Praying for Gil Hodges - by Thomas Oliphant (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Thomas Oliphant's Praying for Gil Hodges is a brilliant work capturing the majesty of baseball, the issue of race in America, and the love that one young boy, his parents, and the borough of Brooklyn had for their team.

On a steamy hot Sunday, the Reverend Herbert Redmond was celebrating Mass at a church in Brooklyn, when he startled his congregation thus: "It's far too hot for a sermon. Keep the Commandments and say a prayer for Gil Hodges."

Praying for Gil Hodges is built around a detailed reconstruction of the seventh game of the 1955 World Series, which has always been on the short list of great moments in baseball history. On a sunny, breezy October afternoon, something happened in New York City that had never happened before and never would again: the Brooklyn Dodgers won the world championship of baseball. For one hour and forty-four minutes, behind a gutsy, twenty-three-year-old kid left-hander from the iron-mining region of upstate New York named Johnny Podres, everything that had gone wrong before went gloriously right for a change. Until that afternoon, leaving out the war years, the Dodgers and their legions of fans had endured ten seasons during which they lost the World Series to the New York Yankees five times and lost the National League pennant on the final day of the season three times--facts of history that give the famous cry of "Wait Till Next Year!" its defiant meaning.

Pitch by pitch and inning by inning, Thomas Oliphant re-creates a relentless melodrama that shows this final game in its true glory. As we move through the game, he builds a remarkable history of the hapless "Bums," exploring the Dodgers' status as a national team, based on their fabled history of near-triumphs and disasters that made them classic underdogs. He weaves into this brilliant recounting a winning memoir of his own family's story and their time together on that fateful day that the final game was played.

This victory thrilled the national African-American community, still mired in the evils of segregation, who had erupted in joy at the arrival of Jackie Robinson eight years earlier and rooted unabashedly for this integrated team at a time when the country was thoroughly segregated.

And it also thrilled a nine-year-old boy on the East Side of Manhattan in a loving, struggling family for whom the Dodgers were a rare source of the joys and symbols that bring families together through tough times.

Review Quotes

"A small masterpiece" --Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the bestseller Wait Till Next Year

"In Praying for Gil Hodges, Tom Oliphant has created a small masterpiece--a splendid re-creation of life in the 1950s, a poignant tribute to his parents, and a fabulous story about the central role the Brooklyn Dodgers played in the lives of his and countless other families. Moving effortlessly from an adult's perspective to a child's recollection, shifting seamlessly between the present and the past, he captures the reader's interest at every step along the way. I found myself happily transported back in time, following a warm-hearted young boy as he comes of age in a memorable era." --Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the bestseller Wait Till Next Year

"Tom Oliphant is one of our most lyrical writers and he has written a love story--about his parents, about baseball, and most of all about the American values that shaped their lives." --Bob Schieffer, "Face the Nation"

"The story builds to a beautiful and moving resolution, proving that the true center of this book is not the seventh game of the World Series. The heart of the story is the love of a family for a place, a baseball team, but mostly for each other." --The Boston Globe

About the Author

Thomas Oliphant has been a journalist, columnist, and commentator in Washington, D.C., for forty years. He has covered everything from the trials of Vietnam and Watergate to the invasion of Iraq, and every presidential campaign since 1968. His work on the tumultuous desegregation of Boston's public schools helped win the Pulitzer Prize's Gold Medal for The Boston Globe and he has contributed analysis for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS for a decade.