Edward Achorn

Boston Globe book critic Kathleen A. Powers says Edward Achorn’s “Fifty-nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had” would be on her Father’s Day wish list if she were a dad.

She writes in The Sunday Globe: “Achorn has dug deep into newspaper files and other archives, including marvelous photographic collections, to give us a raw and rude picture of baseball’s Old Testament era. He also shows us a vanished America, a time when Providence and Boston were prosperous, pugnacious rivals, their games drawing fans from New Bedford, Fall River, and Worcester; a distant day, too, when sports writing was high-flown and fistic. He is generous with oddities of material detail and ways of life, including stories of atrocious sportsmanship on the part of players and perfidy on that of umpires — who justly feared for their lives.

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