SKU: 40350381157

The Original Curse: Did the Cubs Throw the 1918 World Series to Babe Ruth's Red Sox and Incite the Black Sox Scandal?

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The Original Curse: Did the Cubs Throw the 1918 World Series to Babe Ruth's Red Sox and Incite the Black Sox Scandal?IN THE GRAND TRADITION OF EIGHT MEN OUT . . . the untold story of baseball's ORIGINAL SCANDAL Did the Chicago Cubs throw the World Series in 1918 and get away with it? Who were the players involved and why did they do it? Were gambling and corruption more widespread across the leagues than previously believed? Were the players and teams "cursed" by their actions? Finally, is it time to rewrite baseball history? With exclusive access to surprising new

IN THE GRAND TRADITION OF EIGHT MEN OUT . . .
the untold story of baseball's ORIGINAL SCANDAL

Did the Chicago Cubs throw the World Series in 1918--and get away with it?

Who were the players involved--and why did they do it?

Were gambling and corruption more widespread across the leagues than previously believed?

Were the players and teams "cursed" by their actions?

Finally, is it time to rewrite baseball history?

With exclusive access to surprising new evidence, Sporting News reporter Sean Deveney details a scandal at the core of baseball's greatest folklore--in a golden era as exciting and controversial as our sports world today. This inside look at the pivotal year of 1918 proves that baseball has always been a game overrun with colorful characters, intense human drama, and explosive controversy.

"The Original Curse is not just about baseball. It is a sweeping portrait of America at war in 1918. . . . In the end, the proper question is not, 'How could a player from that era fix the World Series?' It's, 'How could he not?'"
--Ken Rosenthal, FOX Sports, from the Introduction

"Sean Deveney plays connect-the-dots in this intriguing account of a possible conspiracy to throw the 1918 World Series. Thoroughly researched and well written, The Original Curse is a must-read for baseball fans and anyone who loves a good mystery. Is Max Flack the Shoeless Joe of the 1918 Cubs? Deveney lays out the case and let's readers decide if the fix was in."
--Paul Sullivan, Cubs beat writer, Chicago Tribune

"This book gives the reader a fun and honest look at baseball as it used to be-- the good guys, the gamblers, the cheaters, the drunks, the inept leaders. But, more than that, it puts those characters into the context of Chicago, Boston and America at the time of World War I, and you wind up with a unique way to explain the motivations of those characters."
--David Kaplan, host, Chicago Tribune Live and WGN's Sports Central

"Deveney's painstaking study of the 1918 World Series between the Cubs and Red Sox argues that the Black Sox scandal was not an aberration and might have had an antecedent. Deveney's scholarship does not detract from his ability to spin a good tale: his tendency to imagine players' conversations will remind readers of Leigh Montville's The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth.... A welcome companion to Susan Dellinger's Red Legs and Black Sox: Edd Roush and the Untold Story of the 1919 World Series, Deveney's book contributes greatly to our understanding of this decisive period in baseball and American morals."
--Library Journal

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 10/01/2009
ISBN: 9780071629973
Pages: 242
Weight: 1.12lbs
Size: 9.26h x 6.32w x 0.98d

