The Cubs: The Complete Story of Chicago Cubs Baseball
by Glenn Stout (Author), Richard A. Johnson (Photography editor)

Order this Book at Amazon.com here Hardcover: 480 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (October 1, 2007)

From the critically acclaimed authors of Red Sox Century and Yankees Century, the definitive narrative history of the Chicago Cubs: They were America’s most successful baseball club at the turn of the twentieth century, but at the turn of this century the Cubs have not won a World Series in nearly one hundred years. Yet, the Cubs have some of the most devoted fans in all of sport. Glenn Stout chronicles the long, rich, counterintuitive history of this team in all its depth, nuance, and color.  Complementing the text are more than two hundred gorgeous black-and-white photographs selected by Richard Johnson as well as essays by noted Cubs chroniclers, including Scott Turow, William Nack, Rick Telander, Penny Marshall, Mike Royko, and more. A must-have for Cubs fans past and present, The Cubs is the definitive history of one of baseball’s most treasured franchises.

“A definitive account of the last remaining team to go almost a century without earning a World Series Championship, this illustrated team history displays the superb gifts that have graced the authors similar studies (Red Sox Century Yankees Century, The Dodgers), Stout combines skillful writing with methodical research to produce detailed and insightful reporting behind team myths…” – Publishers Weekly

” ‘The Cubs’ by Glenn Stout and Richard Johnson is even better (if that’s possible) than their previous team histories of the Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers.” - Bill Madden, New York Daily News

“Perhaps the greatest allegorical compliment that could be paid Glenn Stout and Richard Johnson’s book on the history of the Cubs is that the book was not authorized by the Cubs organization. Those who have struggled through the seemingly endless varieties of Cubs literary lore may appreciate that reality, seeing as reading some Cubs books is like reading about the parties on the Titanic. This one, however, is different and exceptional. Stout and Johnson do well to tell the tale of this franchise, and to discuss, dispel or fortify some myths or truths, and also invoke a certain treasured tenderness that a true Cubs fan should appreciate. Essays by the likes of Mike Royko, Rick Telander, and Penny Marshall tell that other Cubs tale: the kind you only seem to treasure because at one time you too were inside the bricks. It’s a massive volume, heavy as a brick but worth it’s curb weight.”-Chris Sprow, Chicago Sports Weekly

“The Cubs is an epochal study of Cubness: the Friendly Confines, daft and devoted fans who take their losses personally, myopic owners, spurious curses, classic collapses, and abiding stars who gave better and deserved more. It vividly portrays how, for a century, this historically losing franchise has made bonehead plays and stupid trades—and still amassed a huge national following. The Cubs will not always comfort Cub fans. But it will increase the tribe of Cub fans across the country. Let’s play two today!”– Scott Simon, Host, NPR’s Weekend Edition and author of Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan

“Richard Johnson and Glenn Stout long ago established their expertise at writing wonderful books about baseball teams that have been notorious for various reasons. In their latest endeavor, they’ve been joined by Mike Royko, John Schulian, and William Nack, among others. Talk about your all-star line-ups. The Cubs despite or perhaps because of the Cubs, is a winner.” – Bill Littlefield, Host, NPR’s Only a Game

“Once again, Glenn Stout and Dick Johnson have taken what is supposed to be a quaint genre — the coffee table book — and transformed it into important, indispensable history. Finally, we have a Cubs book that isn’t hagiography, but one deconstructs and enjoys the legend of the Cubs while simultaneously explaining the eternal mystery of how a big-city team could be so rich, so powerful, and so beloved with such little to show for it. An outstanding read that doesn’t let anyone off the hook.” –Howard Bryant, senior writer, ESPN and author of Juicing the Game and Shut Out

“I live in Boston, once a town of great baseball angst filled with downtrodden folk who mumbled and stumbled through a succession of 86 summers with the knowledge that sometime before the end of October the sky would fall directly on their heads. Then the crack literary firm of Stout and Johnson published a book entitled Red Sox Century, which confronted all demons, banished them forever and opened the way to a new zip-a-dee-doo-dah future. Now the lads take on the subject of The Cubs in the same through and entertaining fashion. The only question is what route the victory parade will take through the Windy City. – Leigh Montville, author of The Big Bam

Yankees Century: 100 Years of New York Yankees Baseball
Published in September 2002

* Hardcover: 496 pages
* Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (September 4, 2002)
* Language: English
* Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 9.3 x 1.3 inches
* Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds.

