For so long the ads in the subways and in newspapers touted boldface names like Jack Reacher, Gabriel Allon and Harry Bosch. It is perhaps not a major publishing plot twist that, almost two years after the #MeToo movement burst into public consciousness and began to change the conversation around gender, power and who gets a seat at what table a year and a half after women in pop culture, sports and Hollywood began speaking up about equal opportunity and at a time when there are more women in Congress than ever before, proving they can be just as belligerent and forceful as their male colleagues, the traditionally male-dominated world of the thriller has been ceding ground to a different kind of hero(ine).įor so long, after all, the most chart-busting thriller novels were the province of the robotic but moral special ops guy, the dissolute unshaven detective, the beefy brawler with a soul. What McLaughlin’s design lacked in formal grandeur, it made up for in what Goldberger describes as its “benign quirkiness”: the ad hoc arrangement of its grandstands, its famously shallow left field. Nolan, a reporter at The Boston Globe, later described the home of the Red Sox as “a crazy-quilt violation of city planning principles” and “an irregular pile of architecture.” These were meant as compliments.

“If he knew of Frank Lloyd Wright and other modernist architects who were beginning to challenge traditional ways of designing buildings,” Goldberger writes, “he probably did not agree with them.” The project this unadventurous soul undertook would be known as Fenway Park. As Paul Goldberger allows in BALLPARK: Baseball in the American City (Knopf, $35), “most of the best ballparks have not, in fact, been particularly memorable pieces of architecture by any formal standard.” In 1911, when the 37-year-old James McLaughlin was commissioned to design one, he had never worked on such a structure before, and never would again.

Ballpark paul goldberger