Pennant Books

Michael Shapiro does a superb job not only of capturing the excitement of the Brooklyn Dodgers' last pennant-winning season but also of explaining just what the Dodgers meant to so many Brooklynites. Set against the background of the Walter O'Malley-Robert Moses negotiations that would determine the fate of the Dodgers, Shapiro provides logical proof that it was not O'Malley's intention to move the ballclub but that Moses kept making a fool of him to the point where remaining in Brooklyn would have been rather humiliating for O'Malley.

Though never elected to any office, Robert Moses was the most powerful official in New York City in the late 1950s. His power was further enhanced by the fact that the Mayor at that time, Robert F. Wagner Jr. was both lazy and indifferent, and would not have gone far in politics except for the fact that his namesake father was a very popular U.S. senator. If O'Malley was going to get the land and permits to build a new ballpark, he was going to have to go through Moses and Moses couldn't have cared less as to what became of the Dodgers.

O'Malley tired desperately to be taken seriously by Moses and the NYC politicians to where he even had the Dodgers play seven "home" games in Jersey City in 1956. In the end, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, not because O'Malley plotted to take them there but because L.A. politicians eagerly and actively courted O'Malley to move to their city while their New York counterparts, especially Moses, gave him the brush-off.

O'Malley wanted to build a ballpark at the junction of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, where multiple subway lines and the Long Island Railroad converge. Moses at first wanted O'Malley to build a ballpark in a hard-to-reach part of Bedford-Stuyvesant and later proposed having the city build a ballpark on the site of what is now Shea Stadium. Anyone familiar with Brooklyn knows that if you're riding the subway, it's easier to get to Yankee Stadium from Brooklyn than to go out to Flushing Meadows, where Shea Stadium is.

In any case Los Angeles made O'malley an offer he couldn't refuse--300 acres in the heart of the city, where multiple freeways converge. New York officials made no effort to compete as Brooklyn didn't count for much in their eyes. When the Mets were created a few years later there was no question in their minds that they should represent New York and use the orange "NY" logo formerly used by the New York Giants, rather than the Brooklyn Dodgers' "B."

50 years have now passed since the Dodgers moved, and Walter O'Malley has been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The ballpark he built and paid for (which opened in 1962) remains one of the most beautiful and popular in major league baseball. Shea Stadium, on the other hand, built by Robert Moses with taxpayers' money and opened in 1964, will soon be torn down. What is more, New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner is currently trying to arrange to move his NBA basketball team to that same junction in Brooklyn that O'Malley originally wanted.

Michael Shapiro is an excellent writer and his book is highly recommended!

This book probably doesn't get the sales or the attention it deserves, because the title and the cover make it look as if it's intended just for baseball junkies. But it's far more than that. In just 332 pages, Shapiro tells four stories:

1. The story of the National League pennant race in 1956.
2. The story of why the Dodgers (and therefore the Giants as well) decided to move to California in 1958.
3. The social, demographic, and economic changes that Brooklyn (and, by extension, much of urban America) experienced in the post-World War II era.
4. Thumbnail sketches of the personal lives of the core players in the Brooklyn Dodger lineup from 1947 through 1956.

None of these four themes is given short shrift. Furthermore, Shapiro has organized this book beautifully. He seems to have done a perfect job in choosing exactly where to break the narrative of the Dodgers' wins and losses, and insert a section about the changing character of a neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Not only that, but Shapiro's writing is superb. Here is his account of the last pitch of the last Dodger game of the regular season - a game they had to win in order to clinch the championship, with Dodger Don Bessent pitching to Pittsburgh's Hank Foiles:

*****
Don Bessent went into his windup. The last thing he thought before releasing the ball was, he later said, "Tight, keep it tight."

Hank Foiles swung. The next thing he heard was the thud of the ball in Roy Campanella's mitt.
*****

You don't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this book. You just have to enjoy good writing and a wonderful story, wonderfully told.

