Author: Robert W. Creamer
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803264069
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
"This is a baseball book, but whether Creamer intended it or not, it's much, much more."-Sports Illustrated. "[Creamer] recalls this momentous year in baseball and world history. He reprises Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, Ted Williams's .406 batting average, Hank Greenberg and the draft, the furious Dodgers-Cardinals pennant fight, and the ensuing World Series. All this is portrayed against the looming U.S. entry into World War II."-Library Journal. Robert W. Creamer, one of the best and most perceptive writers on baseball, remembers the baseball-and other matters-of 1941 in a tribute to the game that is also part memoir. Creamer was a long-time writer and editor at Sports Illustrated. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including the following Bison Books: Stengel: His Life and Times, Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat, Jocko, and The Quality of Courage.
Author: Steven P. Gietschier
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496235371
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 624
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Book Description
A history of baseball as a sport and business during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the game on and off the field and tracing its development within the broader contours of American history.
Author: Ralph Wiley
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803298163
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
"This is a surprising book, a terrific book. It's not about boxing, but about an odd, demanding world in which boxing is the thread, the key to existence. Wiley deftly broadens the delineation of this world and its people. Perceptive reporting is the foundation and perceptive reporting is rare enough. Wiley enhances it with clear, quick writing laced with humor and with a sensitivity that lends brilliance to this impressive work."-Robert W. Creamer, author of Baseball and Other Matters in 1941. "Ralph Wiley, with Serenity, has produced an original book about the ring. . . . He can dig beneath the surface and show us what really happened in a bout: why Thomas Hearns, with too much faith in his powerful right hand, lost to Sugar Ray Leonard in their first match. . . . Or why Roberto Durn was acting out of prudence, not cowardice, when he quit in his second fight against Leonard. . . . Yet the book is not really about boxing. Boxing in Serenity is what T. S. Eliot, speaking of plot, called the meat a burglar brings to distract the watchdog. The book is really about growing up in a world where you had to defend yourself physically to survive."-New York Times. "Wiley's rapport with boxers is profound."-Publisher's Weekly. "Wiley is one writer who really knows his way around a boxing ring. . . . [He writes] with passion and understanding about complex, violent men and their oddly redemptive sport."-Booklist. Ralph Wiley is the author or coauthor of several works, most recently Born to Play: The Eric Davis Story.
Author: John Christgau
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803222793
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
The first Japanese American jockey, Kokomo Joe burst like a comet on the American horse-racing scene in the summer of 1941. As war with Japan loomed, Yoshio Kokomo Joe Kobuki won race after race, stirring passions far beyond merely the envy and antagonism of other jockeys. His is a story of the American dream catapulting headlong into the nightmare of a nation gripped by wartime hysteria and xenophobia. The story that unfolds in Kokomo Joe is at once inspiring, deeply sad, and richly ironic and remarkably relevant in our own climate of nationalist fervor and racial profiling. Sent to Japan from Washington State after his mother and three siblings died of the Spanish flu, Kobuki continued to nurse his dream of the American good life. Because of his small stature, his ambition steered him to a future as a star jockey. John Christgau narrates Kobuki s rise from lowly stable boy to reigning star at California fairs and in the bush leagues. He describes how, at the height of the jockey s fame, even his flight into the Sonora Desert could not protect him from the government s espionage and sabotage dragnet. And finally he recounts how, after three years of internment, Kokomo Joe tried to reclaim his racing success, only to fall victim to still-rampant racism, a career-ending injury, and cancer.
Author: Robert W. Creamer
Publisher: Penguin Mass Market
ISBN: 9780140169430
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Recreates the glory and atmosphere of the great baseball season of 1941, when DiMaggio had his record fifty-six game hitting streak, Williams batted .406, and America went to war.
