Book reviews: ‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ and ‘Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It’

‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ by Francesca Wade

Francesca Wade’s latest book “can be read as a biographical detective story that fills in once-taboo blanks,” said Diane Cole in the Financial Times. Though Wade’s subject, Gertrude Stein, has not exactly been an inscrutable mystery, newly available archives have revealed more about why the modernist figurehead fled the U.S. for Europe in 1902, why she wrote the memoir that finally earned her a wide audience, and how her relationship with her lover, Alice B. Toklas, sustained her through much of her life. Beyond that, Wade’s work could serve as “a wish-fulfilling literary fairy tale for the always fame-hungry Stein”—because it details how Stein came to be recognized as a literary innovator posthumously and mounts its own précis for Stein’s brilliance.

Nearly 80 years after Stein’s death, “her celebrity is incontestable; her status as a genius less so,” said Christopher Benfey in The New York Times. “Critics barely out of swaddling clothes proclaim Stein unreadable,” but “she can’t be erased from literary history,” because of the influence she had on heirs ranging from Ernest Hemingway to poet John Ashbery. Wade devotes the “vivid” first half of her book to a straight account of Stein’s life, said Judith Thurman in The New Yorker. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in 1874, Stein was raised in Oakland and came within a semester of earning a medical degree at Johns Hopkins before she bolted, joining her brother Leo first in London, then Paris. The siblings began buying paintings by Picasso, Cézanne, and Matisse, building a collection that helped turn their large apartment into a hot spot for forward-looking artists and writers, who viewed Stein as an oracle. Meanwhile, she struggled to find a publisher for her avant-garde fiction, particularly The Making of Americans, a plotless 900-page work that was completed in 1911 but not published until 1925, after James Joyce’s Ulysses. Even compared with Joyce’s, Stein’s modernism was radical. “Her ambition was to deprogram and rewire a reader’s brain.”

In a welcome turn, the second half of Wade’s “breezily readable” book “complicates all that we’ve learned in part one,” said Jacquelyn Ardam in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Focusing on details that Toklas revealed after Stein’s death, it attributes Stein’s early career change in part to the wrenching effects of a lesbian love triangle and frames Stein’s cheekily titled 1933 memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as a bid to repair the couple’s relationship. Meanwhile, although Wade’s positive view of Stein’s fiction won’t persuade all of its many detractors, said Ryan Ruby in Bookforum, the curious should give it a chance. “More than any other writer, Stein invented high modernism,” and Wade’s biography “makes a convincing case that her writing remains, if anything, underrated.”

‘Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It’ by Jane Leavy

Jane Leavy knows baseball, and her ideas about how to fix the game she loves “stretch from the attractive to the absurd,” said Justin Driver in The Washington Post. In her “rollicking” new book, the former Post writer and author of three esteemed baseball biographies visits friends and experts throughout the sport to spitball potential reforms. Too few balls in play? Maybe there should be a 30-foot-tall plexiglass wall wrapping the outfield in every major league park to make homers rare. Too few pitchers throwing complete games or lasting more than a season without an arm injury? Let’s limit hurlers to one 95-mph pitch per at-bat and count every additional heater as a ball. In truth, you don’t have to love every idea here. “Leavy aims less to persuade than to provoke,” and her heart is clearly in the right place.

Baseball fans who think they know better than the sport’s pooh-bahs can often be insufferable, said Mark Leibovich in The Atlantic. “But not Jane Leavy, not ever.” She’s so fluent in the kind of banter true fans toss back and forth during a game that her prose “reads like she’s typing and shelling pistachios at the same time.” She has assembled a Hall of Fame lineup of like-minded kibitzers—Joe Torre, Dusty Baker, Bill “Spaceman” Lee—to help diagnose baseball’s current struggle to engage viewers as the game once did. And while she fairly blames teams’ increased reliance on data analytics for sapping individual games and full seasons of their old narrative power, her best ideas might be the ones that address severed cultural ties. To cultivate next-gen fans, for example, she’d let anyone under 10 into any game for free.

Leavy applauds baseball’s two-year-old pitch clock, which has dramatically improved the pace of play, said David M. Shribman in The Wall Street Journal. Even so, “she knows that baseball still isn’t quite right.” She’d like to see fewer playoff rounds. She’d like increased investment in the development of Black players. “Maybe baseball needs a shake-up the way the Soviet Union needed a shake-up.” And there’s at least one way to do it right: “Make Jane commissioner.”