James E. Elfers’s The Tour to End All Tours: The Story of Major League Baseball’s 1913-1914 World Tour chronicles the epic around-the-globe goodwill tour by the Chicago White Sox and the New York Giants - now just a dusty long-forgotten footnote in baseball lore, but a glorious and celebrated event during that far more innocent era preceding the Great War. Conceived and led by White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and Giants manager John McGraw, the two teams (along with a handful of players from other major league clubs), dubbed “the tourists” throughout the book, barnstormed their way westward through America, then across the Pacific to Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Ceylon, Cairo, Rome, Nice, Paris, and London, and finally returning to the States across the Atlantic aboard the Lusitania to a hero’s welcome in New York.

Via impressive research, Elfers resolutely brushes the cobwebs off this musty chapter of baseball history and breathes some life into it with colorful details, quotes and anecdotes of the tourists’ exploits on and off the field. While the book occasionally gets bogged down in the tedium of game recaps and the minutiae of various banquets and receptions, The Tour to End All Tours ultimately serves as an interesting travelogue of a bygone era and an engaging look at a unique story from baseball’s deadball era. ( )

Being an account of a mildly interesting baseball phenomenon, a barnstorming trip by American pros to educate a world on the verge of war. The portraits of the players will be of interest to devotees of the period, but there's not that much which will be of interest to individuals who are not fans of baseball of that period. ( )