Library Journal
This follow-up to the best-selling Summer of '49 assesses the Yankee-Cardinal World Series of 1964.
Wes Lukowsky
Pulitzer Prize-winner Halberstam has always had a fondness for sports, and occasionally he turns away from his more "serious" historical pursuits to explore a particularly resonant moment in sporting time. Here it's the 1964 major-league baseball season, especially the World Series, which pitted the New York Yankees against the St. Louis Cardinals. Halberstam likes to place his sports reporting within a significant social context, and this time he isolates 1964 -- the last pennant for the Yankee dynasty that stretched back to Babe Ruth and the late 1920s -- as signifying the end of an era dominated by mostly white, power-hitting baseball. The Cardinals, with their three black starters in the field and All-Star pitcher Bob Gibson, were ushering in a new era of speed and black stars. Halberstam wants to hang his hat on the theory that baseball changed dramatically in 1964, and though he seems to be stretching a bit, let's give it to him. What really matters to most readers, after all, isn't the historical premise but the particulars: Halberstam's unerring eye for detail, his sense of team dynamics, and his sensitive, thoughtful profiles of the players and managers -- including Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, and Elston Howard on the Yanks and Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, Bill White, and Lou Brock on the Cards. Halberstam profiles each at length, how their past shaped their present and future, and he does the same with the teams. By any standard, this is a thoughtful, entertaining, and illuminating examination of two intriguing teams from baseball's golden era. Expect high demand among boomer-age fans.