America’s Great Historians Cheer Fifty-nine in ’84
Three of America’s greatest and best-selling historians—including two Pulitzer Prize winners and one Pulitzer finalist for history—are offering rave reviews of Fifty-nine in ’84.
Joseph J. Ellis, professor at Mt. Holyoke College and author of such acclaimed works as Founding Brothers, His Excellency and American Sphinx, called the book “a beautifully written, meticulously researched story about a bygone baseball era that even die-hard fans will find foreign, and about a pitcher who might have been the greatest of all time.”
Gordon S. Wood, a Brown University professor who won the Pulitzer for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and also wrote such seminal works as the Bancroft Award-winning The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 and The Empire of Liberty, promised that “all fans of baseball, all fans of a good story, will love this book.”
Praising Achorn’s “clear and colorful prose,” Wood described Fifty-Nine in ’84 as “the marvelous suspense-filled story of Charles Radbourn’s 1884 season as a baseball pitcher.” In the process of doing so, he wrote, “Achorn has recreated not just the rough and tough baseball world of ‘Old Hoss’ Radbourn … but also the raucous society and the money-mad culture that sustained the wild and wooly and rapidly developing game of nineteenth-century baseball.” Those who read the book, he predicted, “won’t forget it.”
Maury Klein of the University of Rhode Island, acclaimed author of such works as The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (a Pulitzer finalist for history) and Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War, proclaimed that “Achorn’s vivid prose breathes life into a forgotten but fascinating era of baseball and one of its legendary heroes.”
Achorn said he was deeply honored by the advance praise by three of his favorite writers, men whose work he has read in depth. “These three great historians are authors of some of the finest works of American history ever written. To say I am thrilled by their reaction to Fifty-nine in ’84 and their recognition of what I was trying to achieve is an understatement.”
