| Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family's Love of the Brooklyn Dodgersc Contributor(s): Oliphant, Thomas (Author) |
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ISBN: 031231762X ISBN-13: 9780312317621 Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin OUR PRICE: $20.69 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: May 2006 Annotation: Written with clarity and power, this book captures the majesty of baseball's golden era, the issue of race in America, and the love that one young boy, his parents, and the entire borough of Brooklyn had for their team. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Sports & Recreation | Baseball - History - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs - Biography & Autobiography | Sports |
| Dewey: B |
| Physical Information: 0.9" H x 5.4" W x 8.4" (0.90 lbs) 304 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Mid-Atlantic - Cultural Region - Northeast U.S. - Geographic Orientation - New York - Locality - New York, N.Y. - Chronological Period - 1950's - Chronological Period - 20th Century |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Tom Oliphant has created a small masterpiece. Thomas Oliphant creates a relentless melodrama that shows this final game in its true glory. As we move through the game, he builds a remarkable history of the Dodgers' status as a national team, based on their fabled history of near-triumphs and disasters that made them classic underdogs. He weaves into this brilliant recounting a winning memoir of his own family's story and their time together on that fateful Game Seven day, thrilling a nine-year-old boy in a loving, struggling family for whom the Dodgers were a rare source of the joys and symbols that bring families together through tough times. Written with power and clarity, this is a brilliant work that captures the majesty of baseball, the issue of race in America, and the love that one young boy, his parents, and the borough of Brooklyn had for their team. In Praying for Gil Hodges, Tom Oliphant has created a small masterpiece---a splendid recreation of life in the 1950s, a poignant tribute to his parents, and a fabulous story about the central role the Brooklyn Dodgers played in the lives of his and countless other families. Moving effortlessly from an adult's perspective to a child's recollection, shifting seamlessly between the present and the past, he captures the reader's interest at every step along the way. I found myself happily transported back in time, following a warm-hearted young boy as he comes of age in a memorable era. ---Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the bestselling Wait Till Next Year Tom Oliphant is one of our most lyrical writers and he has written a love story---about his parents, about baseball, and most of all about the American values that shaped their lives. ---Bob Schieffer, Face the Nation The story builds to a beautiful and moving resolution, proving that the true center of this book is not the seventh game of the World Series. The heart of the story is the love of a family for a place, a baseball team, but mostly for each other. ---The Boston Globe |
Contributor Bio(s): Oliphant, Thomas: - Thomas Oliphant has been a correspondent for The Boston Globe since 1968 and its Washington columnist since 1989. He is a native of Brooklyn, a product of La Jolla High School in California, and a 1967 graduate of Harvard. He was one of three editors on special assignment who managed the Globe's coverage of Boston's traumatic school desegregation, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. He has also won the writing award given by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He has appeared on ABC's Nightline, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Face the Nation, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and CBS News' This Morning. He has been named one of the country's top ten political writers and one of Washington's fifty most influential journalists by The Washingtonian magazine. He is the author of Utter Incompetents. Mr. Oliphant lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, CBS correspondent Susan Spencer. |