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enlarge | Author: Richard Bradley Publisher: Free Press Category: Book
List Price: $25.00 Buy New: $15.63 You Save: $9.37 (37%)
New (28) Used (14) from $13.40
Avg. Customer Rating: 12 reviews Sales Rank: 27481
Media: Hardcover Number Of Items: 1 Pages: 304 Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1 Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 1416534385 Dewey Decimal Number: 796.357640974 EAN: 9781416534389 ASIN: 1416534385
Publication Date: March 18, 2008 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Shipping: Expedited shipping available Shipping: International shipping available Condition: Brand new Item. CD, DVD, Book, VHS more than 400 000 titles to choose from. ALL days Low Price !
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Sports as History through a Diamond Classic May 13, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Richard Bradley provides enough fresh angles on the classic 1978 one-game playoff between the Yankees and Red Sox that it feels like playing caroms off the Green Monster for the first time.
Delving into sports as history, Bradley avoids the cliches like simply retelling box score statistics or relying on rehashed recollections and truly delivers a clutch performance in making the legends come to life.
As great as the ending of the regular season - which led to this stunning climax for supremacy of the East Division (third place Milwaukee would have won the West by one game) - Bradley's account places makes the diamond classic a spectacular gem.
Terrific April 3, 2008 2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Longtime Red Sox fan here.I remember all too well the '78 season and that agonizing playoff game.The book is well written and researched and to get Carl Yastrzemski to talk as much as he did is a coup.I did find two mistakes,one factual and one grammatical.Reggie Cleveland of the Red Sox was a pitcher,not an outfielder (p.51),and on page 253 when writing about the death of Thurman Munson the text reads "to low" when of course it should be too low.Beyond that though I loved reading this book,even if the end was not to my satisfaction. :)
The Last Great Pennant Race March 31, 2008 5 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is a very enjoyable book which all baseball fans will find gripping and thrilling, much the way the 1978 race shaped up. The book does a very good job at shaping the cultures and idiosyncrasies of both the Red Sox and Yankees and how that helped to shape a tumultuous pennant race. The author does a great deal of painting baseball's changing landscape and how this was impacting both teams as well as the game at large. Also, the book does a great job of shaping the final game around these events as the Red Sox /Yankees playoff game was as dramatic and exciting as the season, coming down to the final batter.
Obviously Red Sox & Yankees fans will find this book more interesting then other fans but regardless the book is worth the read for the moments of excitement and the feelings of nostalgia it is bound to bring up for a simpler time in the national pastime.
how did you miss..... March 31, 2008 1 out of 4 found this review helpful
the fact that the game was played on the holiest of days for jews... yom kippur
my father was ballistic that my brother and i and two friends went crazy over dent's home run and the final result, on a day when we weren't supposed to be watching television
great account otherwise
The Best Book On The Late 70s Rivalry In A LONG While! March 18, 2008 10 out of 12 found this review helpful
Every time a new book comes out on the Yankee teams of the late 70s, which were the first ones I experienced as a child, I keep hoping that it will be a book with some fresh, new insights. Most of the time, the results are very disappointing. Roger Kahn, Maury Allen and Phil Pepe have weighed in with books of their own in recent years and I have found them lacking because for the most part these authors are either too much rooted in the nostalgia for 50s baseball to do justice to the subject of the late 70s (when you read Kahn and Allen you end up seeing more digressions about the 50s than about the later years for the most part!) or they just rehash stuff that was written in books that came out years ago (Pepe's new book was a letdown because there wasn't a single thing I hadn't already read in the autbios of Nettles and Reggie, not to mention the Bill Madden/Moss Klein book from 1990).
That's why Richard Bradley's book was such a breath of fresh air. *Finally* I felt like I was getting the story of 1978 told from a new angle and with some fresh insights on the players, and the race pennant race preceding the game. The alternating chapters of PBP of the game with the background details is not a new feature in baseball books (done with Game 7 of the 60 WS, and Buster Olney with Game 7 of the 01 WS), but it works magnificently here. It makes for a very entertaining and brisk read that I was sorry to see end.
My only tiny nitpick involves the fact that since Bradley did have access to the original telecasts of the game, it would have been nice if some more of the comments of the announcers had been interwoven into the narrative of the game action. And there are also some interesting stories about the broadcasts themselves too (Howard Cosell for instance, was officially part of ABC's baseball broadcast team, but deemed the playoff game taking place on a Monday insufficient reason to miss that evening's meaingless early regular season "Monday Night Football" broadcast). Also priceless was the moment where Phil Rizzuto found himself lingering in the Boston press room after finishing the 6th inning on radio, before heading back to the TV booth and letting out a burst of "Holy Cows!" when Dent homered....only to forget that he was still in the Boston press room, and telling Bill White on-air later that "I thought Frank Malzone was going to bite me on the ankle!" showing how much the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry played itself out in all corners of the ballpark that day!
Thanks again to Mr. Bradley for enriching the baseball literature on the Yankees-Red Sox of the late 70s by taking things to a new level. It gets my vote for what I know will be the best baseball book of the year for me.
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