The first World Series was a best-of-nine series between the Boston Americans and the Pittsburg Pirates, with the first three games to be played in Boston starting at the Huntington Avenue Grounds on October 1, 1903. The series started with baseball's winningest pitcher, Cy Young, throwing the first pitch, and ended with baseball's greatest hitter, Honus Wagner, striking out on the last pitch. Boston won the series, five games to three. Each game of the 1903 World Series and its key plays and players are thoroughly covered here, and the authors also pay special attention to the great significance that first World Series held for the future of baseball. Not only was the survival of the American League at stake, but baseball's place as the preeminent sport in America. The 1903 World Series drew more than 100,000 people to the ballparks, and there was no doubt about the popularity of the game. It was, as the authors point out, played by men, who, had they not been baseball players, would have been among the working class that made up most of the audience.

Doheny built was one of the early oil barons in Mexico and the United States before becoming embroiled in the Teapot Dome scandal.

Best Book of the Year The Los Angeles Times • The Washington Post Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in the world, mad with oil fever, get-rich-quick schemes, and celebrity scandals. It was also rife with organized crime, with a mayor in the pocket of the syndicates and a DA taking bribes to throw trials. In A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner narrates the entwined lives of two men, Dave Clark and Leslie White, who were caught up in the crimes, murders, and swindles of the day. Over a few transformative years, as the boom times shaded into the Depression, the adventures of Clark and White would inspire pulp fiction and replace L.A.’s reckless optimism with a new cynicism. Together, theirs is the tale of how the city of sunshine went noir.

The name “Hollywood” conjures up fantastical images of bright lights, glamorous dreams, and impossible riches. From its humble beginnings as a ranch sprawling northwest of Los Angeles in the late 1800s, Hollywood has spanned lifetimes as a factory of dreams, a dazzling place where all things are possible. This collection of stories takes you on a journey into the golden age, illuminating the space between the airy fantasy and the gritty reality of life in Hollywood. In a transient city where nothing lasts, thousands of stories have taken place in their time here. From the offscreen debauchery of the silent era, to countless dramatic and mysterious deaths, to the sinister past lives of world-famous LA landmarks, vestiges of Hollywood’s checkered past can still be found all over the city. With generations of Tinseltown’s luminaries living and working under the sunny guise of paradisal prosperity, their real stories reveal the sordid underbelly lurking directly beneath the surface. A dangerous collusion between the studios, the press, the mob, and the LAPD forms an impenetrable behind-the-scenes network of corruption, power and control, where the truth is always up for sale. A network in which the most glamorous and well-known figures are merely players in this elaborate charade. It’s magical and gritty, it’s ugly and dirty, it’s the land of dreams...it’s Hollywood.