I’ll admit I had no idea who Doris Kearns Goodwin was when I bought this off a clearance shelf, but the picture of Ebbets Field poking through the clouds caught my attention. Turns out the author is a writer who has won several awards for books that look to be largely unappealing to me. Luckily, this memoir is about her childhood as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. The battles between the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers in the 1950’s are the stuff of legend. Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, the “shot heard round the world,” and the Dodgers first World Series championship—these are topics that are still oft discussed today, and Goodwin was right there for all of it. Mix in McCarthyism, polio scares, Catholicism, Elvis, and the Rosenberg trial and we get an excellent picture of life in this decade. There isn’t much depth to the story, but the vignettes make for good entertainment.
When I was six, my father game me a bright-red scorebook that opened my heart to the game of baseball.
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