After Many a Summer: The Passing of the Giants and Dodgers and a Golden Age in New York Baseball »

For New Yorkers—especially Brooklynites—1957 will always be the year that lives in infamy. It was when the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants delivered a one-two punch to the city by both abandoning their hometown for California. Millions of bereft and angry baseball fans wondered how such a thing could be allowed to happen: Who was to blame? After poring relentlessly through archives, original news stories, and government documents, Robert Murphy gives the most fully-researched answer to that question yet offered. Packed with history, rich in baseball lore and legend, this is a book that any New York history buff and all lovers of America’s national pastime will relish.

AFTER MANY A SUMMER reveals:

How baseball commissioner Ford Frick helped facilitate the teams’ move to California

Which plan for a new stadium would have appeased Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley—and saved Brooklyn baseball

How Robert Moses, who has received much blame, actually tried to solve the problem

How O’Malley and Giants owner Horace Stoneham worked in tandem to make sure their popular rivalry would continue in LA

How the two owners managed to carry out secret talks with California officials even while insisting they had no plans to leave New York

Publishers Weekly

"I have never quite been reconciled to the Dodgers' being taken from me," admits freelance writer Murphy, who grew up within walking distance of Ebbets Field and still lives in Brooklyn. He is able to put his feelings aside, however, in this objective reappraisal of the sequence of events that led Walter O'Malley (who "[left] Brooklyn a rich man and a despised man") to take his team to Los Angeles-while, at the other end of New York City, Giants owner Horace Stoneham was making his own plans to leave town. Murphy is particularly eager to restore the reputation of Robert Moses, who has been accused of squeezing the Dodgers out. The city planner did offer solutions that could have kept the team in Brooklyn, Murphy reports, but the sites where O'Malley wanted to build his own stadium weren't zoned for that purpose. The Giants' story, though it runs concurrently, is much less dramatic; Murphy's most significant accomplishment lies in breaking down the nostalgic myths and sorting through the historical archives to get the real story behind the transformation of New York's baseball landscape. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.