Summer of '49 (Perennial Classics)

David Halberstam's finest gift, among his many as a writer, is his ability to weave a wonderful, colorful, extremely important yet oft-ignored fabric called perspective out of the many-threaded and minute details he uses in his books. (An even better example is the way he swept away history book cliches and "Happy Days" gloss in "The Fifties," but that's another review for another day.)

In "Summer of '49," Halberstam not only gave us an engaging blow-by-blow of one of baseball's best pennant races, as well as some of the key minor players to accompany the all-star cast, he gave us a feel for why baseball was so important to so many people at the time. Even though the book is about two of the last Major League franchises to racially integrate (the Yankees in 1955, the Sox in '59), the crumbling of the color barrier works its way into the story nearly as deeply as the tales of the two teams' immigrants' sons (the DiMaggios, Pesky, Rizzuto). So do baseball's postwar popularity boom, the suburban flight that would soon force franchise shifts and expansion, and the dawn of the television age. The social perspective Halberstam sewed together is just as important, and colorful, as the fine drama that played out on the book's main stage.

This book doesn't just talk about baseball, but explores the psyche of the men who played and formed the game. An incredible history lesson of the times that will give a deeper understanding of just how great and how heartbreaking baseball really is.

Even if you aren't a fan of the Red Sox or Yankees or if 1949 isn't a part of your life, this is something for any student of the game. Of course, baseball is the main theme but it also ties in how much our culture is and was affected by it. And if you just want to learn more about DiMaggio or Williams, Halberstam offers great insight into the legendary players.

Even today, when it isn't the most popular sport in America, baseball still has sociological implications on society. I am definitely getting this for my dad.

Don't get a statistic wrong; don't you dare make a mistake. Okay, Bill James correctly points out some mistakes that Mr. Halberstam makes in this book. None of the mistakes are important to the story, nor do any of them detract from the book in any way. I can't hold that criticism against this book.

This is an excellent baseball book. David Halberstam masterfully brings to life a baseball season and pennant race that otherwise I could never enjoy. He makes you part of the history of the era in the US, as well as in the game of baseball. He introduces you to all the important players in the game and some of the other assorted characters around the game. It is a well written book, easy to read and enjoy by any baseball fan!

If you are a fan of one of the other 30 teams in major league baseball, you may not like this book. Readers will not dislike this book because of the story. The baseball season of 1949 was a great season. This book does not deliver on the promised story of the '49 season. Instead, it seems to be an epitaph to the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry of the past.

As another review points out, many facts in this book are inaccurate. While some of these slips may be acceptable, the pages of fluff that stray from the actual 1949 season are not acceptable. At times, I thought this book might be better titled "Ted Williams and the DiMaggio Brothers". There were so many side stories that Halberstam seemed to avoid talking about the season for entire chapters while focusing on three players.

Perhaps the most enlightening chapter in the book was the last one. Halberstam notes that the Yankees were one of the last teams to embrace African-American players. The slide of the Yankees in the 60's may not have been noticeable had they not passed on May, Aaron, or Banks. Much of today's bandwagon Yankee fan base forget this bit of history.

While I enjoyed Halberstam's more recent work "The Teammates", I could have passed on this book. I never felt the author delivered on what he promised. Particularly for a Red Sox loyalist, I felt Halberstam was quite biased toward the Yankees. While the history of the Yankees is interesting, it was not the reason I purchased the book.

Forget the Yankees and Red Sox, DiMaggio and Williams, and all the great rivalries of the time. They're in this book, but in true Halberstam tradition, this is a book about nostalgia and change. The entire narrative is one long implicit comparison to today's game; the personalities of the game as compared to today's stars, the changing mores of sportswriters, the companionship of teams then compared to looser bonds at present, etc. It's certainly no accident that Halberstam adds a "where are they now?" epilogue (and a touching, entertaining one) to cap the book, cementing the then vs. now theme.

And thankfully, it works. The book centers around personalities more than anything else, especially DiMaggio and slightly less so with Williams, so the narrative isn't quite as smooth as other baseball books, e.g. The Boys of Summer. But Halberstam uses the stories to tie every player and personality to the greater action and themes so that every bit player, backup, and reporter gets to reveal something important about the stars or the way the game was played, So while the season is broken up and the games themselves can be boring, the book stays together well and each character becomes familiar. The success is that the title is exactly what the reader gets: the experience of being a baseball fan, and thus simply American, in the summer of 1949.

This very easily readable book is about the pennant race between perennial rivals Yankees and Red Sox. Half way through the season the Yankees lead the Red Sox by at least ten games but the Sox make an amazing comeback. The last game of the season will decide who will play the Dodgers in the World Series....
Besides being a beautiful account of the 1949 season it is also a nice biography of all the players involved. An ailing Joe DiMaggio, a young Yogi Berra, a brilliant Williams and Kinder
and Doerr. Great names from a great era.
With this book Halberstam again has shown that in America serious historians can also write about baseball, America's national pasttime.

Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam tells the story of the 1949 American League pennant race. Or at least, he tells his story of the race, with a little help from his friends, the baseball players that he interviewed forty years later.
Early on, Halberstam reveals his original perspective on the season in question -- as a pre-adolescent Yankees fan, listening to the games on his radio. He finds several other fans of the day, and gets them to recount the meaning of baseball to their young lives. This perspective is important, because this is where the myth of these giant players began. And then much later on, Halberstam, now a prominent journalist, decided to recreate the myth, but to also use his tools as a journalist to get a glimpse of the forces behind the myths.
We are talking, here, about giants that strode the earth. And the giants that manipulated their salaries, and the giants that wrote about them. They are all very pale giants. Halberstam shows us the managerial politics, the salary negotiations, the long road up from the minor leagues. He shows us the families of the players, he shows us the grisly wear and tear of the long season. He shows the bars, with their newly installed televisions. Climactically, he shows us the amazing conclusion of the 1949 regular season, and its devastating impact on the Red Sox.
He also inadvertently shows us what was missing. As an afterthought, one of the latter chapters details the 1949 World Series. There, the Yankees make mincemeat of the semi-integrated Brooklyn Dodgers. Oddly, though, the tale of the black Dodgers playing in Yankee Stadium is the most electrifying in the book. That energy, that tension, is clearly what's missing from everything that goes earlier. If Halberstam recognizes this, he only decides to focus it on his follow-up, OCTOBER 1964.
One should also note that The Summer of '49 is a fairly gauzy interpretation. Halberstam relies heavily on his interviews, and the accuracy of this book was stridently challenged by Bill James (1991 Baseball Abstract). Ted Williams (may he freeze in peace) died while I was reading this book, which made me grateful for its in-depth portrait of him.

I had a red sox fan to buy for and this was a great deal! Great price and fast shipping, thanks!