Author: Mickey Mantle
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803282599
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Tells the stories of players who did their best despite personal adversity, including Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Roger Maris, Roy Campanella, Ted Williams, and Jimmy Piersall
Author: Paul Dickson
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 0802147682
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 583
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Book Description
“A must-read book that explores a vital pre-war effort [with] deep research and gripping writing.” —Washington Times In The rise of the G.I. Army, 1940–1941, Paul Dickson tells the dramatic story of how the American Army was mobilized from scattered outposts two years before Pearl Harbor into the disciplined and mobile fighting force that helped win World War II. In September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and initiated World War II, America had strong isolationist leanings. The US Army stood at fewer than 200,000 men—unprepared to defend the country, much less carry the fight to Europe and the Far East. And yet, less than a year after Pearl Harbor, the American army led the Allied invasion of North Africa, beginning the campaign that would defeat Germany, and the Navy and Marines were fully engaged with Japan in the Pacific. Dickson chronicles this transformation from Franklin Roosevelt’s selection of George C. Marshall to be Army Chief of Staff to the remarkable peace-time draft of 1940 and the massive and unprecedented mock battles in Tennessee, Louisiana, and the Carolinas by which the skill and spirit of the Army were forged and out of which iconic leaders like Eisenhower, Bradley, and Clark emerged. The narrative unfolds against a backdrop of political and cultural isolationist resistance and racial tension at home, and the increasingly perceived threat of attack from both Germany and Japan.
Author: Jonathan Weeks
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810885328
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
In 1890, baseball's Pittsburgh Alleghenys won a measly 23 games, losing 113. The Cleveland Spiders topped this record when they lost an astonishing 134 games in 1899. Over 100 years later, the 2003 Detroit Tigers stood apart as the only team in baseball history to lose 60 games before July in a season. These stories and more are told in Cellar Dwellers: The Worst Teams in Baseball History, a colorful tribute to the sport's least successful clubs. Cellar Dwellers spans three centuries of professional baseball, recounting the seasons of those teams whose misadventures have largely been forgotten over time. Chapters not only cover the stories of the luckless teams, they also include reams of statistics and detailed player profiles of those who helped the clubs--and those who helped them fail. In addition to the Alleghenys, Spiders, and Tigers, the cellar dwellers of baseball include: -1904 and 1909 Washington Senators -1916 Philadelphia Athletics -1928 and 1941 Philadelphia Phillies -1932 Boston Red Sox -1935 Boston Braves -1939 St. Louis Browns -1952 Pittsburgh Pirates -1962 New York Mets While many books revel in the glories of teams whose exploits have become legendary, the stories found in this volume offer an engaging alternative to the thrill of victory. Embellished with comical and amusing anecdotes alongside historical perspectives, Cellar Dwellers will entertain baseball fans and fascinate those who love baseball history.
Author: Gary Bedingfield
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786458202
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
While most fans know that baseball stars Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg, and Bob Feller served in the military during World War II, few can name the two major leaguers who died in action. (They were catcher Harry O’Neill and outfielder Elmer Gedeon.) Far fewer still are aware that another 125 minor league players also lost their lives during the war. This book draws on extensive research and interviews to bring their personal lives, baseball careers, and wartime service to light.
Author: Thomas Wolf
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803255241
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
In the summer of 1932, at the beginning of the turbulent decade that would remake America, baseball fans were treated to one of the most thrilling seasons in the history of the sport. As the nation drifted deeper into the Great Depression and reeled from social unrest, baseball was a diversion for a troubled country—and yet the world of baseball was marked by the same edginess that pervaded the national scene. On-the-field fights were as common as double plays. Amid the National League pennant race, Cubs’ shortstop Billy Jurges was shot by showgirl Violet Popovich in a Chicago hotel room. When the regular season ended, the Cubs and Yankees clashed in what would be Babe Ruth’s last appearance in the fall classic. After the Cubs lost the first two games in New York, the series resumed in Chicago at Wrigley Field, with Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt cheering for the visiting Yankees from the box seats behind the Yankees’ dugout. In the top of the fifth inning the game took a historic turn. As Ruth was jeered mercilessly by Cubs players and fans, he gestured toward the outfield and then blasted a long home run. After Ruth circled the bases, Roosevelt exclaimed, “Unbelievable!” Ruth’s homer set off one of baseball’s longest-running and most intense debates: did Ruth, in fact, call his famous home run? Rich with historical context and detail, The Called Shot dramatizes the excitement of a baseball season during one of America’s most chaotic summers.