Review Citations: Library Journal Annex 10/13/2009

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SKU: 40350381157

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4.7 ★★★★★
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Michael Burnam-fink
Los Angeles, US
★★★★★ 5
There is a war... for your Mind!
Format: Kindle
"There is a war... for your Mind!" That's the slogan of InfoWars, the incendiary conspiracy news network and nutritional supplement marketing firm. And while Alex Jones is wrong about almost everything, he's right about that. In LikeWar Singer and Brooking ably synthesize a sophisticated picture of information warfare in 2018, drawing from sources as diverse as Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, and ISIS, to argue that the internet has lead to a blurring of lines between consumer, citizen, journalist, activist, and warrior which threatens the foundations of liberal democracy. The tech companies which built these platforms and profited from them must grapple with the politics of their technologies, before we all reap the whirlwind. Computer networks and smart phones connect billions of people, allowing ideas to flow faster than ever before in history. Sometimes, the results can be impressive. The Chiapas Zapatista movement in 1994 was a dial-up and fax version of a network insurgency that managed to bring enough international opprobrium on Mexico that the government blinked, and reached some kind of political accord (Chiapas is complicated). More recently, Eliot Higgins and a team of open source analysts at Bellingcat managed to track down the exact BUK missile system and Russian soldiers responsible for shooting down MH 17 in 2014. But there are a lot of dark sides. When people connect, the emotion that spreads most rapidly is anger. Lies spread five times faster than truth. Musicians can use social networks to directly connect with their fans, and ISIS uses it to connect with alienated Muslim youths worldwide. Social networks sort diverse citizens into filter bubbles of people who think alike. Eliot Higgin's careful open source intelligence has a paranoid fun-house mirror version in the QAnon conspiracy, where Qultist decoders find hidden messages from an alleged 'senior white house source'. And then there is the matter of information war, an area that even now, after years of offensive cyber operations, liberal democracies still don't understand. Hostile propaganda slips into Western news networks and major platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are infested with bots. LikeWar can even take a personal toll. Over the course of writing this book, General Michael Flynn went from forward looking full-spectrum commander to head Trumpist conspiracy cheerleader to indicted and plead out felon. Flynn's fall is complex, but it can't be separated from the internet. If the trolls got him, what chance does your idiot cousin stand? The counters, 'citizen truth teams' and senior emissaries to groups vulnerable to recruitment, seem like thin reeds against the coming maelstrom of noise. LikeWar starts with Clausewitz's dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means, and there are clear links between cyberspace and physical space. Intensity of hashtags impacted the subsequent intensity of Israeli airstrikes during attacks on the Gaza strip. ISIS used propaganda to create an aura of invincibility that outflanked the defenders of Mosul, while Russia denied that its 'little green men' were even in Ukraine. But the difference is that cyberspace is constructed space rather than natural space. The networks are built, maintained, and owned by real corporations and real people. The internet grew from an anarchic specialized scientific network to a major engine of commerce and communicate with little deliberate government oversight. Section 230 absolved American companies of responsibility for policing content, with major carve outs for copyrighted IP and pornography. Yet as concerns over cyberbullying and counter-terrorism rose, major networks adopted digital constitutions that were permissive towards speech and censorious towards erotica. Policing content is and was possible, but always took a back seat to growth and engagement, the guide stars of Silicon Valley. The future is if anything, darker. Advances in machine learning and AI allow ever more realistic bots, computer generated DeepFakes where a politician can be programmed to say anything, and personalized targeting of people with exactly the propaganda they'll believe. There are defensive counters, but if I might draw military analogies, what we saw in 2016 was armored warfare circa 1918: clearly the future, but not yet a mature system. Given the pace of technology, we only have a few years before digital blitzkrieg. I'm extremely online, and I've been following this space for years. I've presented at multiple conferences on this topic, including Governance of Emerging Technologies and Association of Internet Researchers. LikeWar is the book I wish I'd written. Cognizant, forward looking, and deeply researched, it is vital reading for anyone interested in technology or politics. My only reservation is that I wish the sources were better linked in the text, instead of being buried in static endnotes. Maybe the next edition will push an update.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2018
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Victoria Weisfeld
Los Angeles, US
★★★★★ 5
Making Sense of the Tactics Deployed in the Social Media War
Format: Hardcover
