October 1964

Rating:
Summary: baseball fans, especially younger ones, read this book!
Review: This book started my fascination with 50's and 60's era of baseball. Halberstam does an excellent job covering the hundreds of people that made up the game during that time period. After reading this book, I had to go out and buy several biographies of some players that seemed so very interesting to me. Since I am a baseball fan that was born in 83 I wasn't around to experience those players, I just have to read about them.

Rating:
Summary: I Felt Like I Was There
Review: This is not just the story of October 1964 although that is the title of the book. It is in fact the story of the 1960s cultures surrounding baseball. Halberstam observes that the Giants of the 1960s were - on paper, at least - better than the Cardinals virtually every year. Yet the World Series tally for the 1960s was the Cardinals went to THREE World Series (winning two and losing one in seven games) and the Giants to ONE (losing in the last inning of the seventh game).

It was also the last World Series for Mickey Mantle. The book touches on the Philadelphia collapse of 1964 (blowing a 6.5 game lead with only 12 to play), the pennant race of Phillies, Reds, and Cardinals. But best of all it deals with what happened AFTER 1964.

It is a strange irony that the NY Yankees were a powerhouse from 1921 to 1964. The Yankees never went longer than three seasons w/o making the playoffs during that time span. But after the 1964 loss, the Yankees fell out of contention for 12 long years. CBS bought the team and ruined it until a guy named Steinbrenner bailed them out.

This was also a strange series for another reason. Within a couple of days of the end of the series, BOTH managers were out of work. Johnny Keane of the Cardinals was canned and Yogi Berra, a first-year manager of the Yanks was sent packing. And to top off that list of ironies, Keane was hired as the new Yankee manager. This was a victory for the workingman - or so it seemed.

And despite dominance that carried through managers Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy (not the famous Red baiter), Bucky Harris, Casey Stengel, Ralph Houk, and even Berra - Keane took over a collapsed empire. By 1967, Keane was dead, the Yankees were in a coma, and the Cardinals were back in the World Series with a new manager, Red Schoendienst.

The setting of October 1964 is the platform for what would change baseball in the 1970s, the reserve clause. Curt Flood played for those 1960s Cardinals and later rejected a trade to the Phillies. The seeds of free agency, the designated hitter, and the demise of Mickey Mantle were in bloom in October 1964. Read the book and enjoy the trip.



Rating:
Summary: I Had to Say "5 Stars" Because There Was No "6" Available!
Review: This is not your typical sports book. It is a story about the characters, wills, and struggles of a group of men who happened to be involved in one of the greatest seasons of baseball ever. Halberstam definitely does his research for this book, a point that is made obvious not only in the book's acknowledgements, but also in the text of the novel itself. This is a history, but it is told almost as if it were fiction. Some of the stories actually sound too good to be true!

This book will give you a good laugh too. And it will make you think, definitely about more than just baseball. If you do like baseball, then this book is absolutely for you. Put it in your cart right now!

Halberstam develops character unlike any other, and his storytelling technique is enchanting. You will develop a new appreciation for men like Gibson, Brock, White, Uecker, Mantle, Whitey Ford, Ernie Banks, Berra, Maris, The Boyer Boys, Curt Flood, and even Tim McCarver. By the end of the book you know all of these heroes as if you played on the same team with them. It will also make you appreciate just a little bit more what Sosa and McGwire have gone up against in the 1998 season! Plus, Halberstam incorporates some of the lesser-known influences who had quite an impact on the game (and on history), none more deserving than the African American baseball patriarchs like Buck O'Neill. What great men.

And if you like this book, you had better read Summer of 49. Very similar in style to October 1964, within a different era of American history.

Rating:
Summary: Baseball Book That is Good For You, and Tastes Good Too
Review: This is one of the best baseball books that I have ever read. Even though I was not born during this season, I was able to get into the players' stories. The social history that it also provides is what makes it an important book. In fifth grade in every suburban school, you learn that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and are led to believe that it was happily ever after. Not so. Just ask Elston Howard, who could not get a house in the same towns in which the other Yankees lived. Also, as a Yankee fan, I thought it was a bad thing that the Yankees lost this series and did not return there for a decade. Reading this book makes you realize that it was a monumental event for the diverse Cardinals to defeat what at the time was the greatest, and perhaps most racist, dynasty in sports.