I have long been interested in the old Brooklyn Dodgers, having read multiple books on the subject. This is among the best. First of all, it is an excellent read. There is plenty of baseball included in its pages, and the Dodgers teams of the 50s were always interesting. But I learned much more than I expected from this book about the politics that led to the team's move to California. It's too bad the franchise couldn't have remained in Brooklyn, but the reasons they left were different than I would have imagined. The book also paints the picture of a post-World War II New York that was rapidly changing. As a lover of baseball, history and baseball history, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

THE LAST GOOD SEASON, by Michael Shapiro, earns itself a provisional rating of FIVE STARS in my mind, based primarily on the quality of the writing (which is uniformly excellent) and the depth of the research (which, within limits, is exhaustive). Yet the book deserves, like Roger Maris' "61*", to be only a qualified ***(**) success.

Much of that qualification comes from Shapiro's heavily touted and slanted thesis that Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley was not responsible for the Dodgers' departure from Brooklyn in 1957, after Robert Moses refused to build a replacement for the aging Ebbets Field.

Shapiro's grasp of the facts regarding Brooklyn is somewhat fuzzy. He says, "Jews went to Midwood [High School], poor blacks to Jefferson." Yet in the Dodger era, Brownsville was predominantly (70%) Jewish. It was not until later that Brownsville became a black neighborhood. Shapiro waxes rhapsodic about Midwood (his childhood home?) but slights the rest of Brooklyn. He admits that by the time he became aware of the Dodgers they were gone. Ironically enough, even while granting O'Malley absolution in absentia he makes and supports every argument as to why the man did not deserve it.

Shapiro blames, among other things, "white flight" for the Dodgers' relocation, but then argues that fans come in all colors. It's as if, in pardoning O'Malley, he is trying to convince us of something he really doesn't believe himself.

According to Shapiro, "Robert Moses is the bad guy in this story." This is an incredibly strong statement, particularly since Shapiro admits in many places that O'Malley was mendacious, that he was arrogant, that his plans for a new Buckminster Fuller-styled stadium seemed, at best, to be for public consumption only (O'Malley stole the scale model from the actual designer, Billy Kleinsasser, and used it without permission or recompense at public events), that he dealt with player and staff salaries in increments of hundreds and thousands of dollars not hundreds OF thousands of dollars (i.e., star pitcher Preacher Roe claims his highest Dodger salary was a paltry $28,000.00 in 1955), that he did not understand the "Little People" who were Dodger fans, that he once (as a youngster) traded a stack of Dodger baseball cards for one Giants' Christy Mathewson, that he fined employees who mentioned Branch Rickey's name in his presence, and, in short, that he was not really a fan of the team he owned.

Shapiro wants to paint horns on Robert Moses' head, and in some sense they do belong there, but not necessarily in the sense that Shapiro would prefer. Like the Master Builders of Ancient Egypt he had virtually unlimited power in his sphere. The ironically-named Moses was a man with a vision for New York, and he set about creating that vision of shining, rising buildings (such as Lincoln Center), vast bridges (the Throgs Neck, the Whitestone, The Triborough, and the frighteningly huge Verrazano are all his), and endless parkways (as a sampling, the Cross Island, the Belt, the Northern State, the Southern State, the Meadowbrook and the Wantagh) linking New York City and its expanding suburbs in a net of urban development. Yet this visionary had pathological flaws. Monomaniacal in his sphere, he had no compunction about unilaterally razing hundreds of city blocks, evicting tens of thousands, and altering the neighborhoods and neighborhood patterns of New York without a thought. Such changes brought other, unanticipated changes---the "through" expressways of The Bronx relegated it to a kind of backwater status accelerating its descent into slum conditions, and Moses' chopping up of neighborhoods in Brooklyn balkanized the Borough into a patchwork of disconnected rich and poor enclaves. Moses was more successful on sparsely-settled Long Island and in Westchester, where his road network created rather than changed demographic patterns.

