UNSOLICITED READER PRAISE FOR THE GREAT BLACK SWAMP IV
Jim,
I finished reading your latest book that I bought from you at the Defiance Library's Art in the Park last month. It was easily the best of the series and clearly you put a lot of research into writing it. It even prompted me to re-read some chapters from your earlier books in the series as well. I really liked the chapter on Brand Whitlock.
I also enjoyed your book on the Cleveland All-Star game that juxtaposed what was going on in the world with what was happening in baseball that summer. An interesting and informative approach. You do excellent work! Thanks for writing these books about people and places in northwest Ohio!
Lou L. Paulding, OH
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.
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.
