Review by Booklist Review
Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of The Amateurs [BKL Je 1 85] and The Reckoning [BKL O 1 86], turns his attention to one of the most intense rivalries in sport, the New York Yankees versus the Boston Red Sox. He specifically focuses on the 1949 season, which wasn't decided until the last game. Based primarily on interviews with players, coaches, and media, the book is less a daily play-by-play than a careful re-creation of a dimly remembered era. This was baseball before television, before big money, and before charter jets, a time when the media doted rather than pried and a handful of newspapers competed to present the best coverage. An evocative and carefully crafted book that takes its place at the top of this year's lineup. --Wes Lukowsky
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
This book is ostensibly about the pennant race between the Yankees and Red Sox that year and the ``rivalry'' between Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. But, as he did in Breaks of the Game (LJ 11/15/81) and The Amateurs (LJ 7/85), Halberstam focuses on a season and studies an era. Baseball came of age in the summer of 1949. Postwar America looked to baseball for a sense of normalcy in its life; television began to have an impact on the sport; Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Summer of '49 is more than a collection of anecdotes. It is a study of all the elements and personalities that influenced baseball that year and beyond. Halberstam brings them together in such an enjoyable, interesting, and informative manner that a reader needn't be a baseball fan to appreciate the book.-- Martin J. Hudacs, Towanda H.S., Pa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Standout account of the tight 1949 American League pennant race between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, by the author of The Reckoning, The Best and the Brightest, etc. This is baseball just before its 1950's heyday: radio linked the nation, blacks entered the game, the legendary Yankee/Red Sox rivalry entered a new era as the extraordinary Joe DiMaggio neared retirement and Ted Williams (""the philosopher-king of hitting"") stormed the record books. Halberstam does a splendid job of catching the quirks of these two giants: Williams' overblown ego (""No one could throw a fastball past me. God could come down from Heaven, and He couldn't throw it past me"") and computerlike brain; DiMaggio's painful shyness and doelike grace. Other players, too, flourish in capsule bio graphics: klutzy Yogi Berra; Ellis Kinder, known to play while skunk-drunk; Casey Stengel, baseball's greatest practical joker; Johnny Pesky, Phil Rizutto, Bobby Doerr. This assembly of oddballs produces one of the game's greatest pennant races, as the Red Sox sprint from behind to catch the Yankees at the end of September. The season boils down to the final game of the year, each team putting a 96-57 record on the line. Halberstam keeps the tension high and the human element foremost. His one misstep is the considerable space he devotes to discussing the baseball announcers and journalists of the era--dead weight for most fans. On the other hand, A. Bartlett Giamatti makes a delightful cameo appearance as an 11-year-old Red Sox booster. Such unexpected touches--Halberstam's eye for the exemplary detail--help make this a baseball book to cherish. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
