Book reviews: ‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ and ‘Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It’

‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ by Francesca Wade

Francesca Wade’s latest book “can be read as a biographical detective story that fills in once-taboo blanks,” said in the Financial Times . Though Wade’s subject, Gertrude Stein, has not exactly been an inscrutable mystery, newly available archives have revealed more about why the modernist figurehead fled the U.S. for Europe in 1902, why she wrote the memoir that finally earned her a wide audience, and how her relationship with her lover, Alice B. Toklas, sustained her through much of her life. Beyond that, Wade’s work could serve as “a wish-fulfilling literary fairy tale for the always fame-hungry Stein”—because it details how Stein came to be recognized as a literary innovator posthumously and mounts its own précis for Stein’s brilli