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  • Summer of '49 by David Halberstam book cover
  • Summer of '49 by David Halberstam book cover
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Summer of '49

by David Halberstam

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A 1949 pennant race set against postwar America

$17.07 USD
$28.46 USD $17.07 USD
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Paperback New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

A 1949 pennant race set against postwar America

David Halberstam frames the 1949 American League race as both a baseball contest and a window onto a nation emerging from war. The book centers on the season-long competition between Joe DiMaggio’s Yankees and Ted Williams’s Red Sox, whose rivalry comes down to a final-day confrontation. Alongside the stakes on the field, it places baseball within the public search for new heroes in postwar America. This is sports history built around a defining season, two celebrated clubs, and the cultural weight attached to the game at the time.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Baseball fans interested in American League history and classic pennant races
  • Readers interested in Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry
  • Readers seeking sports writing with postwar U.S. cultural context

Themes

Baseball historyYankees–Red Sox rivalryPostwar AmericaSports heroes1949 pennant race

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

"Dazzling...A celebration of a vanished heroic age and a 'simpler America' " --New York Times Book Review

David Halberstam's classic chronicle of baseball's most magnificent season, as seen through the battle royal between Joe DiMaggio's Yankees and Ted Williams's Red Sox for the hearts of a nation.

The year was 1949, and a war-wearied nation turned from the battlefields to the ball fields in search of new heroes. It was a summer that marked the beginning of a sports rivalry unequaled in the annals of athletic competition. The awesome New York Yankees and the indomitable Boston Red Sox were fighting for supremacy of baseball's American League and an aging Joe DiMaggio and a brash, headstrong hitting phenomenon named Ted Williams led their respective teams in a classic pennant duel of almost mythic proportions--one that would be decided in an explosive head-to-head confrontation on the last day of the season.

With incredible skill, passion and insight, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam returns us to that miraculous summer--and to a glorious time when the dreams of a now almost forgotten America rested on the crack of a bat.

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