When these two prima donnas met head-to-head, they treated each other with barely-concealed contempt. Although Moses was at first favorably disposed to a new stadium in downtown Brooklyn, this agreement soured within days. Without access to O'Malley's papers (which he was refused by the O'Malley family), the reason for this sudden souring is unknown, and ripe for speculation. Moses pressed, at first, for a new stadium in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a declining neighborhood; O'Malley refused. Moses promised him a new stadium in Flushing Meadow, Queens (the future Shea); again, O'Malley refused, declaring that the team was to remain in Brooklyn---he countered with an offer to build in Brooklyn, on the site of a ramshackle meat market. Moses refused to condemn the property (a first for him).

This bickering was never about questions of civic-mindedness, fan appreciation, nor humanitarianism. This was strictly a personal issue between the two men that affected millions of people.

While this was going on, the 1956 Dodgers struggled successfully through their World Champion season. Shapiro's snapshot of the team is far more detailed than his portrait of the politics, and is a joy to read. Shapiro is at his best as he describes the dynamic tensions that existed between the various Dodgers, the great negotiator of personalities, Pee Wee Reese, and their fanbase. It is clear that Ebbets Field was no longer a suitable home, at least without major modifications. Parking was very poor, a serious concern in the emerging era of the suburban commuter fan; the stadium itself needed to be revamped, the plumbing fixed, the seating rearranged. Still, Ebbets Field was only 45 years old, and was a solid structure, despite its flaws.

If O'Malley was indeed "desperate to stay in Brooklyn" as Shapiro posits, then why weren't his efforts directed toward staying? Why was he engaged in a stalemated battle of wills with Moses over a new stadium? Perhaps O'Malley simply wasn't "desperate" enough. Certainly, Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park still stand in less than desirable locations, but they draw dedicated fans nonetheless. Had O'Malley spent a part of his considerable fortune buying up some surrounding properties and building a parking complex, and then incrementally improved Ebbets Field with better seating and new amenities, the Dodger fanbase would have continued to travel to Flatbush.

O'Malley did not do this. He wanted land, and a lot of it, on the cheap---had Moses condemned the meat market, O'Malley would have bought the property for pennies on the dollar, a very attractive possibility to a man who squeezed a penny hard enough to put a permanent wave in Lincoln's beard. Los Angeles offered him that and he jumped, literally across a continent, to get it, taking his team about as far from Brooklyn as it was possible to go in his desperation to stay. Yet, if he'd REALLY wanted to stay, Flushing Meadow beckoned. And despite the fact that Flushing is not Brooklyn, the New York football Giants play in New Jersey's Meadowlands and still remain a New York team (the O'Malley-inspired move of the baseball Giants from Manhattan to San Francisco is another issue). In 1957, many of Brooklyn's fans were Long Island transplants, and more would be as time passed. Queens, while not the best of all possible worlds, would have been a convenient waypoint for fans from the old and new neighborhoods.

For that matter, had either O'Malley or Moses given a damn about Brooklyn, they would have cooperated in building a new stadium and reinvigorating Brooklyn. Neither cared to.

"Walter O'Malley was not a bad man. He was devoted to his wife and his children loved him," Shapiro points out. That's nice to know. But O'Malley was also an S.O.B. in business. The two are not mutually exclusive. "Only a sentimental man," Shapiro writes, "would have stayed." Maybe so. But the Dodgers and the Dodger fanbase needed a sentimental man, they needed a fellow fan, they needed a man who loved the team and who loved Brooklyn. What they had was Walter O'Malley, who saw the team merely as a moneymaking concern. O'Malley's actions speak for themselves, regardless of Shapiro's revisionism. And if O'Malley was "not unique" among team owners but merely "so obvious" about his profit motives, the blame is still his for eroding the spirit of The Game, and beginning the slide to where we are today in baseball with its overly mobile nonentity franchises, bloated payrolls, stars on steroids, cupidity and stupidity, and fan disinterest.

In the face of necessity, sentiment oft-times does not serve. But in circumstances of choice, such as faced by the Dodgers, sentiment can be a hedge against callousness.