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Editorial Reviews

ERIC NEEL ESPN.com Page Two 10/9/02:

It says here that 14 percent of Americans root for the Yankees and the other 86 percent root for their demise. No fence-sitting; you’re in or you’re out with the Yanks.

When it comes to cheering on the Yanks — it’s all or nothing.It says here that 14 percent of Americans root for the Yankees and the other 86 percent root for their demise. No fence-sitting; you’re in or you’re out with the Yanks. When it comes to cheering on the Yanks — it’s all or nothing. I’m sure the 14 percent have this book already, and that they’re reading it aloud to their kids every night before bed, wiping the tears from the kids’ faces, letting them know how deep and wide the Yanks’ history is.

If you’re in the other 86 percent, you ought to be reading it, too. First, because there’s something devilishly satisfying in reading about the early days, when the team was nearly shut out of Manhattan, playing on a sloppy, cobbled-together field with a swamp in right. Second, because as you turn the pages you come to realize that from DiMaggio to Mantle, from Bucky Dent and Reggie to Paul O’Neill and El Duque, these guys and the things they’ve done (sometimes to you, sometimes in spite of you) are part of your history, part of how you remember and imagine your life. And third, because it’s insanely thorough, full of details you’ve forgotten or never knew, and very good looking.

Stout started this series with “Red Sox Century” in 2000. “Dodgers Century” is in the works. These are rich, dazzling books, standard-setters, fully-realized, complicated portraits of the ways a team and a game weave in and out of politics, history and popular culture.

O’Neill’s sister contributes an essay to this volume that sums up the series’ appeal much better than I can: “In our family we tell stories, we don’t really talk. We let baseball articulate the hopes and fears that we’d never consider confiding in each other.”

Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe, 9/8/2002:

It is fitting that Major League Baseball’s recent exhibition of greed and disregard for the fan should occur during the presidency of a former baseball-club owner, a man who, with his cohorts, extracted (to put it euphemistically) $135 million toward building a stadium from the people of Texas and ran a land scam that Jay Gould would have envied. In the end, Bush’s piddling, though nonetheless tainted, $600,000 investment brought him $15 million when the team was sold as private property a mere nine years later. The daily reminder of that unedifying episode in the ubiquitous shape of George W. and all the rest of it - the rapacity of owners under the friendly eye of a club-owning commissioner, the demolition of time-honored player records by hormone-marinated monsters, the continuing inequity and anomaly of interleague play, the bathos of the Red Sox’ trajectory this season, the whole spirit-numbing business - it’s almost more than I can bear.

Thank God there are books.

Some people might say that the New York Yankees are the root of all evil and might shrink at the idea of reading a history of that juggernaut. Such people should gather their strength, emotionally and physically, and take up ‘’Yankees Century: 100 Years of New York Yankees Baseball’’ by Glenn Stout (Houghton Mifflin, $35). In addition to the historical narrative, the 478- page book includes essays by a number of Yankee cognoscenti, among them Molly O’Neill, David Halberstam, and Howard Bryant, author of a book considered below. It also has over 250 photographs scrounged up from all over the place by Richard A. Johnson, curator of the Sports Museum of New England. The photographs, all eloquent, and some really awe inspiring, are alone worth the price of the book - which is, please notice, $9 less than one grandstand ticket this season at Fenway Park, and only $3 more than the worst vantage point in the house, a right-field ‘’box’’ seat.

Stout is, among other things, the author of ‘’Red Sox Century’’ (Houghton Mifflin, $40), published two years ago and the best baseball-club history I have ever read. The present volume - despite its painful subject matter - comes in a close second. As with the earlier history, this one’s greatness lies in Stout’s conscientious investigation of what really happened in its complexity and ramification; his meticulous setting straight of the story; and - oh, miracle and joy - his ability to do so in clear, engaging prose.

