Customer Reviews

Hoodoo: Unraveling the 100 Year Mystery of the Chicago Cubs

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Book was a let-down. My husband & I are avid Cubs fans but couldn't get into this.

In detailing the book, I can not nor will I add to what Mr. Marshall wrote other than unlike him, I enjoyed the chapter on Harry. In short, it's a fun book and as I started to say, Where the Cubs are concerned, if you don't laugh, you're gonna cry. So in the spirit of fun, read this book and come April..Oof Wah!

Being a White Sox fan, I can care less about the Cubs (especially after when the Pale Hose won the World Series in 2005). But all that changed with the release of this book "Hoodoo". I have picked up the book twice at my nearest Walgreens store and I'm going to buy it for Christmas for my father; who is a Cubs fan (and said to me that they didn't get swept in this year's playoffs to the Dodgers-they choked).

As the title points out, you are going to be stunned by this-especially what was going on in Chicago and America in 1908 thanks to the collection of newspaper cartoons (remember, there was no computers, no celluar phones, no televisions, or no radios-it was an America still living in an Amish lifestyle). If there is a curse to the Cubs it's the time in which they won their last World Series: Last year, a historian (I forgot his name) wrote a column in Newsweek (which co-incited with their look back at 1968) saying that 1908 was the greatest year in American history. Because that was the year the airplane and the car began to sink into American life; thus signaling the end of the Industrial Age (he also quotes the famous line the columnist for the New York Times said from that year about those two things that caused an engima in which he said the car and airplane are so majestic it may start up war; which it did six times), the year Theodore Roosevelt was in his last full year as President, and it was the year New York started the tradition of dropping the ball at Times Square on New Year's Eve. In short the Cubs last World Series win came at a time when America was at peace with the rest of the world (and I hope it happens soon) and the same can be said when they won their last National League championship in 1945-it came during odd times with World War II ending and all the baseball players still in military uniform.

This is not the first time someone has written a book about why can't the Cubs win a World Series. Mid-west sports columnist George Castle wrote a book at the start of this decade called "The Million-to-One Team" in which he focuses in on why the Cubs had gone so long as to even try to make the World Series. There is one flaw to this book and that is they devote a chapter to Harry Caray and not to their other Cubs announcer-Jack Brickhouse. As you know it was he, not Caray (not to mention he was the announcer for the Cubs AND White Sox for nineteen years; think about it-calling over 300 baseball games every year which he did) who said the famous lines "Any team can have a bad century" and "The Cubs are the most unfortunate team in all of sports."

If anyone is interested for this book-weather for the Cubs, baseball, or history (I'm for the last two) must get this. I'm getting it just of the revelation the author writes in which he got all the newspapers from the Chicago library from 1908.