Beat Writers Research Articles

‘Deteriorating Our Relationship for no Good Reason’: Collegiate Beat Writers’ Perceptions of Their PR Counterparts

This study examines the contemporary nature of the relationship between sport journalists and media relations personnel, particularly within the context of collegiate athletics. Despite years of sharing a “symbiotic relationship” wherein both sides benefited from the success of the other, sports media professionals have cited a strained rapport, as sports information directors (SIDs) and media relations personnel have taken internal positions aimed at producing content comparable to what sports media have traditionally developed. Through in-depth interviews with 16 beat writers, the current project identified three salient themes related to beat writers’ perceived relationships with SIDs and media relations professionals representing athletic programs they cover: (1) frustration over the control of information, (2) misperceptions about the media’s value to the organization, and (3) growing uncertainty about the future of the relationship between beat writers and media relations professionals. These findings contribute theory and practice within the context of the Strategic Sport Communication Model (SSCM).

Book Review: The Paradox of Thanatos: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: From Self-Destruction to Self-Liberation by Tanguy Harma

Tanguy Harma’s monograph entitled The Paradox of Thanatos: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: From Self-Destruction to Self-Liberation, with its fascinating cover illustration by Vasil Stanev, “2 Sugar Skulls,” presents an in-depth study of the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as inheritors of the European Existentialist and the American Transcendentalist tradition. It elaborates these two writers’ struggle to achieve meaningful life in post-war America under hegemonic capitalism and consumerism, crushed beneath conformity and social control, as they struggle towards a more authentic self-expression and liberation beyond the restraints that curtail transcendence.

Last Gangster in Austin: Frank Smith, Ronnie Earle, and the End of a Junkyard Mafia by Jesse Sublett

Reviewed by: Last Gangster in Austin: Frank Smith, Ronnie Earle, and the End of a Junkyard Mafia by Jesse Sublett Jason Mellard Last Gangster in Austin: Frank Smith, Ronnie Earle, and the End of a Junkyard Mafia. By Jesse Sublett. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022. Pp. 212. Illustrations, notes, index.) Jesse Sublett's Last Gangster in Austin hinges on a single dramatic incident: an armed robbery gone bad in an Austin salvage yard in 1976, leaving one man in a monkey mask dead on the floor. That is not what the book is about, though. This singular crime becomes a kaleidoscope through which to view the intricate and intersecting biographies, criminal endeavors, and political fortunes of the figures in the subtitle, underworld character Frank Smith and crusading district attorney (DA) Ronnie Earle. Frank Smith was a bail bondsman, auto parts dealer, and ne'er-do-well, a "Don Corleone as reimagined for Hee Haw" (16). Ronnie Earle was a 1970s reform wunderkind, the youngest municipal judge in Texas before his DA election put him in place to prosecute Smith. A constellation of [End Page 604] associates and nemeses swirl around the two, a cast plucked from the noir genre that Sublett renders so well as hardboiled nonfiction. Ike Rabb is the owner of the Austin Salvage Pool and target of Smith's ire. Sherriff Raymond Frank had been a reformer in his own right before ties to Smith exposed his corruption. A real star of the book, whom Sublett often channels, is Austin American-Statesman beat writer Bill Cryer, whose articles testified to the quality of writing and depth of relationships that local journalism once fostered. Beyond this cast, "significant" Texas history figures cameo throughout, including LBJ's brother Sam Houston Johnson, Allan Shivers, Ann Richards, and Willie Nelson. When such figures appear on the page, they put the book's accomplishment in high relief. It is a rollicking narrative of a criminal underworld, yes, but Sublett's attention to characters otherwise invisible in the celebratory accounts of modern Austin shows that histories aiming to capture the life of a Texas city miss much when they fixate on who performs on its central stages rather than, say, who guts out a living in a salvage yard. Earle is the protagonist here in bringing Smith to justice, but the work of telling history from Smith's vantage point on the margins (or in the shadows) fills in the blind spots of so many other Austin stories. Last Gangster in Austin adds to what has become Sublett's extended literary universe of nightlife and hustles, shenanigans and sleaze, across mid-century Texas. Individuals from his other books put in appearances here: the Overton Gang from Austin Gangsters, co-author Broadus Spivey of Homer Maxey's Texas Bank War, Eddie Wilson from Armadillo World Headquarters, and even allusions to the tome that started it all, Sublett's own memoir Never the Same Again. In fact, the origins of this book lay in that first, as Smith's legal troubles swirled in the newspapers in which Sublett was researching his own experiences of 1976, when he had been wrongfully suspected of a violent crime. That experience, and a familiarity with the journalistic sources of the time, helped spark this book and led Sublett to engage in extensive interviews with surviving principals that he deploys to good effect. On its surface, the book reads as true crime and succeeds as such. It is also an exemplary microhistory with close attention to currents that broader accounts of modern Austin have missed, if not outright ignored. Historians may reflect on moments where the book could have aimed for larger themes—the Smith case as emblematic of the institutional failures and political corruption of the 1970s—but that can be the work of other studies and is typically implicit in Sublett's telling. A riveting character study, The Last Gangster in Austin stands out as is, as bold and individual as Smith's bright green Cadillac speeding away from the scene of the crime. [End Page 605] Jason Mellard Texas State University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Drugs as Creation and Destruction to Ginsberg: Focusing on His Poetry and Life

