Mark Lamster

In October of 1888, Albert Goodwill Spalding—baseball star, sporting-goods magnate, promotional genius, serial fabulist—departed Chicago on a trip that would take him and two baseball teams on a journey clear around the globe. Their mission, closely followed in the American and international press, had two (secret) goals: to fix the game in the American consciousness as the purest expression of th

The true story of how seventeenth-century Europe's most famous painter doubled as a secret agent and negotiated a peace between superpowers.Peter Paul Rubens is best remembered as the Old Master with the penchant for fleshy, pink nudes whose popularity was eclipsed by that of Rembrandt van Rijn. In his time, however, Rubens had no equal; his contemporaries revered him as the greatest painte

A "smoothly written and fair-minded" ( Wall Street Journal ) biography of architect Philip Johnson -- a finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award.When Philip Johnson died in 2005 at the age of 98, he was still one of the most recognizable and influential figures on the American cultural landscape. The first recipient of the Pritzker Prize and MoMA's founding architectural cu