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A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family's Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers
Thomas Dunne Books
July 2005
304 pages ISBN: 0312317611 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
On a steamy hot Sunday, the Reverend Herbert Redmond was
celebrating Mass at a church in Brooklyn, when he startled
his congregation thus: “It’s far too hot for a sermon. Keep
the Commandments and say a prayer for Gil Hodges.”
Praying for Gil Hodges is built around a detailed
reconstruction of the seventh game of the 1955 World
Series, which has always been on the short list of great
moments in baseball history. On a sunny, breezy October
afternoon, something happened in New York City that had
never happened before and never would again: the Brooklyn
Dodgers won the world championship of baseball. For one
hour and forty-four minutes, behind a gutsy, twenty-three-
year-old kid left-hander from the iron-mining region of
upstate New York named Johnny Podres, everything that had
gone wrong before went gloriously right for a change. Until
that afternoon, leaving out the war years, the Dodgers and
their legions of fans had endured ten seasons during which
they lost the World Series to the New York Yankees five
times and lost the National League pennant on the final day
of the season three times--- facts of history that give the
famous cry of “Wait Till Next Year!” its defiant meaning. Pitch by pitch and inning by inning, Thomas Oliphant re-
creates a relentless melodrama that shows this final game
in its true glory. As we move through the game, he builds a
remarkable history of the hapless “Bums,” exploring the
Dodgers' status as a national team, based on their fabled
history of near-triumphs and disasters that made them
classic underdogs. He weaves into this brilliant recounting
a winning memoir of his own family's story and their time
together on that fateful day that the final game was
played.. This victory thrilled the national African-American
community, still mired in the evils of segregation, who had
erupted in joy at the arrival of Jackie Robinson eight
years earlier and rooted unabashedly for this integrated
team at a time when the country was thoroughly segregated.
And it also thrilled a nine-year-old boy on the East Side
of Manhattan in a loving, struggling family for whom the
Dodgers were a rare source of the joys and symbols that
bring families together through tough times. Every once in a while a book provides a certain view of
America, and whether it is The Greatest Generation, Big
Russ & Me, or Wait Till Next Year, these works
strike a chord with readers everywhere. Praying for Gil
Hodges is such a book. Written with power and clarity,
this is a brilliant work capturing the majesty of baseball,
the issue of race in America, and the love that one young
boy, his parents, and the borough of Brooklyn had for their
team.
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