Drugs both heal and destroy the human body and mind. Illegal drugs such as heroin, LSD, cocaine and marijuana were often celebrated as means to literary insight. In the 1960s drugs were used by the Beat writers, notably Allen Ginsberg, who referred to them in his poetry as a means to both political and spiritual insight. However, drugs also proved to be a dangerous and destructive addiction. This paper traces the awareness of the power of drugs in Ginsberg’s poetry creation, political stance and spiritual transcendence as well as the introspection of drugs in his late years.

Making soufflé with metal: Effects of the coronavirus pandemic on sports journalism practices.

The coronavirus pandemic significantly – and perhaps permanently – altered the ways by which we lead our personal and professional lives. Sports journalism is no exception – with the seasons of all kinds of sports modified, reduced or cancelled entirely in 2020, reporters on the sports beat had to quickly adapt to ever-changing circumstances. This exploratory study investigates the impact of the pandemic on the practices of sports beat writers during the 2020 season. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 beat writers covering teams in all four major North American sports leagues, this study reveals that the journalists’ experiences with the pandemic-imposed conditions underscored already-present trends within sports journalism: namely, a reduction of access to players and coaching due, in part, to increased team control through robust media relations divisions; journalists’ overreliance on official team sources; and a move towards feature and data- and analytics-driven stories. This study contributes to literature on sports journalism beat reporting and offers an early insight into how the pandemic conditions might help shape the future of the industry.

Queer Angels in Post-1945 American Literature and Culture: Bad Beatitudes

Queer Angels in Post-1945 American Literature and Culture: Bad Beatitudes

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

Covering the Rooney Rule: An Exploratory Study of Print Coverage of NFL Head Coaching Searches

This content analysis uses media framing theory to explore and compare the rate at which NFL beat writers discussed race in their coverage of the 2020 and 2021 NFL head coach hiring cycles, a perennial process that has historically maintained the statistical overrepresentation of white men among the league’s head coaches. The study of the articles (N = 374) found significant year over year increases in 2021 in both the percentage of all sampled articles overall that mentioned race and in the percentage of stories that mentioned race after a team’s head coach was hired. This study’s findings suggest that, while NFL beat writers are unsurprisingly likely to avoid using race to frame their coaching search stories, their willingness to include race in their reporting may be increasing. Given increased calls for the NFL to address its lack of Black head coaches, sportswriters’ (un)willingness to include race in their reporting of coaching searches has become increasingly relevant. Given this study’s results, we therefore call for further qualitative and longitudinal quantitative studies to more definitively investigate these results as a sustained (and sustainable) phenomenon.

