I relish lists of books enjoyed by friends and acquaintances, and it seems that many of my readers do too, hence this annual diversion from commentary on the academic employment law which is the bread and butter of our legal practice.
The books discussed herein are neither the “best” of anything, nor are they necessarily recent, just read (by me) in the last year with particular interest.
My friend Tony Downer, whose knowledge of the American Presidents rivals that of many professional historians, recommended Troy Senik’s A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland (Threshold Editions of Simon & Schuster 2022). I happily and wholeheartedly pass along his recommendation. The recent election eliminated the long-time trivia question of who was the only U.S. President to serve two non-consecutive terms. Before this November 5, the answer had been Grover Cleveland. I knew little about Cleveland before reading the Senik biography, but he was quite an extraordinary person. A man of fierce and meticulous honesty, Grover Cleveland, within less than a decade, rose from being a private lawyer in Buffalo, New York to become Mayor of Buffalo, then Governor of New York State, and then President of the United States. Cleveland’s rapid ascent was even more remarkable given his staunch refusal to participate in the “spoils” system—think Tammany Hall—which was the predominant feature of American politics in the Gilded Age. He even returned unsolicited gifts, including a large Labrador dog, at his own expense (!!) in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Like most Presidents, Grover Cleveland failed more often than he succeeded, but he lived an admirable life and Senik tells it well.
Still on the subject of American history, in 2019 the military historian Rick Atkinson published the first volume of his projected “Revolutionary War trilogy”, entitled The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (Henry Holt). A large book, it sat on my shelf, giving me the occasional fish eye, until I finally started it earlier this year. I can report that it is not only a fine work of scholarship, but a truly engrossing “read” as well. One professional historian has said that he had dismissed Atkinson as nothing more than an impressive storyteller until he (the historian) went back and found that Atkinson had a specific reliable source for every single detail in every sentence, including the weather, the emotional atmosphere, and his frequent quotations from the diaries of obscure figures. Atkinson’s elegant writing makes the reader feel that “you are there” in the midst of contemporary events with as yet undetermined outcomes, from George Washington and his ragtag rebels raising the siege of Boston after the terrible ordeal of Bunker Hill, to the panicked forced retreat of American troops, many riddled by smallpox, from lower Canada a few months later. Great events hang in the balance, and the risks and sacrifices that the Revolutionary generation was willing to endure remain almost unbelievable. The second volume of Atkinson’s trilogy is due out this coming Spring, and I assure you that it will not gather dust on my shelves.
What about the law, you might ask? Although we no longer litigate cases, I deeply enjoyed Thomas Grant’s re-telling of Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories (a 2016 best-seller in England, now available in paperback from the English publisher John Murray). When the book was published, Hutchinson was still alive at age 100, a celebrated criminal barrister who was the dramatic courtroom “star” of quite a number of celebrated British cases for three decades beginning in the early 1960s. They range from famous spy trials (R. vs. Blake; R. vs. Vassall), through the scandal involving Christine Keeler, to landmark freedom of expression cases like the British government’s attempts to suppress Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Last Tango in Paris. A Second World War veteran, tall, slender, good-looking, possessed of a rapier wit and an equally sharp sense of injustice, in his day Jeremy Hutchinson was the barrister everyone wanted to hire. Too modest to write his own memoirs, younger lawyer Thomas Grant secured Hutchinson’s cooperation in preparing these stories of Hutchinson’s cases, which he tells in compelling fashion. A book for anyone interested in the law or the effects of legal procedure on a rapidly changing society.
Next, readers with a taste for the classics may have noted that the distinguished Penguin Classics series has, in the past few years, broadened its definition of what is a “classic”, and has included in its beautifully designed and affordable series of paperback reprints an increasingly wider range of books well beyond the standard canon of accepted “great works”. Accordingly, I was delighted to find that Penguin has reprinted a legendary 1912 sports memoir from the rough and tumble “deadball era” of Big League baseball, Pitching In A Pinch: Baseball from the Inside by Christopher (aka Christy) Mathewson. Mathewson was the rare college man and celebrated “Christian gentleman” who elevated the tone of John McGraw’s roughneck New York Giants in the first decade of the twentieth century. He also was the only member of the original class of inductees at the 1936 opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame who was not present at the ceremony in Cooperstown, having died a decade earlier from tuberculosis inflamed by a poison gas accident in the First World War. “Matty” was the idol of millions, one of whom was my own grandfather, who regaled me with stories of his youth on the Lower East Side of New York, telling me how he left work early to take the elevated train to the Polo Grounds to watch the immortal Mathewson pitch. Written (supposedly) by Mathewson himself with the assistance of New York sports writer John N. Wheeler, Pitching In A Pinch could be found in the back pocket of kids’ knickerbockers all across America. In the book, Matty tells about his own personal encounters with other legends, such as “Three Finger” Mordecai Brown, Rube Waddell, Eddie Collins, the celebrated double-play combination of Tinker to Evers to Chance, and, of course, his peerless manager, John McGraw himself. Given last summer’s diamond heroics, it is to be hoped that younger fans are being lured back from videogames to America’s Pastime, and Pitching In A Pinch will whet any fan’s appetite to learn about an older generation of players and famous games (Mathewson tells the story of the celebrated “Merkle boner”, which cost the Giants the 1908 pennant, with no self-pity whatsoever). It is fully appropriate that Christy Mathewson’s Hall of Fame plaque contains the line, “Matty was Master of Them All.” He was indeed, as his 373 victories prove.
Another enjoyable sports book: The League by John Feinstein (in paperback 2019) tells the story of how five men—George Halas, Art Rooney, Tim Mara, Bert Bell and George Preston Marshall—built professional football from a sideshow attraction before WWII (football was supposed to be a college game) into the largest and wealthiest professional sports franchise on the planet. They were far from perfect human beings (Marshall was a racist who resisted hiring great Black players), but their visionary commitment to the game survived years of both threatened and actual insolvency on the road to making the National Football League the dominant television sports attraction it is today.
Back to history. One of the added bonuses of our legal practice is our contact with impressive scholars and educational administrators, one of whom, Laura Auricchio, currently an officer at the Guggenheim Foundation, is the author of a fascinating and highly readable biography entitled The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered (Vintage Books 2015). Her subject, the noted French aristocrat, was not only a hero of our own Revolutionary War, but came perilously close to losing his life in the bloody terror of his own country’s “revolution”. Fortunately, he escaped that fate and survived long enough to make a celebrated “victory lap” tour of the infant U.S. two hundred years ago this very year. Streets, cities, colleges and presumably babies were named for him. Who says that a prophet is without honor in his own time?
Finally, I got around to reading a translation of the Chinese religious classic The Tao (or Dao) this year, and was fairly overwhelmed by the great wisdom it contains, despite all of its more than occasional ambiguities. There supposedly are more than 500 translations of this ancient masterpiece (at least three new ones in this year alone), but I read the one by David Hinton in China Root: Taoism, Ch’an and Original Zen. It was recommended to me by my friend Dick Nodell, gifted consultant and coach to College Presidents and other management executives, and I am pleased to pass the recommendation along to you.
It has been a privilege to serve and support many dedicated executives in Colleges, Universities and Independent Schools during the past year. Lisa, Theresa and I wish our clients, friends and readers a wonderful holiday season and a healthy and productive 2025!
