A Warm-Hearted Look At Enduring Friends

books:

	• The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship David Halberstam Hyperion, 2003 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 80 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Warm-Hearted Look At Enduring Friends

This a wonderfully written book that leaves you with a very warm and nostalgic feeling. Yeah, it's about four great players for the Boston Red Sox but it's so much more. I'm afraid to say much more because it may sound trite or have too many cliches. However, it really is a story, as advertised, about an enduring friendship among four guys.

The more you know about some baseball history, like the Enos Slaughter scamper home from first base in the 1946 series, the more you might appreciate some of the stories but one needn't know anything about the sport to be touched by this book. In fact, I was so impressed with this story, I loaned it to a die-hard Yankee fan who hates the Sox and, he, too, said it was a fantastic book.

The ending of this book, when the players go down to Florida and meet a dying Ted Williams, will haunt me forever. David Halberstam certainly knows how to turn a phrase and get a reader involved. It's hard for me to sit for any length of time, but I couldn't put this book down.

I am pleased to say hat as of this review, the other three ballplayers - Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr and Dom DiMaggio - are still all alive and kicking. I have such respect for those three men, after reading this book.

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Insight into a different era...

I read this book on the recommendation of a client and was impressed! Halberstam does an excellent job of weaving the tale of four teammates forever bound by baseball, Boston, and their friendship. Each has his own story and personality from the larger-than-life Ted Williams to the reserved Bobby Doerr all revealed with masterful writing. A must read for any Red Sox or baseball fan. Because of the masterful writing I will be reading more of David Halberstam.
October 1964
Summer of '49 (P.S.)
The Best and the Brightest

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A Remarkable Bond Like No Other

Admittedly, I'm a huge Yankee fan. But beyond that, I'm a baseball fan, and Halberstam does a great job of getting me to feel in my heart for this great group of guys and the relationships they had with each other. He takes you through the major milestones of their careers and relationships and makes you feel like you're one of the boys and share in their joys and hardships. If you're not a fan of baseball and brotherhood, then you won't enjoy this book. But if you are, you won't be able to put it down.

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founding brothers

The late David Halberstam's insightful baseball writing has been a boon for fans with long memories. There are more of them attached to this odd American sport than any other. A penchant for statistics and scars that never heal are practically the calling card of those of us who are drawn, inexorably, to the diamonds with every new Spring.

This 2003 tribute to four skinny kids on the 1946 Boston Red Sox is not so much about the game as about the uncommon friendship that linked four of its iconic players. Halberstam has helped us to understand the grace that made Bobby Doer a lifetime interpreter of the gifted, irascible, and troubled Ted Williams; about the fealty to the sports unwritten rules that moved Johnny Pesky to accept the blame for a ball he never held (at least according to Halberstam's reconstruction) until ten years after the true culprit had gone to his grave; and about the tragedy of a season that came so close to glory but ended up heralding a generation (these are short in baseball time) of mediocrity in the precursor of what we have come to know as Red Sox Nation.

Halberstam tells the story with an instinct for the game's heroic rhythms, most of which pass unnoticed by all but the most committed observers. He skirts the edge of hagiography by taking Doerr's, Dimaggio's, and Pesky's 'lite' version of the book's dying, central figure as accurate description. This is what friends do for friends. Halberstam almost does it too, but pulls out before falling prey to the understandable urge to see whether a porcelain saint might just be constructed from Williams' legacy.

Alas, it cannot.

That friends, sometimes, stick together in the way these four teammates did--and do, those who survive--is a larger story than baseball. Yet in the telling of it, Halberstam has illuminated the game as well.

We are the better for it on both counts.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

ed Williams, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, and Johnny Pesky were all members of the famed 1940's Boston Red Sox. Their legendary careers led the Red Sox to a pennant championship and ensured the men a place in sports history. David Halberstam, the bestselling author of the baseball classic Summer of '49, has followed the members of the 1949 championship Boston Red Sox team for years, especially Williams, Doerr, DiMaggio, and Pesky. In this extremely moving book, Halberstam reveals how these four teammates became friends, and how that friendship thrived for more than 60 years. The book opens with Pesky and DiMaggio travelling to see the ailing Ted Williams in Florida. It's the last time they will see him. The journey is filled with nostalgia and memories, but seeing Ted is a shock. The most physically dominating of the four friends, Ted now weighs only 130 pounds and is hunched over in a wheelchair. Dom, without even thinking about it, starts to sing opera and old songs like 'Me and My Shadow' to his friend. Filled with stories of their glory days with the Boston Red Sox, memories of legendary plays and players, and the reaction of the remaining three to Ted Williams' recent death, The Teammates offers us a rare glimpse into the lives of these celebrated men-and great insight into the nature of loyalty and friendship.

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