The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto

Reviewed by: The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto Erik Mortenson Steven Belletto. The Beats: A Literary History. Cambridge UP, 2020. x + 463 pp. Beat writers are often seen as postwar isolatos—Romantic figures of rebellion who turned their backs on postwar conformism to forge boldly ahead in new literary directions. As compelling as such formulations might be, they hide the Beats’ indebtedness to the culture that produced them. Steven Belletto’s The Beats: A Literary History offers a fresh perspective on these time-worn assumptions. By placing well-known as well as lesser-known Beat texts into a useful dialogue [End Page 806] with cultural concerns, Belletto has created a book that is extremely relevant and timely—a much-needed overview of Beat writing, it provides a general introduction while simultaneously making important claims that deserve further exploration. The book is divided into four parts that examine the Beats as both writers and social phenomenon and is organized, for the most part, chronologically. The first part starts with an engaging reading of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs’s coauthored novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, written in 1945. Belletto effectively demonstrates that, far from a simple chronicle of the famous murder of David Kammerer, which has become a staple of Beat lore, the novel rehearses the act of narrativization in ways essential for understanding the interplay between representation and lived reality in the Beat canon. Belletto concludes the section by tracing the beginnings of the Beat movement, putting it into dialogue with other mid-century avant garde literary communities such as the Black Mountain poets and the New York School. In the next part, Belletto provides an engaging examination of early Beat novels, which are only now getting the attention they deserve, then moves into more familiar territory with an examination of classic Beat texts by writers such as Burroughs, Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Part 3, “The Beatnik Era and the Profusion of Beat Literature (1958-1962),” looks at early critical reviews, little magazines, and a series of discussions on lesser-known but equally-important Beat writers outside the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs triumvirate, from Diane di Prima and Gregory Corso, to the more obscure, such as David Meltzer, Ron Loewinsohn, and Sheri Martinelli. Part 4 is a shorter discussion of Beat politics but includes sections on Beat women’s writing, lesser-read Beat novels such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Her and Corso’s The American Express. It ends with an examination of how the 1960s Vietnam Era pushed many Beat writers into the overtly political, with special emphasis on Ginsberg and Ed Sanders. The work functions through a series of close readings coupled with either social or literary-historical contextualization, which provides readers with a sense of not only writers’ individual voices and preoccupations but also how they fit into the larger scene that is Beat. Ginsberg’s celebrated long poem Howl is discussed through an examination of publishing in and about San Francisco, the 6 Gallery reading and its aftermath, the textual construction of the poem, the poem as a “Secret history of the Beat Generation” (129), and its obscenity trial. This layered approach not only provides engaging new takes on Beat works but also reveals how Beat representations [End Page 807] are in dialogue with the contingencies of the postwar moment. At the same time, Belletto’s range is usefully broad. Readers are provided revealing discussions of classics such as On the Road and Naked Lunch but are likewise treated to analyses of seldom-discussed little magazines such as the parodic Sinking Bear, as well as important but unfortunately overlooked Beat authors such as Kay Johnson. Belletto includes those whose literary output was meager but who were nevertheless Beat figures worthy of attention and critical discussion. Though necessarily wide-ranging given its aim, the work could use more of a roadmap at times. Nevertheless, coupling interesting close reads with helpful contextualization makes for illuminating reading. Belletto’s approach has numerous advantages, not the least of which is that it allows him to sidestep problems that often plague other treatments of the Beats. Because of the confessional nature of their work and their...

Hettie Jones and Bonnie Bremser: Complicating Feminist and Beat Master Narratives

The Beat master narrative suggests that all Beats ignored racism; the feminist wave model suggests that there was no feminist activism between the first and second wave of feminism and no attention to the intersection of race and gender prior to the third wave. Both models discount and in the process erase the efforts by Beat writers Bonnie Bremser and Hettie Jones who challenged racism and sexism before the more visible civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s. Employing Milton Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity to analyze the intercultural/interracial attitudes present in Bonnie Bremser’s Troia and Hettie Jones’ How I Became Hettie Jones reveals how these Beat writers’ attitudes regarding Otherness were problematic, but also progressive for their time.

Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey

Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey

Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition

Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition

The Spiritual Imagination of the BeatsWomen Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and IntertextualityWorld Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. LiteratureKerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory

The Spiritual Imagination of the BeatsWomen Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and IntertextualityWorld Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. LiteratureKerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory

Aspects of Ecology in the Select Literary works of American Beats: An Investigation

The literary products of the Beats reflect the companionship between humans and animals. Beat novelists and poets project the elements of compassion for the species and the inanimate things through their eco-sensible prose and poetry Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti are very famous literary figures of the Beat Generation. All of these Beats have raised their protest against the war and the social industrialization or establishment which was seen in America and in the other parts of the world. Beats have full appreciation for the oriental countries and their love is manifested in their novels and poems. Beat writers have given a new shape to their literary works by the inclusion of the views and ideas which pertain to spirituality and religion; they posit their faith in the religious function of literature for achieving social and environmental harmony. Beats incorporate visions and dreams in their works and establish themselves as the seekers of reality and truth. This paper attempts to explore Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Ferlinghetti’s ecological consciousness through their select works and also how and in what sense they highlight the grave issues of the global ecology and provide the humanity the solutions in this regard.