What O'Malley (and Moses) failed to grasp is that a ball team is more than an agglomeration of men in uniform standing around in an open field. He (they) failed to grasp that a baseball game is more than just nine innings and a cold toting of runs, hits, and errors. It is a conversation at a water cooler, a friendly argument over lunch, an invitation to meet at the ballpark on Saturday afternoon for dogs and beer and a chance to see The Duke of Flatbush. It is a sense of neighborliness, a sense of pride, and was---still is---an important part of Brooklyn's special identity.

As Roger Kahn says in The Boys of Summer, "In the best of all possible worlds the Dodgers would be in Brooklyn and Los Angeles would have the Mets."

That's as it should have been.

Wow. First let me say that I'm not a Brooklyn resident or a Dodger fan and picked this book up without knowing anything about it. The book turned out to be one of the best baseball books I've read in quite some time.

I was drawn into the book immediately. It is clear in the Prologue that Shapiro is a very good writer and that the book is as much about the fifties and Brooklyn as it is about a pennant race. The book is enjoyable on both fronts.

Shapiro does a great job of weaving a portrait of the changes going on in Brooklyn in the mid-fifties and giving younger readers a good idea of what it was like to grow up in that era. It is clear that Shapiro has done quite a bit of research and I think the reader really gets a good look into the personalities of the players and other characters in the story.

Any fan of baseball history will do himself a favor in buying this book. It truly deserves more acclaim than it has received.

I first read this series of books back when they were new. I've read them over and over through the years. I've now sent them to my granddaughters. I hope they get as much pleasure from them as I have.

I love all the books in this set. They are wonderful. I do believe in the "borrowers". I bought the whole set for my 11 year old granddaughter. Hopes she loves them as much as I do.

Being 13, I'm pretty picky, but this book was awsome! It's so in my shopping cart! I love how the Clocks are so smart, they can make everything out of anything! This book really appeased me, because I love models and mineature things, an the thought of moving, living, mineature people is so thrilling! I really liked how they made a hot-air balloon out of a strawberry basket, a fountain pen, and a plastic (or toy, as it says in the book) balloon. Soooo coool! I'm SO reading the other books (I've already read the book and seen the movie "The Borrowers").

The Borrowers Aloft is Mary Norton's fourth installment in this captivating series about small people who lead hidden lives borrowing from "human beans". Pod, Homily, and Arrietty Clock are now living in the miniature village of Little Fordham, built in the back garden of a retired railroadman and maintained by the eccentric but very kind Miss Menzies. Once again Arrietty, who is now sixteen and learning more and more about the world, becomes a bridge between the worlds of borrowers and human beans. Unfortunately, another human couple with a rival miniature village have spotted the borrowers, and one night they kidnap the Clock family and hide them away with plans to put them on permanent display as prisoners.

Mary Norton's powers of description and her ability to imagine the ingenious methods the borrowers use to survive and eventually escape their predicament are as enchanting as ever. Although the world of the human beans impinges a bit too long on this story, so that it seems to take forever to actually find out what the borrowers themselves are up to, this is another fine story. It was apparently written with the intent to make it the last in the series, but fortunately a fifth installment eventually arrived.

Again great reading in this series of books. Couldn't put it down. Great for children and adults alike

Very good reading. My eight year old enjoyed the story very much.

Nick and the the Thunderballs can't find a coach for their baseball team so who else offers for the job but NICK'S MOM. Nobody likes the idea at first, but when the team beats the Tornadoes,(Their arch rival) to win the pennant. An extraordinary book that teaches you lessons in friendship as well as baseball.

Nick and the the Thunderballs can't find a coach for their baseball team so who else offers for the job but NICK'S MOM! Nobody likes the idea at first, but when the team beats the Tornadoes,(Their arch rival) to win the pennant. An extraordinary bookthat teaches you lessons in friendship as well as baseball.

My 7 year old son is an avid reader. He loves many books but most of all, books by Matt Christopher. This book started it all. It is a heart-warming story which keeps a child's interest due to the baseball, but is really about a mother and son relationship. I stongly recommend this book!

