Books
Books > All Booked UpCheck out our reviewer’s pick of the page-turners.
words by > Michael J. Bandler
The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World
Joshua Prager
October 3, 1951. Upper Manhattan. The Polo Grounds. Rubber game of the National League playoffs. Dodgers vs. Giants. Ninth inning. You hadda be there.
Bobby Thomson’s walk-off homer with two men aboard, on a curve ball thrown by Ralph Branca, is arguably one of the most compelling moments in the history of baseball. But as Wall Street Journal reporter Joshua Prager revealed in a 2001 article, there was more to the moment than windup, pitch, swing, hit, win. Whether or not Thomson indeed took advantage on that pitch, an elaborate sign-stealing scheme fueled the Giants’ ascent from mid-season doldrums to the pennant.
Prager, so captivated by the sheer brazenness, pursued the saga further. Actually, despite the subtitle, the story wasn’t “untold.” It kept poking out here and there, but generally went unheeded. Branca, who’d reaped fans’ derision almost from the moment the ball was hit, heard about the scheme some time later. But he buried it in his gut. And even as the hero and goat wound up their careers modestly, coming together at Old Timers games and trade shows, they skirted the subject of “the shot.”
Prager’s article was rooted in the intricacies of the plot that involved a Wollensak telescope, a buzzer system and some spies. In expanding it to 350 pages, he weaves wondrous tangents—the teams’ ongoing rivalry, the place of baseball in
New Yorkers’ psyches, the diversity of cheating in the sport, and the tales of such ordinary men as an electrician, a bench jockey and a couple of journeymen athletes— into an enticing whole.
The result is one of the more illuminating baseball books to come along in years. (Pantheon, $26.95)
Magic Time
Doug Marlette
Five years after the publication of his fi rst novel—The Bridge, a journey back to his own thinly veiled Southern roots—the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and creator of the comic strip Kudzu has left all lightness behind. The characters in his second novel are also glancing back over their shoulders at their families’ histories. But this time, the three-dimensional men and women, black and white, within and outside the law, inhabit a more somber landscape as they review the events of the civil rights movement through the prism of the present. Marlette has created a no-holds-barred slice of history that asks what happened during one particularly heinous episode in the sixties. Who was victimized? Who eluded the law? And who may have perverted it?
Marlette’s writing is passionate and compelling—and at the heart of his prose is the message of lessons learned. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25)
Real Lives, Briefly Noted
Bookshelves will be home this month to two personal volumes that shine the spotlight on folks who know what spotlights are all about. TV star and stand-up legend Bob Newhart steps out of the comedy clubs and college auditoriums into the pages of I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This (Hyperion, $23.95), a sort of memoir in which the driving instructor, submarine commander and soused retiree of his monologues surface, alongside the oft-poignant life and times of this comic Bard with the “button-down mind.” Donna McKechnie, who gained a Tony and a Newsweek cover three dec ades ago when she danced into audiences’ hearts in A Chorus Line (the show returns to Broadwa y in revival this month), treats the grit and glory of her musical theater life in Time Steps (Simon & Schuster, $25).