The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City with Best-Selling Author Kevin Baker at New Canaan Library

Historian Kevin Baker’s hugely entertaining history of baseball and New York City, bursting with larger-than-life figures and fascinating stories from the game’s beginnings to the end of World War II, was voted Sports Illustrated #1 Book of 2024. In Baker’s hands the city and the game emerge from the murk of nineteenth-century American life—driven by visionaries and fixers, heroes and gangsters. He details how New York and its favorite sport came to mirror one another, expanding, bumbling through catastrophe and corruption, and rising out of these trials stronger than ever.

Kevin Baker is a novelist, historian, and journalist. He received an American Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a member of the board of the Society of American Historians. A contributing editor and columnist at Harper’s and a contributing editor at The New Republic, Baker collaborated with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on The Holocaust and the United States, a 2-hour documentary film for PBS exploring the American response to the Holocaust.

Photo credit: Nina Subin

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