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Original Title:	The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together
ISBN:	0767906888 (ISBN13: 9780767906883)

The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together

Michael Shapiro

Paperback | Pages: 384 pages

Rating: 4.07 | 180 Users | 18 Reviews

Explanation To Books The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together

In the bestselling tradition of The Boys of Summer and Wait ‘Til Next Year, The Last Good Season is the poignant and dramatic story of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ last pennant and the forces that led to their heartbreaking departure to Los Angeles.

The 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers were one of baseball’s most storied teams, featuring such immortals as Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, and Roy Campanella. The love between team and borough was equally storied, an iron bond of loyalty forged through years of adversity and sometimes legendary ineptitude. Coming off their first World Series triumph ever in 1955, against the hated Yankees, the Dodgers would defend their crown against the Milwaukee Braves and the Cincinnati Reds in a six-month neck-and-neck contest until the last day of the playoffs, one of the most thrilling pennant races in history.

But as The Last Good Season so richly relates, all was not well under the surface. The Dodgers were an aging team at the tail end of its greatness, and Brooklyn was a place caught up in rapid and profound urban change. From a cradle of white ethnicity, it was being transformed into a racial patchwork, including Puerto Ricans and blacks from the South who flocked to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers’ black stars. The institutions that defined the borough – the Brooklyn Eagle, the Brooklyn Navy Yard – had vanished, and only the Dodgers remained. And when their shrewd, dollar-squeezing owner, Walter O’Malley, began casting his eyes elsewhere in the absence of any viable plan to replace the aging Ebbets Field and any support from the all-powerful urban czar Robert Moses, the days of the Dodgers in Brooklyn were clearly numbered.

Michael Shapiro, a Brooklyn native, has interviewed many of the surviving participants and observers of the 1956 season, and undertaken immense archival research to bring its public and hidden drama to life. Like David Halberstam’s The Summer of ’49, The Last Good Season combines an exciting baseball story, a genuine sense of nostalgia, and hard-nosed reporting and social thinking to reveal, in a new light, a time and place we only thought we understood.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Title	:	The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together
Author	:	Michael Shapiro
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 384 pages
Published	:	March 9th 2004 by Broadway (first published 2003)
Categories	:	Sports. Baseball. Nonfiction. History

Rating Epithetical Books The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together

Ratings: 4.07 From 180 Users | 18 Reviews

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There are some really silly editing mistakes in this book that keep it from being a '5.' But the way Shapiro shifts between baseball anecdotes and Brooklyn history in the era of Robert Moses is really engaging. Perhaps subject matter this good is hard to mess up, but it's one of the better baseball books out there.

A real gem of a book that I came across this year. Shapiro gives some really nice up close profiles of the players, what type of men they really were. A very personal and human view of the players and the owner Walter OMally- who was no Branch Rickey. He clearly shows the powerful hand of New Yorks power broker, Robert Mosses, and reminds us that NOTHING got built in NYC without his approval. He also covers in depth the way Brooklyn was changing in the 1950s. I picked up this book for my father

While the book is well written and very well researched (perhaps TOO well)... it's not really much about baseball. The purpose of the book was clearly to paint Walter O'Malley as a victim of the evil Robert Moses. That narrative gets a bit in the way.. there are very few details on the actual move of the team, nor does it set any context (the Giants move at the same time is only mentioned twice in passing).While the book does also document the 1956 season, it does so in a rather joyless,

Very interesting book. It clarifies that Robert Moses was the person who forced O'Malley's hand in moving the Dodgers to LA. I think O'Malley truly wanted to stay in Brooklyn but Moses, did everything in his power, to prevent the new stadium. The portions that described what was going on in Brooklyn, socioeconomically was very interesting. It truly was the Last Good Season, as Robinson was slowing, Reese and others were getting older and unfortunately Roy Campanella's car crash was in the near

As a long time Dodger fan I really enjoyed starting the new baseball season exploring this slice of history before my time (slightly).Nicely done and fairly well researched. Shapiro doesn't bring a typical sportswriter sensibility to this subject which is a good thing. He tells the story of the Dodgers' last pennant in Brooklyn and does a good job of presenting Robert Moses as the true bad guy in the story of how/why the Dodgers left NYC. The book could use some editing. Okay, the editing is terrible and I usually give an example or two, but there were dozens of mis-spellings and the like, so we'll leave it at that. Shapiro

The kind of book that leaves you wanting more--more info on that 1956 season, more about this team, more about the civic leaders who neglected & wooed the Dodgers, more about the fans and the neighborhoods they came from. Shapiro does a good job here--keeping the narrative short enough to be an easy read, but complete enough to sell this as a story to be concerned about from a number of different perspectives. Deserving of a less-structured, fact- & anecdote-filled follow-up. Shapiro

Well written and researched The attention to individual stories of Brooklyn residents combined with the high-powered wrangling of politicians makes this more than a baseball book.