The exultation of another

The Beat writers' influence on world letters is well known, but far less understood is their translational ethos that brought the world to American writing. This study offers insight into a Beat philosophy of translation, whether formalized or implicit. What emerges is a picture of an expansive poetics that puts translation in the service of a project of identity‐formation that actively chose its confederates and precursors from all over the world's language traditions. For the Beats, translation was sympathy and identification both textual and biographical, sometimes to the point of projection and creative misreading, and always with a sensibility recognizably tied to their place and time, a Beat translation style. They blurred the lines between original and translation like few generations of writers, including through interpolation, “shift linguals,” homage, and other kinds of polyphonic textures. While some of its key figures are already understood in their translatorial dimension, considered as a whole, the Beat poets' theories and practices of translation reveal the group to be more multicultural, and more multilingually networked, than perhaps had hitherto been thought.

Charles Bukowski – America’s Poet of the South

One of the most expressive trends in American culture of the 1950s and 1960s, manifested by the treatment of travel as a motive of life in both the mental and creative spheres, can be confidently attributed to the Beat generation. Their consumption lifestyle, crazy undertakings, love and moral fights, in which they entered without any moderation, led them to living problems and, consequently, to being lost. This generation almost automatically brings to mind the portrait of young, vulnerable Americans, rebellious and lost, oppressed and radical, wanting freedom and falling into trouble. The myth of the Beat generation is one of the most distinct myths of American culture of the twentieth century. We know very little about Beat in Poland. Admittedly, there have been several studies concerning the literary output of Beat writers, but they do not fully reflect the complexity of the phenomenon and contexts in which they were shaped. We are constantly looking at them in terms of mythologized rebellion. Associated with beat, Charles Bukowski is the best example of a person whose work was inspired by his own experiences related to sex, alcohol, poverty and human weaknesses.

Genius and Genitality: William S. Burroughs Reading Wilhelm Reich

This article explores the impact of Wilhelm Reich’s theories and writings on the works and thinking of William S. Burroughs. Reich’s significance for Burroughs’ fiction is beyond doubt, as the appearance of Reich’s discoveries and inventions, such as orgones and orgone accumulators, in Burroughs’ major works demonstrates. Yet to date, no attempt has been made in academia to make all those references to Reich in Burroughs’ complete œuvre visible. In order to make the thinking of the Austrian-American psychoanalyst and scientist comprehensible for readers not familiar with Reich, the first section will provide a brief biographical outline. In the subsequent sections, the article will describe how Burroughs and other Beat writers discovered Reich, how and to what extent Burroughs incorporated Reich in his texts throughout his career and what opinions Burroughs expressed about Reich in interviews and letters. For the first time, with a summary as undertaken in this article and by documenting most of the references to Reich in Burroughs’ work, the importance of the former to the latter is revealed in a compact form.