Nick and the rest of the team are the main characters in the book. The minor characters are the other teams that they play and the friends and family of the players on Nick's baseball team. Nick's baseball team is not very good. This year, they don't have a coach Nick's mom decides to become the coach. The whole team thinks that their team will do even worse. This book really takes place in the 1980's in Nick's town. But could take place anytime and anywhere as long as there is faith, determination and baseball.

This is yet another twist on the Dr. Faust legend, and it follows other similar stories such as "The Devil and Tom Walker" and "The Devil and Daniel Webster." Having not read the Faust legend in its entirety, but having read the other two, I note that whereas Tom Walker failed, both Daniel Webster and Joe Hardy, the hero of this book, overcame Satan. There is a difference, however, in the reasons. Daniel Webster overcame the devli through his goodness, whereas Joe Hardy overcame Satan through his determination. There is a similarity here, because Joe Hardy remained true to his wife's love in overcoming the wiles of the beautiful Lola. Having watched "Damn Yankee," the movie taken from this book, just after reading the book, I saw two different twists to the same story, both applicable to the genre in which they were produced. Overall, a recommended reading either for the sports buff or the casual reader.

man it would take the devil for the yankees to loose the series. This is a great book that isn't to long to read and it is a very good story

This is a wonderful story, and one that I enjoyed for personal reasons - the main character Joe Hardy was inspired by my grandfather Joe Judge, who played first base for the Washington Senators from 1915 to 1932. The story is told in my book Damn Senators.

The novel tells the story of Joe Boyd, a long-time fan of the Washington Senators who have the worst record in baseball. One night after an incredibly bad loss, Joe decides to take a walk around the neighborhood and runs into the mysterious Mr. Applegate. It turns out that Applegate has been keeping tabs on Joe and his Washington Senators and wants to offer Joe a proposition. How would he like to watch his beloved Senators to win the 1958 pennant? Not only watch, but even help the team by becoming their newest star player? Reluctantly, Joe agrees but has Applegate write an escape clause into the contract. Within a few days the old Joe Boyd is transfromed into the 21-year-old Joe Hardy and sets off on a whirlwind ride that moves the Senators up from 7th place to just within reach of the Yankees.

Along the way, Joe begins to realize just what he's given up and what the ramifications are of his joining the team. It's a heart-warming trip, both funny and sad, and delves into a passionate fan's view of the world of baseball. So many temptations to stick with the game, and even stronger feelings tying him to his old life. Until the gorgeous Lola steps into the picture to keep his mind off the old Joe. Author Douglass Wallop's story keeps you enrapt and rooting for Joe and the Senators until the very end, never quite sure just what the outcome is going to be. It's a unique, light-hearted twist on the tale of Faust with many great and wonderful characters.

I first read this as a kid, and loved it then. It's a happy thought that, 50 years ago, the greatest desire a man could aspire to was to have his underdog baseball team beat the undeafeated Yankees, and was willing to sell his sould to the Devil for it. Today he'd probably want at least one oil-producing country.

Well written, entertaining and with some great twists, it still remains one of my favourites for moralistic humour, right up there with the various Don Camillo books. Really gives the flavour of baseball in the 1950's when there were fewer teams, stronger loyalties and better sportsmen.

This book is obscure, hard to find, rare. I stumbled across my copy at a bookstore that has since closed down. It quickly became one of the invaluable prizes in my baseball library.

A few qualifiers: This is only for baseball nuts. Casual fans shouldn't bother. Also, the book is only current through 1980.

Now, what the book is. It's every pennant race in baseball history, displayed in graphic form. On the left side of each graph, the teams all start at zero. Time passes from left to right. As teams win, their lines move up. When they lose, their lines move down. Each team is shown at each point on the graph with respect to their number of games above or below .500. Come the far right of each graph, you'll see how they finished.

