Product Description

The Best Team Ever captures the essence of a century-old Windy City, and weaves baseball, love, murder and intrigue through every page.

This baseball book, crime drama, and love story follows the 1907 Chicago Cubs from the Practice Season to the World's Championship Series. The team of Tinker to Evans to Chance. And ''Three Finger'' Brown, owner of the game's best curveball. Rookie ''Kid'' Durbin rides the bench and writes a journal as the Cubs play a near-perfect brand of baseball against the backdrop of a wild, corrupt Chicago and a transforming America. Madmen, saints and sinners on the diamond and off parade through the pages of this historical novel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #450014 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 516 pages

About the Author
Alan Alop is a lawyer in Chicago, where he is a Deputy Director of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago. He and his son Jim are long-suffering Cubs fans. Alan remains entranced by the game of baseball.

Doc Noel was chosen to play shortstop for the 1959 and 1960 All Star Teams of the Skokie Indians Little League in Illinois, and was elected to the 2002 National Adult Baseball Association (NABA) All Stars in Sacramento, California. He enjoys his career in health promotion, but continues to play, manage, watch and write and speak about baseball. Playing catch with his sons Andrew and Adam is still a favorite pastime.

Customer Reviews

The Poetry and True Grit of our National Pastime
This book is a wondrous celebration of the quintessential American sport. The authors have brilliantly infused the story of one baseball season with a related tale of murder and revenge, giving life to the characters on one of baseball's greatest teams and the many dangerous and intriguing currents which defined Chicago a century ago. This delightful book surpasses nearly all baseball novels I have read by creatively using parallel stories to bring home the reality of the "dead ball" era in baseball with the gritty stuff of life in the big city, with its corruption, chicanery, villians, and heroes.
The writing is superb and wide-ranging. Lovers of baseball will delight in lyrical passages which are reminiscent of scenes from the movie Field of Dreams. The locker room banter and the character descriptions are authentic and engaging. One of the great strengths of the book is the scene setting, such that the reader feels part of the action, on and off the field. Nearly everyone who loves baseball will enjoy this book and absolutely everyone who loves both baseball and Chicago will love this story, told by guys who obviously love both.

A story of the legendary season of the Chicago Cubs
Baseball is supposed to be honest, pure, the American pastime . . . "The Best Team Ever: A Novel of America, Chicago, and the 1907 Cubs" is a story of the legendary season of the Chicago Cubs. A work of historical fiction, it brings conflict onto the success story as the city of Chicago changes with the turn of the century and all of the corruption hat comes with it. The epic season serving as a unique backdrop for a story, "The Best Team Ever" uses the old to provide something new, recommended.

Second best book of the year
Alan Alop, author of the controversial "Representing Consumers After Repossession" and the perennially banned "Defending Hospital Collection Cases: A Practical Guide" (soon to be a major motion picture), has outdone himself with this piece of riveting historical fiction. Having already established himself as the Stephen King of legal practice manuals, Mr. Alop has now produced what every major literary critic agrees is a book. And at 516 pages, it's longer than most novels, including those by such masters of the form as Philip Roth and John Updike.

"The Best Team Ever" is very nearly the best book of the year, second only to "The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Book," which you can purchase from amazon.com for just $16.49.