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Summary
Summary
Winner of the 2011 CASEY Award from Spitball Magazine
Seventy baseball seasons ago, on a May afternoon at Yankee Stadium, Joe DiMaggio lined a hard single to leftfield. It was the quiet beginning to the most resonant baseball achievement of all time. Starting that day, the vaunted Yankee centerfielder kept on hitting-at least one hit in game after game after game.
In the summer of 1941, as Nazi forces moved relentlessly across Europe and young American men were drafted by the millions, it seemed only a matter of time before the U.S. went to war. The nation was apprehensive. Yet for two months in that tense summer, America was captivated by DiMaggio's astonishing hitting streak. In 56, Kostya Kennedy tells the remarkable story of how the streak found its way into countless lives, from the Italian kitchens of Newark to the playgrounds of Queens to the San Francisco streets of North Beach; from the Oval Office of FDR to the Upper West Side apartment where Joe's first wife, Dorothy, the movie starlet, was expecting a child. In this crisp, evocative narrative Joe DiMaggio emerges in a previously unseen light, a 26-year-old on the cusp of becoming an icon. He comes alive-a driven ballplayer, a mercurial star and a conflicted husband-as the tension and the scrutiny upon him build with each passing day.
DiMaggio's achievement lives on as the greatest of sports records. Alongside the story of DiMaggio's dramatic quest, Kennedy deftly examines the peculiar nature of hitting streaks and with an incisive, modern-day perspective gets inside the number itself, as its sheer improbability heightens both the math and the magic of 56 games in a row.
Author Notes
Kostya Kennedy is an assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated and the New York Times bestselling author of 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports , winner of the 2011 Casey Award and runner-up for the 2012 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He lives with his wife and children in Westchester County, N.Y. To learn more, visit kostyakennedy.com.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sports Illustrated senior editor Kennedy recreates the triumph of Joe DiMaggio's improbable 56-game hitting streak during the anxious summer of 1941. With the United States marching toward war, and young men (including professional ball players) being drafted by the millions, the country needed something to cheer about. The New York Yankees centerfielder, then in his fifth season, delivered by setting a record that many experts say will stand forever. As Kennedy writes in one of five compelling sidebars that provide a modern-day perspective on the feat, only nine players in Major League history have run off hitting streaks of more than 35 games in a season. DiMaggio seemed an unlikely candidate as the 1941 season opened. In fact, 56 begins with the slugger in a slump. But then came the hits, and as the streak extended into the twenties, most Americans became enthralled. Kennedy recaps those 56 games and brilliantly depicts an era free of 24-hour-news cycles and social networks, a time when newspapers and the radio delivered information first. Through meticulous research and interviews, he takes readers beyond the field. From the private world inhabited only by DiMaggio and his new bride to Newark barbershops, the playgrounds of Queens, and the streets of DiMaggio's hometown, San Francisco, Kennedy humanizes an immortal accomplishment. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Sports Illustratedsenior editor Kennedy follows the days of Joe DiMaggio's immortal hitting streak, evoking the mood of a long-gone America to which DiMaggio was a central figure."Baseball's most resonant numbers keep falling," he writes. "But Joe DiMaggio's is still there: 56 consecutive games with a hit." The streak began on May 15, 1941, and ended 57 games later when DiMaggio went hitless in Cleveland. A "biting strangeness" seemed to envelop America during these spring and summer months, as the country inched ever closer to war, and young men, including professional baseball players, entered the military in increasing numbers via the draft. As the streak unwound, DiMaggio offered not only escape from harsh reality but certainty in uncertain times. However, it was not easy being Italian in America at the time, and more than a few newspapers referred to DiMaggio as "the Wallopin' Wop." Always a hero to kids in Queens, once the streak seemed to stretch on forever, DiMaggio truly became "America's Joe," gaining uncommon celebrity and adulation. Kennedy creates a dynamic portrait of the young star as he tried to keep the streak alive. Elegant both on and off the field, DiMaggio remained somehow distanced and detached, and the author draws precise character sketches of those closest to him at that time: his wife Dorothy, pregnant with their first child, and his brother, and Red Sox rival, Dom. Kennedy also brings to life such characters as diminutive rookie Phil Rizzuto and DiMaggio's closest friend, Lefty Gomez. DiMaggio emerges in these pages as a flawed hero, but a hero nonetheless. How unique was the streak? "Through the end of the 2010 season," writes the author, "17,290 players were known to have appeared in the major leagues. Only one of them had ever hit in 56 straight games."A fine baseball book and an expert social history.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak may still be the greatest achievement in baseball, if not all sports, but over the years it has become detached from the near-delirium it generated across the country during the summer of 1941, as the streak gathered steam while the nation prepared for war with the Axis powers. Sports Illustrated senior editor Kennedy restores the streak to its natural milieu, portraying the gravitational pull it had on DiMaggio himself, his family, his teammates and opponents, and the public at large, from his lone hit on May 15 to at long last! his first hitless game in two months (July 17), before 67,468 fans in Cleveland. Throughout, Kennedy drops in sidebars ( The View from Here ), in which he fast-forwards to today's baseball players and how they view and even have tried to challenge the streak. While Michael Seidel's Streak (1988) covers much of the same ground, Kennedy's account supersedes it with its narrative power and its portrait of one ballplayer who enraptured a country on the brink of war. This superb mix of sports and social history should be read alongside novelist Jerome Charyn's Joe DiMaggio (2011), which looks at the great Yankee center fielder's life after baseball (see review in this issue).--Moores, Alan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Kostya Kennedy, a senior editor at Sports Illustrated, strains to prove the impressiveness of Joe DiMaggio's record consecutive-game hit streak with expert testimony - Pete Rose, the career hits leader, calls his 44-game streak "the hardest thing I ever did in baseball" - and with day-by-day retelling. The effort is extraneous. Fifty-six is Everest; its magnificence is self-evident. The trick, rather, is to say something new about it, which is why the best parts of Kennedy's book are the series of interludes in which he goes meta, exploring the psychology required to maintain a streak, for example, and recounting challenges to the record. The chapter in which he meticulously recreates DiMaggio's hit in his 30th successive game and considers whether it should have been scored an error reads like the Warren Report, only thrilling (and credible). Moreover, Kennedy deserves praise for frictionlessly dispensing with hindsight. The most dramatic game for the reader of "56" is not the 56th - which at the time was, after all, just one more scoop on the record-breaking cone - but the 42nd, in which DiMaggio surpassed George Sisler's record. And, exactly as a Yankee fan of June 1941 would have done, Kennedy's reader spends pages on Lou Gehrig's death, only to turn away from that disaster to learn - as The New York Times reminded readers above the box score that day - that "DiMaggio, incidentally, has hit safely in 19 straight games." Marc Tracy is a staff writer at Tablet magazine.
