The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together FROM THE PUBLISHER
"The 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers were one of baseball's most storied teams, featuring such immortals as Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, and Roy Campanella. The love between team and borough was equally storied, an iron bond of loyalty forged through years of adversity and sometimes legendary ineptitude. Coming off their first World Series triumph ever in 1955 against the hated Yankees, the Dodgers would defend their crown against the Milwaukee Braves and the Cincinnati Reds in a six-month neck-and-neck contest until the last day of the season, one of the most thrilling pennant races in history." But as The Last Good Season so richly relates, all was not well under the surface. The Dodgers were an aging team at the tail end of greatness, and Brooklyn was a place caught up in rapid and profound urban change. From a cradle of white ethnicity, it was being transformed into a racial patchwork, including Puerto Ricans and blacks from the South who flocked to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers' black stars. The institutions that defined the borough - the Brooklyn Eagle, the Brooklyn Navy Yard - had vanished, and only the Dodgers remained. And when their shrewd, dollar-squeezing owner Walter O'Malley began casting his eyes elsewhere in the absence of any viable plan to replace the aging Ebbets Field and any support from the all-powerful urban czar Robert Moses, the days of the Dodgers in Brooklyn were clearly numbered.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
With an almost Dickensian ability for delineating his characters, flaws and all, Shapiro, who teaches journalism at Columbia University, makes us care about this random collection of aging baseball players as they enjoyed their last great season together at Ebbets Field. — David Nasaw
The New Yorker
Does the world really need another book about the Brooklyn Dodgers? Happily, Shapiro's account of Brooklyn's last pennant-winning season, in 1956, mostly eschews traditional nostalgia for "da Bums" and, instead, provides a glimpse of nineteen-fifties urban politics, as it came to bear on a pro baseball team. The much reviled Walter O'Malley, who abandoned Ebbets Field and moved his Dodgers to Los Angeles, gets something of a reprieve in this account; it is Robert Moses who really deserves our scorn. O'Malley, faced with declining attendance and a crumbling, outdated ballpark in a deteriorating neighborhood, sought repeatedly to build a new Brooklyn stadium "a geodesic dome" at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. Shapiro, using archived letters, shows how Moses, who secretly had plans for a new ballpark in Flushing (i.e., Shea Stadium), thwarted O'Malley at every turn. The model of O'Malley's proposed dome sat in the basement of its designer's parents, in Tennessee, for years until it was thrown away.
Publishers Weekly
The caveat about this book is that it is as much about political personalities and the social changes that post-WWII America confronted as it is about the '56 Dodgers. Still, this is one terrific read. The Brooklyn Dodgers won their only world championship in 1955; in '56 they lost the series to the Yankees; two years later, the team was in Los Angeles. "The move" is the thing that haunts the 1956 season. New Yorker writer Shapiro (The Shadow in the Sun; Solomon's Sword) dissects Walter O'Malley absorbingly, in a meticulously dead-on portrait of a man still virulently hated in the borough of churches. There are the stories of O'Malley's soft adolescence, how he became a lawyer and how he came to own the Dodgers. Shapiro tells of O'Malley's plan for a domed stadium (designed by Buckminster Fuller) and of his battles with another hated New Yorker, Robert Moses, who would not condemn land, a first for Moses; hence O'Malley could not come up with property on the cheap. There are wonderful vignettes of the Dodgers: Pee Wee Reese, the captain and the glue that held the Dodgers together season after season; the still intense Jackie Robinson and his dislike for the easygoing Roy Campanella; the sulking Duke Snider; the good-guy Carl Erskine; the enemy from the Polo Grounds who came to pitch, Sal "The Barber" Maglie; and how the team rallied to win the pennant. In a surprise, Shapiro contends that the real villain of the Dodgers move to Los Angeles was Moses because he blocked O'Malley's plan to build a stadium in downtown Brooklyn. With equal parts sport, history, politics and sociology, Shapiro's book is reminiscent of the works of Caro, Halberstam and Kahn, a volume that belongs right next to The Boys of Summer in every sports fan's library. (Mar. 18) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Brooklyn's tragic loss, of course, was L.A.'s gain. But Brooklyn native Shapiro concentrates on the 1956 season, the thrilling pennant race with the Braves, and the ultimately doomed negotiations for a new ballpark between owner Walter O'Malley and New York political boss Robert Moses. An excellent social history as well as a great baseball story, with sharp-edged portraits of the players in the Brooklyn drama (on and off the Ebbets Field grass), ranging from Pee Wee Reese to Buckminster Fuller. Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
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