Virginia book notes

In a month, America's pastime will kick off another season when pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

Those who can't wait might want to check out George E. Outland and John W. Outland's Baseball Visions of the Roaring Twenties: A Fan's Photographs of More Than 400 Players and Ballparks of the Era (482 pages, McFarland & Co. Inc. Publishers, $45).

As a teenager, George Outland lived on a ranch in Southern California and traveled to Los Angeles for Pacific Coast League games. From 1921 through 1930, Outland, who would go on to be a professor and a two-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives, documented the decade's baseball with his camera. Among his subjects: Babe Ruth and Grover Cleveland "Pete" Alexander.

More than 400 of Outland's photos are collected in this book, the text of which was written by his son, John Outland, a professor emeritus of political science and international studies at the University of Richmond, where he taught from 1969 to 2004.

An extra treat is his dad's home-run log, a record of the 1,503 homers that George Outland witnessed at 66 different ballparks from 1922 to 1974.

. . .

Some say Walt Whitman was America's greatest poet, and although others might tout Emily Dickinson, there's no doubt that Whitman was among the luminaries of the field.

Now, in Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America's Poet During the Lost Years of 1860-1862 (224 pages, University of California Press, $24.95), Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, looks at the two years that Whitman seemed to disappear from the nation's literary scene.

He re-emerged after his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg, and Genoways' account fills in a major gap in previous biographies of Whitman and rebuts the canard that Whitman was unaffected by the war and the run-up to it.

. . .

The story of Williamsburg's rebirth is well-known, but Anders Greenspan sheds fresh light on it in his second edition of Creating Colonial Williamsburg: The Restoration of Virginia's Eighteenth-Century Capital (240 pages, University of North Carolina Press, $45 cloth, $19.95 paperback).

Greenspan, a visiting assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, naturally pays deserved attention to the Rockefeller family and its efforts, beginning in 1926, to restore a rundown burg into a showplace of history.

Since the book's first edition, declining attendance and a bad economy have forced Colonial Williamsburg to add new interpretive approaches, among them street theater, and Greenspan takes note of the continuing evolution of the old capital.

-- Jay Strafford