Editor’s Choice

Peter Andrews, whose history of American newspapering anchors this month’s issue, recommends an entertaining study by Stephen Bates, who wrote the accompanying piece on the Hutchins Commission: If No News, Send Rumors: Anecdotes of American Journalism (Henry Holt, 318 pages, $12.95 soft cover, CODE: HHC-3 ).

Edward Sorel, who illustrated the newspaper story, has for years collaborated with his wife, Nancy Caldwell Sorel, to create a highly popular series in The Atlantic Monthly called “First Encounters.” Now it has become a very handsome, wholly engaging book chronicling sixty-five actual first meetings: an anxious Scott Fitzgerald shows off for Edith Wharton; the young Fats Waller goes at gunpoint to Al Capone’s birthday party; Sarah Bernhardt collapses in Thomas Edison’s arms; William Randolph Hearst gives Orson Welles the cold shoulder . . . ( First Encounters: A Book of Memorable Meetings , Knopf, 144 pages, $24.00, CODE: RAN-23 ).

In his column “The Life and Times” Geoffrey C. Ward reviews No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—The Homefront in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster, 768 pages, $30.00, CODE: SAS-9 ), which follows the years from 1940 to 1945.

As Ward explains in another article in this issue, his newest collaboration with the filmmaker Ken Burns has produced both an epic-length PBS film on the history of baseball and a richly illustrated companion volume, Baseball: An Illustrated History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf, 468 pages, $60.00, CODE: RAN-24 ). The game’s stars and rogues—from King Kelly to Babe Ruth to Roger Clemens—make the contentions of baseball’s modern era seem tame by comparison.