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BOOK REVIEWS
Midwest Book Review
Small Press Bookwatch
February, 2011
One Summer Day in America: July 13, 1954 is a story from
baseball's golden age, focusing on the record-setting
All Star game played in Cleveland. Legends who
participated in the game included Willie Mays, Mickey
Mantle, Yogi Berra, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Jackie
Robinson, and Duke Snider.
One Summer Day in America brings the excitement of the
game alive inning by inning, as well as offering an
immersive glimpse of 1950s America - both its upbeat,
friendly surface and the underlying tensions of the Cold
War beneath. One Summer Day in America is especially
recommended as a superb giftbook for baseball fans.
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Akron Beacon Journal
March 27, 2011
It was a watershed year,
1954 (and) Toledo author Jim Mollenkopf distills
the idea further, by focusing on a single day in
One Summer Day in America: July 13, 1954.
Mollenkopf taps into mid-'50s zeitgeist using
newspapers and other sources, finding events
that occurred on that day and bouncing from
those to other stories like a friend with a head
full of interesting trivia. His chapters are
headed ''First Inning,'' ''Second Inning,'' and
so on, with baseball talk leading to
McCarthyism, bomb shelters, the new polio
vaccine and a lovely little eulogy to Herb
Score.
Eight members of the starting lineup were future
Hall of Famers, and there were that many again
in the reserves. Spectators could see greats
like Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle,
Jackie Robinson and Yogi Berra for as little as
a dollar, the cost of a bleacher seat in the
cavernous Municipal Stadium. |
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