Being Beat: The Stern Reality of London's Tramp Diary and Kerouac's Road

Being BeatThe Stern Reality of London's Tramp Diary and Kerouac's Road Paul Crumbley (bio) In the "Author's Introduction" that appears in the opening pages of his 1960 collection of travel sketches, Lonesome Traveler, Jack Kerouac presents a brief résumé of his life in which he includes the following item: "read the life of Jack London at 18 and decided also to be an adventurer, a lonesome traveler" (v). While Kerouac is without question alluding to his experience of reading about London's life during the eighteenth year of his own, it is possible with hindsight and perhaps a touch of literary-historical prestidigitation to extract a layer of unintended meaning from Kerouac's words and make the case that he was in fact reading about London's life at the time that London was eighteen. This proposition may at first seem far-fetched but becomes somewhat less so when considering the fact that the eighteen-year-old London kept a record of his 1894 participation in the nation-wide labor action known as Coxey's Industrial Army in a document now referred to as the Tramp Diary,1 the same document that would provide the germ for London's 1907 book The Road. It is this 1907 book that John Seelye identified in 1963 as having established "the tradition in which Kerouac has been writing" (340), thereby providing the basis for an indirect line of influence that connects the unpublished London Tramp Diary with Kerouac's literary career.2 Close examination of the Tramp Diary reveals that even at the age of eighteen London had begun to develop a rudimentary philosophy of life on the road that corresponds closely to the interdependence of adventure and lonesomeness that Kerouac singled out in his résumé. More significantly, London's early philosophy bears a surprisingly close resemblance to core elements of what Kerouac would famously refer to as being "Beat" and further clarifies the cultural and literary lineage that unites London with Kerouac and the consequent emergence of the Beat [End Page 32] Generation. This line of descent becomes clearest when comparing key passages in the Tramp Diary with Kerouac's comments on Beat culture and looking at the way London's revisions of the Tramp Diary for inclusion in The Road reconstruct core features of this shared philosophy without significantly diminishing its appeal to Kerouac. London's revisions illuminate in sometimes startling fashion the extent that he utilized a distinctively naturalist brand of romance3 that incorporates elements of melodrama to magnify features of life on the road in an effort to reach a broad readership. Kerouac was part of that readership and it is not in the least surprising that his most famous road novel, On the Road, contains clear evidence of London's influence. In the sixth entry London makes in his Tramp Diary, for April 11, 1894, he describes what might be considered a mis-en-scene for his own writing about the road and the Beat writers that followed him. In fragmentary, blunt language of the kind to be expected in notes complied while living the tramp life, London records his parting of the ways with Frank Davis, the friend who set out with him from Oakland to join Kelly's Army, the Oakland branch of Coxey's Industrial Army.4 London first describes "an understanding" (L10, E34)5 he reached with Frank and then goes on to acknowledge the hardships that attend such a rugged and unpredictable life. "The road," London concedes in his diary entry, "had no more charms for [Frank]." Seemingly undaunted by Frank's disenchantment, however, the eighteen-year-old London immediately identifies those very charms in broad terms that make clear how the fire that died in the heart of his friend still burns in his own: "The romance & adventure is gone & nothing remains but the stern reality of the hardships to be endured" (L10–11, E34).6 For London and the Beat writers who came after him, the "stern reality" of the road exerted an almost irresistible appeal precisely because of its power to strip romance of illusion and ground adventure in the unmediated demands of...

Still on the Road

Still on the Road Jorge García-Robles (bio) On the Road Jack Kerouac Penguin Books www.penguinrandomhouse.com 320 Pages; Print, $18.00 And his "criminality" was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yeasaying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming. Jack Kerouac, On the Road The Natural and Spontaneous Validity of On the Road There are books that last and books that are forgotten; books that stay current and books that roll over and die; there are books that survive thanks to the critics who exalt them, and books that ooze life and compel critics to discuss them. On the Road by Jack Kerouac is a book that goes beyond the critics. Despite their indifference or outright dismissal, it continues to be published, consumed, celebrated. Unlike other books that were published at the same time and faded from view, On the Road—without planned marketing and without the baptismal accolade of the critics—has taken root in an organic humus where trunk, branches, and arborescence seem to grow unabated. Why, 60 years after its publication and 65 years after it was written, do thousands of people all over the world continue to read On the Road? Why do they pay it homage, adopt it as a behavioral beacon, and place it upon a sort of countercultural altar? It seems to me, in the first place, because the way that readers use this work—because books are used, like shoes—is more ethical than literary. Kerouac and other beat writers, rather than readers, have fans, followers, devotees of a generational ideal that is still alive and inspired by a beat spirit. The key to understanding the validity of On the Road is that its powerful magnetism stems more from its ideology than from its art, more from the model of life that its characters embody—all taken from real life, which is also key because we are not dealing with a work of strict fiction—than from the perfection of its prose, more from life than from literature, although in this book, as in others, Kerouac wants to bring the two together rather than segregate them. I think that in order to understand the beat spirit expressed in On the Road, it is best to trace the meaning of its hero-protagonist, soul and essence of the book: Dean Moriarty. Physiology of Dean Moriarty Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady, the hero of On The Road, embodies and symbolizes the most significant model—if not the only one—of the beat spirit in Kerouac's works. A link between the American literary tradition and the new generational discourse, created by Kerouac with a certain innocence, Moriarty is for our author the epitome of a new way of generational behavior and at the same time a link in the chain that makes up American literature. Compared to other heroes of modern American and European literature, Moriarty is a sui generis hero. His investiture is not that of the defeated warrior, that of the American dream turned into a nightmare: Dean Moriarty is an intact, vital, and Dionysian hero, overcome by nothing and no one, because his struggle is not against something or [End Page 13] someone. In fact, he does not even fight for an ideal, much less endeavor to face an enemy. His point of departure and arrival is himself, his will to power, to want, to desire. He has neither ideals to fulfill nor moral codes to stick to, only the physiology of a man driven by an instinct for pleasure that, rather than a moral imperative, is a clear and natural reflection of biological behavior. Dean Moriarty is pure hormones. The vitality of our hero ends not in defeat or suicide, as in numerous nineteenth-century European novels where Napoleon Bonaparte is held up as the archetypal literary hero representing a model of failure. Nor does it emulate the fate of Captain Ahab of Moby Dick (1851), Jay Gatsby of The Great Gatsby (1925), Clyde Griffiths of An American Tragedy (1925), or Faulkner's twisted and bewildered characters...

