BILL VEECK, in the language of the subject, is a homerun-a bases clearer. The story of the remarkable full-life of this pioneering baseball character is told with the steadiness, detail and flare that we have come to expect from Paul Dickson, the premier all-star writer and reporter. The book is great fun-much like being in the bleachers during a day game.

Jim Lehrer

Bill Veeck was inventive, courageous, principled, and hugely influential--the Thomas Paine of a revolutionary time in baseball. He told his own story in VEECK--AS IN WRECK, back in 1962, but even a man as famously candid as Veeck cannot be fully portrayed in an autobiography. He has awaited a clear-eyed admiring chronicler, and in Paul Dickson he has found him. This amazingly detailed, delicious biography is, as its subject might have titled it, VEECK--AS IN SPEC-tacular!

John Thorn, Official Historian, Major League Baseball, and author of Baseball in the Garden of Eden

Bill Veeck didn't want to break rules, he insisted, just "test their elasticity." He wasn't talking only about baseball. The master showman, who famously sent a three-foot-seven-inch batter to the plate, also desegregated the American League and proudly marched in the funeral procession for Dr. Martin Luther King-on his peg leg and without crutches. BILL VEECK revisits a golden age for baseball, a pivotal time for America and some hilarious moments in the life of a man who helped to change both.

Clarence Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Chicago Tribune

We knew Bill Veeck was the baron of ballyhoo. We didn't know (or at least I didn't) that he was a patriot as high-flying as Ted Williams, a racial barrier-buster as fearless as Branch Rickey, a gadfly who set the mold for Charlie Finley, and a one-of-a-kind iconoclast who was irresistible. So don't resist. Buy Paul Dickson's new book and have a blast.

Larry Tye, author of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend

Any man who wanted to be included on Richard Nixon's enemies list is worthy of a searching biography--and Paul Dickson has been kind enough to do that for us with his compelling portrait of the unregenarate Bill Veeck.

Ray Robinson, author of Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time

Dickson renders an engaging portrait of a man who was more than just the facilitator of Eddie Gaedel, Larry Doby, and Comiskey Park's exploding scoreboard...[He] lucidly brings Veeck into focus.

NINE: A Journal of Baseball History & Culture