Word: authority
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Halberstam, author of such books as The Best and the Brightest and The Reckoning, this new work may be his most appealing, mainly because it is quirky and informal and the author leaves his moral fervor in the bat rack. He intersperses the season's important action with portraits of key personnel: the Yanks' Tommy Henrich, Jerry Coleman, Yogi Berra; the Sox's Bobby Doerr, Ellis Kinder, Johnny Pesky. While he does adequately by Boston, clearly his heart is in the Bronx. In his hagiography, the Yankees are a little more godlike. Perhaps they were...
...Summer of '49 is much enhanced by the author's ruminations about the era. He captures both the glamour and the quaintness of the late '40s, when the corner bar, the movie palace and the ball park were the major entertainment centers. The new age of expansion clubs and megasalaries was coming on fast. Though TV was in the wings, radio ruled a fan's life. Teams still traveled by train and, in Halberstam's view, the clubs lost priceless cohesiveness when they boarded airplanes. For these old-timers, alcohol was the prevailing addiction. Red Sox manager Joe McCarthy hectored...
...surviving players Halberstam sought out, only Joe DiMaggio turned him down (not even mutual friend Edward Bennett Williams could twist his arm). Yet Halberstam's portrait of DiMaggio is the finest part of the book. The author has a tender, intuitive sympathy for the proud, remote athlete. DiMaggio does not need a writer to confirm his stature, but still he is lucky to have such a thoughtful, intelligent chronicler. Boston had its own superstar in Ted Williams, and that brings up the inevitable comparison between Halberstam's work and John Updike's classic account of Williams' last game, "Hub Fans...
Fourteen productive years and thousands of dusty miles later, My Secret History does that and more. Theroux, 48, reinvents not only his great train odyssey but other chapters of his exotic autobiography as well. The result is the most consistently entertaining of the author's more than two dozen books, a serial portrait of the artist as a young stud that will undoubtedly cause the usual confusion about what is fact and what is fiction...
This is never an easy question (autobiographies frequently contain more fancy than novels), but so far as one needs a guide to the free state of Theroux's imagination, it is this: like the author, the novel's hero, Andrew (sometimes Andre) Parent, was born and reared in Massachusetts, spent a good part of the '60s teaching and traveling in the Third World, and eventually made his mark as a London-based writer...