Winner of the 2011 CASEY Award from Spitball Magazine
Seventy baseball seasons ago, on a May afternoon at
Yankee Stadium, Joe DiMaggio lined a hard single to
leftfield. It was the quiet beginning to the most
resonant baseball achievement of all time. Starting that
day, the vaunted Yankee centerfielder kept on hitting-at
least one hit in game after game after game. In the
summer of 1941, as Nazi forces moved relentlessly across
Europe and young American men were drafted by the
millions, it seemed only a matter of time before the
U.S. went to war. The nation was apprehensive. Yet for
two months in that tense summer, America was captivated
by DiMaggio's astonishing hitting streak. In 56, Kostya
Kennedy tells the remarkable story of how the streak
found its way into countless lives, from the Italian
kitchens of Newark to the playgrounds of Queens to the
San Francisco streets of North Beach; from the Oval
Office of FDR to the Upper West Side apartment where
Joe's first wife, Dorothy, the movie starlet, was
expecting a child. In this crisp, evocative narrative
Joe DiMaggio emerges in a previously unseen light, a
26-year-old on the cusp of becoming an icon. He comes
alive-a driven ballplayer, a mercurial star and a
conflicted husband-as the tension and the scrutiny upon
him build with each passing day. DiMaggio's achievement
lives on as the greatest of sports records. Alongside
the story of DiMaggio's dramatic quest, Kennedy deftly
examines the peculiar nature of hitting streaks and with
an incisive, modern-day perspective gets inside the
number itself, as its sheer improbability heightens both
the math and the magic of 56 games in a row. |
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