| SUMMER OF '49 Hardback Book with Dust Jacket Written by David Halberstam Over 300 pages Copyright © 1989 by David Halberstam " The fever was in the streets. On Saturday morning the crowd gathered early, not only inside Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox and the Yankees in their early workouts, but also outside the nearby Kenmore Hotel where the Yankees were known to be staying...
When Charlie Silvera, a young catcher just brought up from the minors, saw the streets outside the hotel jammed with excited Boston fans, he felt like a Christian on his way to the Coliseum. It was, thought Silvera, as if nothing else in the world matters except for this game. " " Thus David Halberstam begins his magnificent journey through the 1949 pennant race, in which two legendary rivals, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, battled down to a winner-take-all final game of the season. At that time baseball, unrivaled by any sport, seemed at the very center of American life. Halberstam has given us not merely a dramatic and intimate portrait of two great baseball teams at the height of their powers, but also a revealing portrait of a remarkably different America, when the games were still played during the day and were broadcast on radio instead of television; when teams traveled by train instead of plane and St. Louis was judged a western city; when management, not players, dictated salaries; and when alcohol, not drugs, was the most bothersome addiction. It was, in the phrase of Curt Gowdy, a rookie sportscaster with the Yankees, the last moment of innocence in sports. " " Halberstam captures that moment brilliantly. We see the star players: an aging but still graceful Joe DiMaggio, heroically struggling with a crippling foot injury; a brash and gifted Ted Williams honing his exquisite talents and fighting constantly with the Boston Press. We meet Ellis Kinder, a country boy straight out of Ring Lardner, carousing all night before the biggest game of his life; Yogi Berra, trying to make it as a catcher, the butt of cruel jokes from teammates because of his looks; Jerry Coleman, the rookie second baseman for the Yankees, so nervous in his first season that he can barely eat breakfast all year long; and Mel Parnell, the remarkable Boston left-hander, pitching so often on the Boston depleted staff that he lost twenty pounds during the pennant race. All the other players are there - Dom DiMaggio, Tommy Henrich, Bobby Doer - as well as the sportswriters; Toots Shor, who ran the last great sporting club in New York; the owners and managers. " " To Summer of '49 David Halberstam brings the passion, the penetrating journalistic skills, and the capacity for capturing human drama with rare intimacy that have made him one of our most important writers. " Both the book and dust jacket are in very nice condition with minor wear.
No torn or ripped pages.
No markings or writing. |
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