Well, that really loses a lot in translation, but please take my word for it: the excitement of a pennant race really comes through on these graphs, often more than is the case with just a written description. You can feel the flavor of each pennant race -- the closely fought battles with teams moving back and forth throughout, the amazing comebacks, the sudden collapses, the teams that stumbled along until mid-June or so and then suddenly got hot, the blowouts -- all the different flavors of pennant races are here in full detail.

Many a book has been written that covers many of these pennant races, but try as they might, they can't convey all the information, all the drama, that these graphs do. In many of these books, every so often, the narration will stop to show you the standings at a certain point -- the author's attempt to show you a glimpse of the story that these graphs tell more thoroughly.

For the best pennant races, the author has presented "close ups" -- magnified portions of the closing dates on the graph, the sections involving the key teams, with the scores of key games printed over the points where they occurred.

These graphs really bring a lot of dramas back to life, and are a wonderful supplement to the great tales you might have read elsewhere: the 1908 donnybrook, the 1914 Miracle Braves, the incredible 1920 season, the 1934 Gas House Gang comeback to surpass the Giants, the 1951 Miracle at Coogan's Bluff, anong others.

An unexpected bonus is that the author's capsule prose rundowns of each pennant race are usually quite well written.

Again, this isn't for everyone; this is for the sort of fan who gets something out of graphs. If you're not a numbers person, this probably isn't for you. It's for the type of obsessed baseball fan who has the time and inclination to sit around looking at these pictures and discovering new stories in them.

John Warner Davenport's 1981 book "Baseball's Pennant Races: A Graphic View" presents a series of graphs showing every American and National League pennant race from 1901-1980. When you think of the nature of pennant races, from wild season-long battles between two or more teams to runaways by one dominant team, chances are the way these graphs look is the way you'd see those races in your mind.

For all of the marquee races during this span -- the 1908 chases in both leagues; the 1920 American League battle between the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees; the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Giants tussle; the Philadelphia Phillies' 1964 collapse that created a heated four-team struggle; and others, Davenport gives us "close-up" graphs, that chronicle each day's scores over a period of one or more months. These closeups really give an insight into what was actually happening to these teams day by day, and in some cases, what effect teams outside the race were having on the final result.

In the regular, more broad-based graphs, we get a glimpse at interesting also-rans who were either on the rise -- like the Philadelphia Athletics of 1926-28, right before their domination of the American League over the following three seasons -- or on the way down. These are indicated by bolder lines in Davenport's graphs (as are the teams who won the race).

Perhaps the ideal combination would be this book's graphs and the pure numbers available in Neft and Cohen's "The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball." Having both books separately is good enough, however.

While on one level it's unfortunate that this book hasn't been updated, either by Davenport or someone else, for some people an update would only be valuable through 1993, in any case. After '93, the Wild Card was introduced, devaluing the pennant race for many observers. Of course, the real purists might point to 1968 as the last year of true pennant races (though neither was particularly close), coming on the eve of divisional play in 1969.

"Baseball's Pennant Races: A Graphic View" is a fine addition to any baseball fan's collection, its lack of updating notwithstanding.

As a previous reviewer pointed out; this is not a typical hooligan book its a biography of Cass one of the main members of the IFC one of the most famous hooligan gangs of the 70s and 80s.

The book covers his childhood, being a black child adopted by a white couple and raised in an all white area, the racism he encountered as a kid and how his foster parents taught him pride in who he was and to stand up to anyone. The book then goes into how he got hooked up with the IFC and hooked on the violence that went with it.

The many trials he went through, how he went into bouncing post jail time, how he met his future wife and finaly got his life together metting up with his natural parents back in Jamacia.

Realy interesting read especially his connections with Frank Bruno and Lenny Henry.

Honest book, highly recomended.

