Rating: 
Summary: a great baseball book, and great summer reading
Review: What a great book to read over the summer, it covers all that is both good, and great, about baseball and how the sport of baseball has went from one generation to the next, and what the game itself means to all of us who love baseball, and what it has meant to our great nation, and to the rest of the world.
Rating: 
Summary: Not much new...and hideous sportwriter prose
Review: You should read this book if you fall into one of the following categories:1. You can't remember what happened last baseball season (perhaps the most memorable season of our generation); 2. You remember what happened but you don't mind reading about it for the zillionth time; 3. You want to know which of Mike Lupica's kids is the "nester"; 4. You crave more turgid sports writing, with its transparent efforts to create dramatic effect by using endless clipped sentences and paragraphs. Lupica is a master of this style. Why write a whole sentence when you can break it into two fragments? Or three fragments? Better yet, you can really enhance the drama of a sentence fragment. By making it a paragraph. The following are examples of "sentences" written by Lupica: "With the game." "And memories of Kerry Wood." "Then Jeff Bagwell." "And the Cubs right fielder, Sammy Sosa." "Yet." "Even in Grand Prarie, Texas." All of these are found on just two pages. Page 39. And page 40. And the last four examples were entire paragraphs! To be fair, Lupica does throw in some behind-the-scenes material, including conversations with: the scout who discovered Sammy Sosa, the best friend of Roger Maris, the high school coach of Kerry Wood, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Bobby Thomson, Daryl Strawberry, Cal Ripken, Derek Jeter. Even these are mostly predictable, though. The scout remembers Sammy as a ragamuffin in old spikes. Roger didn't like to talk much about his 61 homers. Kerry struck out a lot of guys in high school. And so on. Still, these little vignettes, wedged between the bad writing and the stories about Lupica's precocious kids and fabulous wife (who smiles, shakes her head, and sighs...'oh, those boys!'...as Mike and the kids sit glued to the tube watching yet another game) at least make the book tolerable. Plus it's a pretty quick read and the 1998 season was a great story. Just don't expect much insight, and put on some hip boots to wade through the Lupica prose.
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