War Fever

Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War

By: Randy Roberts, Johnny Smith

Narrated by: Craig A. Hart

A "marvelous" (Sports Illustrated) portrait of the three men whose lives were forever changed by WWI-era Boston and the Spanish flu: baseball star Babe Ruth, symphony conductor Karl Muck, and Harvard law student Charles Whittlesey. In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German. And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as the radicals lecturing workers about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek. War Fever explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval.

Critic reviews

"A marvelous book."—Sports Illustrated

"[War Fever] arrives just in time to remind us that ours is by no means the first generation to experience the wholesale disruption of our norms and institutions by an 'invisible enemy.' "—Boston Globe

"A remarkable new book."—Jeremy Schaap, ESPN

"In the midst of the curveball that is this crisis, sporty titles are helping satiate those who typically prefer spring training to spring releases. War Fever, a new book by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith, examines how baseball converged with the country's last terrible pandemic. Among the tidbits revealed: In 1918, Babe Ruth had the so-called Spanish flu twice - so baseball, at least, has been here before."—Washington Post

"An entertaining reminder that American hero worship, media hype, and fierce nationalism haven't changed much in a century."—Kirkus

"A compelling look at a tumultuous moment in U.S. history through the lives of three extraordinary individuals. Fans of 20th-century American culture as well as Boston and World War I history will rejoice."—Library Journal

"Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith didn't set out to write a book about the Spanish-flu pandemic of 1918, but the outbreak looms like the ghost at the banquet over their new book War Fever. A recurring storyline that runs through the book's narrative has a much more urgent feel today as America is in the grips of the worst pandemic since that terrible autumn."—National Review

"Roberts and Smith have a brilliant knack for finding unexplored subjects and bringing them fully to life. This haunting, elegantly written book is the story of Boston -- but really America itself -- set against the background of a raging global war, momentous lifestyle changes, and an influenza epidemic that would kill more people in a shorter time than any event in human history. Told through the eyes of three vibrant characters, War Fever is a sober reminder of the forces that came together in 1918 to confront the Great War and shape the nation's future."—David Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Polio: An American Story

"What a terrific book. With in-depth research and absorbing storytelling, Roberts and Smith bring to life a tumultuous chapter of American history. A Brahmin becomes a reluctant hero. A famous German conductor sits in an internment camp. A darn good pitcher turns out to be the best hitter of baseballs the world ever has seen. This will be the best few stay-at-home nights you'll have in some time."—Leigh Montville, author of The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

Very nice

Very nice book. Rather than looking at baseball, the 1918 pandemic, and WWI separately, as other books have, it puts them all together in historical context. It provides a very rich depiction of those events in a unique way.

I wanted to like this book...

It's got all the makings of a great book. However they dwell on uninteresting characters and tend to ramble about things not associated with baseball, the war or the fever. Only an ok read.

Almost entertaining, but the history has a glaring flaw.

Firstly the narrator is almost unlistenable. It’s taken me a month to get through a day book. The man sounds like a computerized voice reading the text.

For a book called “War Fever,” the epidemic seems to be something of a minor note alluded to for the sake of comparison, by the reader, to COVID 19.

The biggest issue is that this historian quotes works by Al Stump, about Ty Cobb, that have been so thoroughly discredited it shouldn’t have made it to publishing with them cited. Is this a small detail? Yes. It is bad history? Absolutely. It makes the rest of the work suspect for me. Ken Burns can be forgiven, he quoted the works when they were still considered factual. However, since then Stump has been discredited so well that you have to wonder about a professor of history willing to quote him to describe Ty Cobb still.