Product Description

It's hard to imagine a wilder pair of brothers than Alfred and George Lawson. Best known as early promoters of professional baseball, they were intense rivals whose shared narcissism led them from one grand scheme to another, both in and away from the game, generating headlines as they went. Alfred had a long career as a player, manager, and minor league organizer before gaining notoriety as a utopian novelist, philosopher, economic reformer, cult leader, and early aviation promoter. George was a soldier, vaudeville troupe manager, performing hypnotist, medical quack, evangelist, and anti-KKK crusader who sought to break baseball's color line by founding integrated leagues.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #213711 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 238 pages

About the Author
Jerry Kuntz is a baseball historian whose articles on the Lawson Brothers have been published in Base Ball, A Journal of the Early Game and The Baseball Research Journal. He lives in Warwick, New York.

Customer Reviews

If You See The Lawsons-- Run!
This fascinating book tells the story of two very strange lives that intertwined so many of the popular culture and scientific trends of their times. It's so meticulously researched that you feel as though you are following the Lawson brothers around with a notebook and video camera! They are the kind of intense characters that if you met them, you would either be completely converted or would run from them. The book is a great read -- whether you are a baseball or aviation fan, enjoy learning about alternative religions and cults, or just like to read about people who didn't follow the beaten path.

"You can't make this stuff up!" Case in point

I've just finished Jerry Kuntz's "Baseball Fiends and Flying Machines," and what a great read it was. We believe our modern age moves fast, but the Lawson brothers seen like eels on stimulents. Talk about quirky characters, these two take the cake, transforming themselves into various careers seemingly at will, with an entrepreneurial core gone wild. Kuntz has done a fantastic job of research tracing the careers of the Lawsons, and, apart from the entertaining characters he's found, he puts early baseball and nacent aviation in a new light. We're so used to heros from that age, its a shift to recognize anti-heros as well. As the book unfolded, however, I found the Lawsons to be more complex than those two poles, with the heroic and innovative often mixed with the crass and common...often at the same time! Its a great accomplishment to make history come so alive.

Look Out Baseball, Boeing and Airbus - Here Come the Lawsons
This is an outstanding book - Alfred and George Lawson were perhaps America's greatest rogues - almost everyone that came into contact with them lived to regret it, both in baseball and aviation. One can only speculate what they would have accomplished if the internet had been in existence at the beginning of the 20th century.