Book Notes
Croquet: An Annotated Bibliography
from the Rendell Rhoades Croquet Collection.
By Nancy L. Rhoades. (Metuchen, NJ:
Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1992. xx + 214p.; illus-
trations, bibliography, appendix.)
Today, croquet might appear a quaint, insignificant
game in an environment dominated by
professional football, baseball, and basketball.
But this annotated bibliography
underscores croquet's position of prominence among
American sports in the years following
the Civil War, as well as its revival in the past
twenty years. Nancy L. Rhoades based
this enlightening book on the croquet-related
collection of the late Rendell Rhoades,
now housed in the Rutherford B. Hayes
Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio. The
bibliography is organized according to the
source of the croquet image or
information, from rule books to fiction, patents to sheet
music, etiquette manuals to trade cards.
The pungent annotations give the reader a clear
idea of both the substance and style of
each citation. Read cover-to-cover, the book pro-
vides, in miniature, a history of
croquet's meteoric rise as entertainment and obsession
followed by its precipitous decline as
the public's taste shifted to lawn tennis.
The Strong Museum
Christopher Bensch
Sports in Cleveland: An Illustrated
History. By John J. Grabowski.
(Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1992. xii + 150p.; illustrations, index.) An
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History project, this splendidly illustrated work will appeal
to all sports fans, both from within and
without Cleveland, but especially to those old
enough to remember when the Indians were
perennial contenders for the American
League crown. But Grabowski does not
limit his coverage to baseball, as he includes
football (remember those early Paul
Brown teams?), sleigh racing, trotting, auto racing,
tennis, roof-top tennis (see page 21 for
this YWCA donation to the sports world), golf,
hockey, track events, basketball, and
bowling. Grabowski's text is informative--espe-
cially a number of short biographical
sketches-and his illustrations well chosen. The
book is a fine addition to Cleveland
history.
Ohio Historical Society Robert L. Daugherty
Distinguished Shades: Americans Whose
Lives Live On. By Louis Filler. (Ovid,
Michigan: Belfry Publications, Inc.,
1992. vii + 278p.; illustrations, index.) In reexam-
ining the careers of 56 extraordinary
Americans, historian Louis Filler presents new
information on men and women of various
social and ethnic origins whose lives were,
as Filler notes, truly great. Filler, a
widely respected historian, carefully explains in his
introduction that Distinguished
Shades "is not a guide to distinction or to past figures
who seem to lean toward present
interests, but rather a guide to methods by which past
or present lions can be given place to
assert their qualities for good or evil." Among his
diverse collection of luminaries are
several individuals with Ohio associations, includ-
ing William Burnham Woods, a native of
Newark who rose to become Supreme Court
Justice, E. W. Scripps, father of the
penny post newspapers and the United Press
International (UPI), and Arthur Ernest
Morgan, creator of the Miami Conservancy
District, a landmark flood control
system that served as a model for TVA, of which he