Rating:
Summary: TERRIBLE
Review: THIS IS THE WORST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ. IT IS UTTERLY TERRIBLE IN MANY WAYS. IT HAS TOO MUCH DESCRIPTION AND IS INCREDIBLY BORING. THE PARAGRAPHS ARE TOO LONG, AND WHEN I HAVE JUST GOTTEN INTO A CHAPTER THE TOPIC SUDDENLY SWITCHES WITHOUT WARNING. MY RECOMMENDATION: STAY AWAY-- THIS BOOK IS BADLY WRITTEN AND INCREDIBLY BORING.

Rating:
Summary: THE BEST BASEBALL BOOK I'VE EVER READ -- AND MORE!
Review: This wonderful book by David Halberstam follows the fortunes of the NY Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals in the fall of 1964, culminating in their meeting in the World Series. Reading about greats like Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, and Lou Brock will keep the baseball fan turning the pages through the night, but this is more than just a book about baseball. Halberstam sensitively explores the conflicts and struggles between White and Black American in the mid-1960s through the story of these two teams.

Rating:
Summary: Keep Baseball Alive, Even if Players Kill It
Review: What to do with the rest of the summer of the Boys of Summer take their ball and go home? Read this book...

I'm not, by any means, a rabid baseball fan, but Halberstam paints fascinating word portraits of many of the sport's most famous players. Not only are the biographies interesting, the story their collective desires to WIN (not make money) is inspirational. In 1964, baseball led the way in accepting minorities into the fabric of American culture. Despite off-the-field distractions, the Saint Louis Cardinals fought and clawed their way into the World Series.

Bob Gibson kept the team focused. He was just plain mean on the mound. Opposing batters feared him. And in the end, Gibson's reputation and his ability to "psyche out" his opponents may have given the Cards that little extra edge that made them Baseball's World Champions in October 1964.

Rating:
Summary: A baseball classic & insightful look at sports integration
Review: While many baseball experts recognized the "seams" in the Yankee team of 1964, most Americans saw this team as a continuation of a mighty dynasty. A young upstart Cardinal team emphasized speed over power and featured a full complement of new black superstars: Gibson, Brock, White and Flood. A fascinating read for baseball fans and for insight into the racially troubled 60's.

Rating:
Summary: Well written and fascinating baseball story¿and more.
Review: With his book "October 1964," author David Halberstam once again proves himself an exceptionally talented sportswriter, as well as a superb historian and journalist. Written in the same vein as "The Summer of '49," his 1989 book on baseball, "October 1964" tells the story of the last season of the great New York Yankee dynasty of the 1950s and 60s, the St. Louis Cardinals' 1964 championship season, and the climactic seven-game 1964 Yankees-Cardinals World Series.

This is much more than a straightforward account of a baseball season and World Series. Halberstam, a writer well known for books combining excellent history with insightful social commentary, ("The Best and the Brightest," "The Fifties," "The Children," among them,) delivers a well researched historical narrative and an incisive analysis of both the Yankees' and Cardinals' 1964 seasons and players, set against the backdrop of ongoing social ferment in the United States of the 1960s. The reader is introduced to a Yankees team of aging white superstars - Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Whitey Ford among them - a team living on past glories and hoping to keep its dynasty alive. The St. Louis Cardinals, by contrast, was a team made up of young and predominantly black players - Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Curt Flood (who would one day help change the face of baseball) - bringing new levels of speed and power to the game, and rising to dominance in the National League. Halberstam eloquently interweaves a narrative of each team's season with the story of the black players' struggle against prejudice, at the time the Civil Rights movement in the United States was gaining momentum. The culmination of this book is Halberstam's description of how the 1964 World Series was played, won and lost, and some of the surprising turns of events in the aftermath of the World Series.

"October 1964" is simply an excellent read - highly entertaining, fast paced, witty, anecdotal, and authoritative. Lovers of baseball, and those who know nothing about the game, will enjoy this book. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Another Halberstam home run...
Review: Yes, this is another lovely baseball book from David Halberstam. While not as sweeping and poetic as 'Summer of 49', it is more...oh I don't know..."hard-boiled"?
Maybe baseball was different too...and he's reflecting that in his book. Baseball was more serious.
Take players like Maris and Mantle, or Gibson and Brock. These aging superstars and noble black ballplayers...their stories aren't so much whimsical (like in 1949) as seriocomic. The hardships Gibson and Brock went through can only be imagined by today's players. Mantle's brittle knees almost have their own personality here.
Yet the power of a Gibson pitch or a Mantle home run comes across perfectly in Halberstam's prose.
Also, he proves the theory that there is no other sport contest more inherently dramatic (in a literary sense) than a classic pennant race.
This is a pleasure to read.