogendra, Yogananada, Ramana Maharshi-the sage Paul Bruton made famous in the West, Krishnamacharya-the scholar,practitioner and healer who launched the modern revival of hatha yoga via his students, and many more. See Chapter 5, "Science Studies Yoga", for a review of early and modern efforts to measure what yogis are doing and quantify what the benefits of practice are. Chapters 12 and 13, "The History of Hatha Yoga" and "The Evolution of Posture",discuss the relatively short history of what many normally think of as Yoga today. There is even a delightful "interview" with Patanjali, where a modern scholar asks the sage many of the questions students throughout the ages have wondered about. This book is out of print, but well worth the effort to solicit via Amazon or, better yet, petition Georg for another printing.

My son always chooses this book at the library. He's not yet two years old and he loves looking at each animal, making their noises, then finding each animal in the final panoramic picture. The drawings are engaging -- the zebra prances, the rhino smiles, the leopard is utterly relaxed but thoughtful. (Only the lion doesn't look quite proportional with real lions, but he looks wise and a little mean.) He'll be getting his very own copy for his 2nd birthday!

This book was very helpful to me. As a child of divorced parents, I never understood how my experiences as a small child could effect my ability to be intimate with others as an adult. Since I am a Christian and have admired the work of Minirth and Meier for years, I love how the authors weave the truth of Jesus' love for us and wanting us to feel safe with solid counseling advice. I know that this is a book I will refer to again and again as I contine to work through my "unsafe" experiences as a child.