Summer of '49

The cover says this is "the story of a magnificent season - and the battle royal between Joe DiMaggio's Yankees and Ted Williams's Red Sox for the heart of a nation." Halberstam captures much more than a baseball season between the covers, though. He captures an entire zeitgeist and draws the reader back to the age of players who had fought in an actual war. He also brings to life each of the players, so that they are not merely the athletes of the era, but varied and interesting human beings. This is perhaps best illustrated when Halberstam relays the anecdote of the notoriously intelligent and well-spoken Dom DiMaggio, little brother of Joe, shouting at an umpire, "I have never witnessed such incompetence in all my life!"

Unlike Halberstam's The Fifties, Summer of '49 is brisk and lively. There can be no doubt that his passion fueled this work. In that way, it is similar to The Boys of Summer, the major events of which took place just three or four years after the Yankees and Red Sox battled it out. I am not a particular fan of baseball (I'd barely seen more than two games before meeting my husband in college), but I've now read several books that track the progression of baseball from the very early days (Saint Louis, 1883) to the height of the Ruth-Gehrig mania (New York, 1927), to the post-war evolution of the game from radio and day games to television and night games. Summer of '49 just might be the best of them, though.

Five stars.