October 1964
In 1989 David Halberstam published Summer of '49, which became a number one New York Times bestseller. It was a compelling portrait of baseball in an America as yet unchanged by affluence, technology, and social progress. The players, almost all white, had been raised in harsh circumstances, the games were played in the afternoon on grass and were broadcast on radio, the teams traveled by train, and the owners had dictatorial power over the players. Here also was the story of the Yankees winning the first of their pennants under Casey Stengel before going on to become baseball's greatest dynasty.
October 1964 is Halberstam's exciting new book about baseball - this time about the last season of that Yankee dynasty. Like the previous book, it is both sports and history, and it is a fascinating account of an electrifying baseball championship against the background of profound social change. The Yankees, like most American League teams, reflected the status quo and, in contrast to the National League teams, had been slow to sign the new great black players (indeed, for a time, their best scouts were ordered not to sign them). Though the Yankees boasted such great names as Mantle, Maris, and Ford, theirs was an aging team: Mantle, hobbled by injuries, was facing his last hurrah in post-season play. By contrast, the St. Louis Cardinals were a young tough team on the ascent, featuring talented black players - Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, Lou Brock, and Bill White - who were changing the very nature of the game with their unprecedented speed and power.
Halberstam has once again given us an absorbing tale of an exciting season and a great Word Series that reflected a changing era in both baseball and the rest of society as well: The fabric that insulated baseball from the turmoil in the rest of the country was beginning to tear. We get intimate vignettes not only of the players but also of the scouts who signed them (including the black scouts who had been denied the chance to play in the major leagues themselves), and of the new and more irreverent members of the media, known as the Chipmunks, and their conflicts with the players. A book of keen insight and significance, October 1964 is also, like Halberstam's previous work, a great read.
Buy October 1964 by David Halberstam at Attic books in Nairobi Kenya.
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In 1989 David Halberstam published Summer of '49, which became a number one New York Times bestseller. It was a compelling portrait of baseball in an America as yet unchanged by affluence, technology, and social progress. The players, almost all white, had been raised in harsh circumstances, the games were played in the afternoon on grass and were broadcast on radio, the teams traveled by train, and the owners had dictatorial power over the players. Here also was the story of the Yankees winning the first of their pennants under Casey Stengel before going on to become baseball's greatest dynasty.
October 1964 is Halberstam's exciting new book about baseball - this time about the last season of that Yankee dynasty. Like the previous book, it is both sports and history, and it is a fascinating account of an electrifying baseball championship against the background of profound social change. The Yankees, like most American League teams, reflected the status quo and, in contrast to the National League teams, had been slow to sign the new great black players (indeed, for a time, their best scouts were ordered not to sign them). Though the Yankees boasted such great names as Mantle, Maris, and Ford, theirs was an aging team: Mantle, hobbled by injuries, was facing his last hurrah in post-season play. By contrast, the St. Louis Cardinals were a young tough team on the ascent, featuring talented black players - Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, Lou Brock, and Bill White - who were changing the very nature of the game with their unprecedented speed and power.
Halberstam has once again given us an absorbing tale of an exciting season and a great Word Series that reflected a changing era in both baseball and the rest of society as well: The fabric that insulated baseball from the turmoil in the rest of the country was beginning to tear. We get intimate vignettes not only of the players but also of the scouts who signed them (including the black scouts who had been denied the chance to play in the major leagues themselves), and of the new and more irreverent members of the media, known as the Chipmunks, and their conflicts with the players. A book of keen insight and significance, October 1964 is also, like Halberstam's previous work, a great read.
Buy October 1964 by David Halberstam at Attic books in Nairobi Kenya.
show more
Book details
- Hardcover | 380 pages
- English
- 0679415602
- 9780679415602
About David Halberstam
David Halberstam was an American journalist and historian, known for his work on the Vietnam War, politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, and later, sports journalism. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964.
Halberstam graduated from Harvard University with a degree in journalism in 1955 and started his career writing for the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, writing for The Tennessean in Nashville, Tennessee, he covered the beginnings of the American Civil Rights Movement.
In the mid 1960s, Halberstam covered the Vietnam War for The New York Times. While there, he gathered material for his book The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. In 1963, he received a George Polk Award for his reporting at the New York Times. At the age of 30, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war. He is interviewed in the 1968 documentary film on the Vietnam War entitled In the Year of the Pig.
Halberstam's most well known work is The Best and the Brightest. Halberstam focused on the paradox that those who shaped the U.S. war effort in Vietnam were some of the most intelligent, well-connected and self-confident men in America—"the best and the brightest"—and yet those same individuals were responsible for the failure of the United States Vientnam policy.
After publication of The Best and the Brightest in 1972, Halberstam plunged right into another book and in 1979 published The Powers That Be. The book provided profiles of men like William Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, Phil Graham of The Washington Post—and many others.
Later in his career, Halberstam turned to the subjects of sports, publishing The Breaks of the Game, an inside look at the Bill Walton and the 1978 Portland Trailblazers basketball team; an ambitious book on Michael Jordan in 1999 called Playing for Keeps; and on the pennant race battle between the Yankees and Red Sox called Summer of '49.
Halberstam published two books in the 1960s, three books in the 1970s, four books in the 1980s, and six books in the 1990s. He published four books in the 2000s and was on a pace to publish six or more books in that decade before his death.
David Halberstam was killed in a car crash on April 23, 2007 in Menlo Park, California.
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