The notorious Babe Ruth deal, which has given rise to such a quantity of easy talk, unwarranted bitterness, and superstition (and which epoch-making event Stout turned on its head in the earlier book), gets a further shaking up here. It is not possible to summarize briefly the tangled circumstances that lay behind Ruth’s leaving Boston for New York. Suffice it to say that the central elements were the Bambino’s bad behavior and Grand Pooh-Bah Ban Johnson’s astounding lack of integrity, which, in turn, brought him a deserved comeuppance. One point, however, is simple and clear: Babe Ruth - Gargantua of ego and appetite - just did not, could not, fit into dinky, dowdy Boston, while, on the other hand, ‘’Ruth was New York incarnate - uncouth and raw, flamboyant and flashy, oversized, out of scale, and absolutely unstoppable. He towered over baseball like the Manhattan skyline.’’

Certain readers who are only human tend to gravitate toward the chapters in which the destiny of the Yankees intersects with what we might call the fate of the Red Sox. Stout weaves each encounter, so touchingly more significant to Boston than to New York, into the history of the game and of the cities themselves. He also perfectly captures the sense of exalted horror that we feel when we recall, say, 1978. I, personally, thrilled to the ghoulish brio with which he summed up an earlier calamitous encounter, a Bomber sweep in the merry month of May 1947: ‘’The Red Sox would never, ever be able to drive a stake through the heart of New York. For just as Boston would bend over New York’s prostrate body to check for breath, New York would rise and seize the Red Sox by the throat.’’

The Yankees have produced from their roster and helm more names that approach common nouns than any other sports team in history: Stengel, DiMaggio, Gehrig, Mantle, Berra, Mr. October, and, for that matter, George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin, whose folie a deux is a continuing theme through many pages. Stout portrays the individual characters of these and countless other Yankees through the years, and in doing so conveys the defining character of Yankee teams of different eras as they formed and dissolved through good times and the often-unnoticed bad

Red Sox Century
by Glenn Stout, Richard A. Johnson

* Hardcover: 480 pages
* Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (September 15, 2000)
* Language: English
* Book Dimensions: 11.0 x 9.2 x 1.3 inches
* Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds.
* In-Print Editions: Hardcover : Paperback : All Editions

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Editorial Reviews From Amazon.com

“Oh, to be a Red Sox fan. It is a mark of the singular angst that attends the territory that the four retired numbers–9 (Ted Williams), 4 (Joe Cronin), 1 (Bobby Doerr), and 8 (Carl Yastrzemski)–taunt the faithful every game from their perch on Fenway’s right-field facade; they precisely correspond to the date–September 4, 1918–that the Sox won their last World Series title. Less than two years later, owner Harry Frazee would sell his star pitcher and outfielder, Babe Ruth, to the Yankees, and the curse of the Bambino would take hold of Boston hearts.

From Cy Young to Cy Young award winner Pedro Martinez, this is a franchise full of myth and history–the first to win a World Series and the last to cross the color line–and, contend authors Glenn Stout, the series editor of the annual Best American Sportswriting volume, and Richard A. Johnson, curator of the Sports Museum of New England, the most interesting franchise in the history of the game. Their splendid, fully illustrated chronicle, rich with anecdotes, of the club from 1901 to the present makes it hard to argue with the assessment. The Sox have always been interesting–as well as frustrating, enigmatic, contradictory, and thrilling, and Red Sox Century touches all of those bases. This is an exhaustively researched history, but it’s also a fan’s book, filled with affection and exasperation. Stout and Johnson effectively pepper their narrative with personal reflections and observations from writers such as Peter Gammons, Dan Shaughnessy, and Elizabeth Dooley. They also pick a Red Sox all-century team, make a fine case for Pedro’s ‘99 season as the best ever for a pitcher, compile some requisite stats, and assemble the most complete Sox bibliography ever. About the only thing they don’t supply is a good parking place near Fenway.” –Jeff Silverman

Welcome.  You’ll find all sorts of stuff here - books, articles, columns, books-to-come, BASW index, poems - a life of writing, more or less.   Check back often for news and regular updates.  Comments are welcome, but specific questions are best addressed to me by e-mail - see “CONTACT GLENN STOUT” on the right side of the home page for a direct link to my e-mail.

Thanks for stopping by.

Best,

Glenn