The Echoing Green

[toejam]

On the surface this is the story of Bobby Thompsons' famous home run off Ralph Branca but it is so much more. The author covers everything from the history of the Polo Grounds to the background of the electrician who installed the buzzer that allowed the Giants to steal signs from their clubhouse. If you like baseball books, history books, or just a good read I reccomend this one.

[StanTheMan]

Agreed!! The Echoing Green is the finest baseball book I have ever read..... I am a bit of a Polo Grounds nut, which helps, but Prager paints a portrait of baseball in NY in 1951, and digs deep into the personalities and backgrounds of the men who made happen what is still the most exciting moment in baseball history, the Shot Heard Round The World.

STILL the only time a team has come from 3 down to win in the bottom of the 9th of any elimination playoff/WS game.

[POLO GROUNDS 1957]

I suggest to all to get a copy of this book its great. and i did help Mr Prager with this book.it also gives a great idea on how the Polo Grounds clubhouse looked like.

[TheStringIsOut_NC]

Overall a "good enough" book, but one that is fatally flawed by Mr. Prager's awkard writing style / odd habit of structuring sentences - and often whole paragraphs - in what is at best an anachronistic style. At worst it is just plain awful writing and a good editor should never have allowed the book to go to press as written.

It could have been a "great" book. I don't think it comes close to its potential. In addition to the maddening syntax, it was sometimes just painfully long-winded; Prager had done so much amazing research, he seemed desperate to include every last, tiny, detail. There were times in The Echoing Green where sensory overload threatened. I found that Prager seemed to lose his focus and his compelling story under piles and piles of often trivial detail.

I'm sure I sound overly critical. I enjoyed the book in sum. At least, I did not hate it. And to be fair, Prager sometimes traded in his disastrous prose for bursts of sheer brilliance -- there were more than a few beautifully written, evocative, descriptions in the book. It was awfully ambitious and had a very moving, compelling, story at its heart. But it was not as good as I expected it to be. And the flaws sometimes seem more memorable than the story.

Certainly worth buying for fans of the era and/or those with arcane or narrow niche interests (Polo Grounds fanatics like the above) that the book addresses.

[catfishhunter29]

i actually bought this book a week or two ago. My one friend that I work with recommended it to me because we were talking about Bobby Thomson. So I do look forward to reading this once I finish my other book.

[bholdr]

"fatally flawed by Mr. Prager's awkard writing style / odd habit of structuring sentences - and often whole paragraphs - in what is at best an anachronistic style. At worst it is just plain awful writing and a good editor should never have allowed the book to go to press as written."

I couldn't agree more. I literally had to force myself to finish this book (it was a gift). The writing is so bad that i almost have formed a bad association with the content- the 'whole shot heard 'round the world' thing is tainted for me now.

thanks a lot, you hack.