When i started reading this book i thought it would be about a MORONIC FOOTBALL THUG that all the media wants us to believe they are, but this is how CASS found true friends at West Ham, who didn't care about his colour but just the love of his team and how he grew up amongs racists,football rivals and police prejedice and came out a proud person and a loving parent. Excellent reading

During the summer of 1962 I was 11 years old, and baseball was the most important thing in my life. That summer I listened to every Dodger game and lived and died with every pitch. I knew all the players in both major leagues, but the Dodgers were my life. I can still remember the Koufax no-hitter against the Mets, the sweep of the Giants in L.A., and getting swept by them in S.F., and the September swoon by the Dodgers was epic (leading by 4.5 games with 7 to play!).
The 9th inning of the 3rd playoff game was a trauma that took weeks to recover from (no, I'm not a hopeless case like Red Sox fans!), but something that I still vividly recall today. David Plaut's book brings 1962 back in narrative, chronological form, and while I knew most of the things noted from the Dodgers' perspectives, I gained new insight into what the Giants clubhouse went through, and what their great players thought of the Dodgers, and the pennant race.
This was a classic pennant dogfight with two evenly matched teams going down to the final pitch of the year. Sandy Koufax's ailment can't be used as an excuse - the Giants played better when it counted, as no one remembers who finished second, except for broken-hearted Dodger fans, and David Plaut, who has put together a wonderful reminiscence of that magical summer of 1962.
I highly recommend this book to baseball fans of any age.

I read this book several years ago and found it quite enjoyable. I like to read about baseball pennant races and this one was an unforgettable one. Very thorough and readable!

My kids love this series. They have the series at the school library and I've read it during library time to the classes and all the kids really like these books. It has adventure, suspense and humor that kids enjoy.

They are back! Join Charles an Oliver for yet another exciting adventure as they sail on THE SEVEN SEAS in a race with Captain Crag's sea dogs to discover the rumored southern continent. Watch out! Those pirates are fierce, and Barney, thier winged friend, has eyes that can see far. Will the Queen's cats and mice be able to outsmart them?

If your a fan of "Football Factory" or Football Hooliganism, this book will trasport you back to a time when you chose where you walked and what you wore very carefully. Very enjoyable.

for all those football fans across the world this book is a must read. this book exemplifies the dedication and fanaticism of the football fan!!! this book gives a first hand look into the insanely furious times of 1980's football. if you have any interest in any sports, you should read this book. this is what being a fan is all about,willing to fight anyone who disrespects you and your team. a must read

It is frustrating finding good books on the Navy during the Civil War, most everything published looks at operations on land. So it was fun surprise to find this book the other day. Grattan had a great "view" of the navy -- both its men (of high rank and low) and its operations. One gets an insight into life on ships for officers and enlisted, which is almost unheard of in Civil War publishing. Grattan is also candid in his opinions and one appreciates the frank assessments he makes.

I was surprised at the length of the editor's introduction (50 pages) -- but it too was a pleasant surprise. Schneller's commentary is informed and well worth reading. I am glad to see that there is a publisher that still lets editors write long intros when warranted.

The book has good maps and loads of illustrations, most all of which I have never seen before. The editor works at the U.S. Naval Historical Center, it appears he must know where all the good photos, paintings and woodcuts are kept.

Bottom line -- Grattan and Schneller have teamed up after more than 130 years to produce a most fascinating book. If you are looking for something new and interesting on the Civil War, you will love their collaboration!

"Under the Blue Pennant" is a rare, firsthand account of naval life during the Civil War. For that alone, it would merit recognition, but it is also a well-written, fascinating history of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Its author, John Grattan, served as a clerk to the Squadron's commander, which provided him an intimate glimpse into both major strategic maneuvers and into the daily life of the Civil War sailor on the Union side. Many modern military experts view today's joint operations between all services as a new approach to war. Grattan's account provides solid proof that the Union's leaders were planning and executing combined operations all along. Grattan recorded his experiences and observations in a clear, cohesive prose. What Grattan leaves out in background detail, is ably provided in editor Robert John Schneller's excellent introduction. Although quite lengthy, the introduction places Grattan's experiences into the overall context of the Civil War. "Under the Blue Pennant" helps feeling a gaping hole of Civil War literature by wonderfully illustrating the vital but long neglected naval side of the war.