The Milwaukee Brewers at 50: Celebrating a Half-Century of Brewers Baseball by Adam McCalvy

Reviewed by: The Milwaukee Brewers at 50: Celebrating a Half-Century of Brewers Baseball by Adam McCalvy Lee Kluck Adam McCalvy. The Milwaukee Brewers at 50: Celebrating a Half-Century of Brewers Baseball. Chicago: Triumph Books, 2020. 256 pp. Cloth, $40.00. Perhaps better than any sport, organized baseball and the writers who cover it are willing and qualified to present the history of the sport to consumers. This is especially true in years that encompass anniversaries of championships or the births of teams. As such, the fact that Adam McCalvy, a beat writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has produced The Milwaukee Brewers at 50: Celebrating a Half-Century of Brewers Baseball should be no surprise. He is in the perfect position to present the rich history of the team in a positive light for both diehard fans of the Brew Crew and for the casual fan as well. That history is colorful and diverse. Trust me, I know. As a life-long Brewers fan, each page of this book flooded my memory bank with memories of twi-night doubleheaders at County Stadium with my dad and uncle when we watched players like Yount, Molitor, Surhoff, and Sheffield. I also took my wife to her first opening day at Miller Park in 2003 to watch a seriously outmatched Milwaukee team lose 11–9 to the St. Louis Cardinals. I remember the day eight years later when the team made the league championship series for the first time, since I was two, thanks to Nyjer Morgan and his alter-ego Tony Plush. The work itself is long on visual evidence of the team’s history. Each chapter is full of high-quality color and black and white photographs from the Brewer archive. These include action shots of famous games, infamous individuals, and snapshots that help to capture the vibe of not only playing in Milwaukee but being a fan. In this regard, of particular note are photo essays about the history of team mascots like Bernie Brewer (he was inspired by real fan Milt Mason who lived on top of the scoreboard at Milwaukee County Stadium in 1970 until the club had their first sellout), the World Famous Racing Sausages, and institutional defining broadcaster Bob Uecker. Moreover, the photos of events like the “victory parade” the city threw for the Brewers after they lost the 1982 World Series will cause a flashback for lifelong fans and provide a starting point for the next generation of the True Blue Brew Crew. Pictures are not the only reason to pick this work up. Given that it is, for lack of a better term, a “Coffee Table Book,” the work is short on text. That does not mean that a reader should skip over it. McCalvy has provided anecdotes from and about Brewers legends such as Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Jim Gantner, and Gorman Thomas and lesser known fan favorites such as Dan Plesac, Teddy Higuera, and Rob Deer. Richie Sexson, Jeromy Burnitz, and Jeff [End Page 225] Cirillo are also present. Also present in pictures are Ben Sheets, Rickie Weeks, and J. J. Hardy. He also provides insight related to owners Bud Selig and Mark Attanasio. Finally, McCalvy shows how people like Harry Dalton, Doug Melvin, and David Stearns turned the, at times, less than mediocre team into a contender on the field with acumen and guile, if not money. With superb photos and direct, if not exhaustive text, there are not many holes in the work. Aside from the glory days of the early 1980s and late 2000s, McCalvy also delves into (with the help of Hank Aaron and Uecker) the fight that Bud Selig undertook to get a stadium issue passed so that the team would not be forced to relocate. However, any discussion of the tough times in Milwaukee, including the collapse of the team on the field thanks to financial hardship experienced by Selig in the early 1990s and throughout the mid-2000s, are ultimately glossed over. The academic researcher will need to find another source of information if they wish to draw conclusions on why the team struggled for a large part of their existence. The general...