N.Y. / REGION

Sam Roberts on Books on New York Topics From the 1870s to the 1930s

Nicholas Murray Butler at Century Association revels.Columbia University 
With summer officially underway, here’s an unofficial vacation reading list of amusing, informative New York books. 
Even seven decades after Nicholas Murray Butler’s death, it must be considered a milestone for academic freedom of sorts that Columbia University Press is publishing a paperback edition of his unauthorized biography. Dr. Butler, the revered Columbia president, no doubt would have suppressed it, just as he did the Pulitzer Prize jury’s selection of Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which he considered offensive.
If you missed the original Farrar, Straus Giroux version a decade ago, grab “Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler,” by Michael Rosenthal, an English professor and former Columbia dean.
In 43 years as president, Dr. Butler transformed Columbia into a first-class research university, downgrading undergraduate liberal arts programs in the process. Yet he considered himself primarily a “publicist,” whose every thought was not only spoken but also disseminated, including his compelling early opposition to Prohibition as an unenforceable government intrusion on private behavior. Few people, one observer wrote, “can leap to the front pages with the agility Dr. Butler has exhibited for so long.”
Robert E. Murphy stumbled upon the story of “The Three Graces of Raymond Street: Murder, Madness, Sex, and Politics in 1870s Brooklyn” (Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press) by mistake. Lucky for that.
His accessible narrative provides a window on the morals and criminal justice system of late-19th-century Brooklyn, and on what distinguished that growing city from its bigger neighbor across the East River. Witness this ode to the Borough of Churches, by William E. S. Fales, a journalist, in 1887: “Of all the great cities in the world, one stands pre-eminent in the preservation of public order and in the purity of public morals. That city is Brooklyn.”
George Steinbrenner used to say that owning the Yankees was like owning the Mona Lisa. “If that was true, then Jacob Ruppert was Leonardo da Vinci — the man who painted it,” Marty Appel writes in the foreword to “The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership That Transformed the New York Yankees” (University of Nebraska Press), by Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz.
You don’t have to be a Yankees fan to appreciate how Col. Jacob Ruppert, the beer magnate who bought the team before the 1915 season, and the man he hired as its manager, Miller Huggins, transformed an also-ran squad into the nation’s dominant baseball franchise.
Col. Jacob Ruppert and Miller Huggins, right.The New York Times 
Baseball wasn’t the only sport at Yankee Stadium in the 1920s. While one publisher rejected Rich Blake’s book as a biography of “a has-been who never was,” “Slats: The Legend and Life of Jimmy Slattery” (No Frills Buffalo) is an engaging tale of a boxer who, one journalist wrote, in his heyday “was like the hero of some ancient Irish fable.”
Jimmy Slattery, the world’s light heavyweight champion in 1930 and hailed as a successor to James J. Corbett, was said to have earned $350,000 in the ring, but was penniless by 1935. An athlete who was briefly lionized as “poetry in motion,” he died largely forgotten.
A version of this article appears in print on June 28, 2015, on page MB3 of the New York edition with the headline: Morals, Murder and Tales of Sports Glory. Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe