Edward Achorn

Edward Achorn, in his new Fifty-nine in ’84, “delivers an entertaining story,” offering “a thoroughly researched panegyric to a man and an era,” Kirkus Reviews declares.

Kirkus, which serves the book and literary trade sector — including agents, TV and movie producers and booksellers – describes the book as “a loving reanimation of the 1884 baseball season, during which Charles ‘Old Hoss’ Radbourn won 59 games and hurled his team into the World Series.”

It adds: “Preserved in sometimes skimpy, and always biased, newspaper accounts, the achievement of Radbourn, the Providence Grays’ ace pitcher, is indeed astonishing.”

Achorn portrays 1880s baseball, which was “flourishing before motion pictures and audio recordings,” as “a game both familiar and surpassingly alien.” The review describes the world revealed in Fifty-nine in ’84 – of pitchers expected to end the games they started, of bare-handed play and frequent injuries. “The author charts Radbourn’s swift rise in an era when pitchers flamed out quickly because of arm injuries; Radbourn and his colleagues lived with continuous pain.”

Kirkus praises Achorn for providing “needed cultural history – e.g., the train ride from the East Coast to Chicago took three days; Buffalo Bill arrived in Providence that same season.” And it describes Achorn exploration of Radbourn’s growing love for “hunting, purebred dogs, baseball and later on, Carrie Stanhope, the legendary woman who ran a Providence boarding house and eventually married Radbourn.”