Singer and Brooking’s book, pulls together in one place the various threads of information about cyberthreats from the last few years, weaving them into a coherent, memorable, and understandable(!) whole. All these authors provide exhaustive lists of sources. It’s incumbent on responsible people to understand the tactics of information warfare, because, “[recent Senate hearings] showed that our leaders had little grasp on the greatest existential threat to American democracy,” said Leigh Giangreco in the Washington Post. These ill-intentioned manipulators understand the human brain is hard-wired for certain reactions: to believe in conspiracy theories (“Obama isn’t an American”); to be gratified when we receive approval (“likes”!); to be drawn to views we agree with (“confirmation bias”). If we feel compelled to weigh in on some bit of propaganda or false information, social media algorithms see this attention and elevate the issue—“trending!”—so that our complaints only add to the virality of disinformation and lies. “Just as the internet has reshaped war, war is now radically reshaping the internet,” the authors say. Contrary to the optimism of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who saw social media as a positive, democratizing force, this new technology is being used to destructive effect at many levels of society. At a local scale, for example, it bolsters gang violence in Chicago; at a national scale, it contributed to the election of fringe politicians; at a regional scale, it facilitated the emergence of ISIS; and at an international scale, it undergirds the reemergence of repressive political movements in many countries. How to be a responsible citizen in this chaos? Like it or not, “we’re all part of this war,” the authors say, “and which side succeeds depends in large part on how much the rest of us learn to recognize this new warfare for what it is” and how ready we are for what comes next.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2019
K
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Ky
Cuba, US
★★★★★ 4
A Must-Read for the Internet Age (Even If It’s a Little Terrifying)
Format: Kindle
If you’ve ever found yourself doomscrolling through Twitter (sorry, X—ugh), arguing with a stranger in the comments section, or wondering why that ridiculous meme is suddenly everywhere, LikeWar is the book that explains why. And let me tell you, it does so in a way that’s as entertaining as it is unnerving. P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking take a deep dive into the battlefield of social media, where wars aren’t just fought with bullets but with hashtags, viral videos, and AI bots pretending to be real people (or worse, real people pretending to be bots). They connect dots between everything from military psy-ops to online disinformation campaigns, showing how social media has become the new frontline of modern warfare. The book is packed with fascinating stories—from ISIS using social media to recruit followers like an influencer pushing protein powder, to political campaigns that make you question reality itself. And while the subject matter is serious, the authors keep things engaging with sharp writing, eye-opening insights, and just enough humor to keep you from spiraling into existential dread. So why four stars instead of five? Well, while LikeWar is undeniably eye-opening, it occasionally gets a little too caught up in explaining things at length. Some sections feel a bit stretched, like that one friend who insists on telling a story with every single detail included. A tighter edit in some places might have made it even stronger. That said, this book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how the internet shapes the real world—whether you’re a journalist, a policymaker, or just someone trying to figure out why your uncle keeps sharing weird conspiracy theories on Facebook. It’s insightful, timely, and slightly terrifying, but in the best way possible.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2025
V
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vickip007
Cuba, US
★★★★★ 5
A Must Read That Belongs on Every Political, Social, or Military Strategist's Shelf
Format: Hardcover
LikeWar is the manual for warfare in the 21st century, a worthy successor to Singer's Ghost Fleet, and excellent debut work for Brooking. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who wants to seriously understand how war will be fought and social policy developed in the era of Facebook and Twitter. There is a particularly urgent need for this book at a time when most tacticians have their eyes firmly fixed on enhancing cybersecurity through the protection of systems and hardware. While this is undeniably important, LikeWar reminds us that the information that is transmitted over that infrastructure is no less, and possibly quite a bit more important than the infrastructure itself. This message has never been more urgent than today when democratic nations struggle with balancing the need for an open civil society against the risks of foreign subversion and influence. This is the next great battle. It will be fought in the trenches of Facebook and the swamps of Twitter - wise commanders will bring LikeWar with them as field guide. LikeWar stands out for its incredible scope and accessibility. Its coverage is comprehensive - everything from the 2016 election to the IDF's influence tactics are explored, analyzed, and fit into a comprehensive thesis about the changing face of war. Read LikeWar and you will have a confident grasp of the major developments in this new theater of combat. Yet the book remains eminently readable - this combat guide does not require a reader to slog through the bone-dry prose of a TRADOC manual or an academic paper. It is quick and engaging yet thorough at the same time. In short, Singer and Brooking have written a manual for combat in the new millennium that is both engaging and substantial enough to leave their reader a master of the new face of battle.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2018
B
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B
Charlottesville, US
★★★★★ 5
Its Good!
Format: Paperback
Move over action-packed thrillers, because LikeWar is the real deal – a mind-bending exploration of the internet's collision with war and politics! It's like a rollercoaster ride through livestreamed terrorist attacks, Twitter wars, and viral misinformation – the online world has become the ultimate battleground! Who knew that social media could turn average folks into global warriors, with former World of Warcraft addicts foiling war crimes from thousands of miles away? And let's not forget the unexpected warriors – rapper-turned-jihadist PR czars and Russian hipsters waging infowars against the West – it's like a cyber soap opera! But wait, there's more – China even has a smartphone app to police its citizens' thoughts – talk about big brother on steroids! LikeWar is like a crash course in the web's darkest corners, exposing the truth and burying it at the same time. So buckle up, folks, because the future is networked, and LikeWar is the ultimate guide to surviving the social media battlefield!
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2023

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