Mark Lamster is Editor-at-Large at Princeton Architectural Press in New York. His writing on baseball, history, design, and architecture has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, Metropolis, I.D., and Architecture.He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book, Spalding's World Tour: The Epic Adventure that Took Baseball Around the Globe - And Made it America's Game, and reported the following:
Page 99 is a fitting enough place to drop into my book, which is the story of a group of itinerant baseball players and their trip around the globe. There's actually a summary sentence on the page that had been in the original proposal when it was sent out to publishers:Read an excerpt from Spalding's World Tour and an author's note, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.
In place of Phileas Fogg, [Jules] Verne's punctilious British protagonist, Spalding would be leading a charismatic gang of working-class heroes on a mission to spread the gospel of baseball, that most
beloved and potent symbol of the American way.
There's something further on down about one of the great deceptions of the trip, and I think it generally captures the tone of the book in its entirety.
--Marshal Zeringue
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