March 12, 2012
In this affectionate fan’s notes to the team, former Yankees public relations director Appel regales baseball fans everywhere with a fast-paced, exhaustively and exhaustingly detailed, year-by-year chronicle of the team’s history. He covers the team from its beginnings in 1903 right up to the 2011 season, when Derek Jeter became the first Yankee to reach 3,000 hits and also to pass Mickey Mantle for most games played as a Yankee. Appel recreates the excitement and the debates over building Hilltop Park in Washington Heights, the first stadium for the team, then known as the Americans. He narrates the growth of the team as it moves from Hilltop Park to the Polo Grounds to the various incarnations of Yankee Stadium, and the growing enthusiasm among New Yorkers for the team. He reminds us that the now famous Yankee pinstripe uniforms first debuted in 1912, disappeared for two seasons, and then returned for good in 1915. In this definitive history, Appel avidly narrates the already well-known stories of the colorful players (the beloved Ruth, the bad boy Mantle, the now forgotten team player Bobby Richardson) and managers (the volatile Billy Martin and the wisecracking baseball genius Casey Stengel) whose passion for the game, athleticism, and dedication to the Yankee pinstripes helped create the franchise we know today. Agent: TK.
March 1, 2012
A former Yankees' PR director and sports commentator charts the vicissitudes of the beloved/hated team once known as the Highlanders. Appel (Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain, 2009, etc.) is no disinterested observer. He is a Yankees insider, and he has enviable contacts with the high and the low in Yankee history and occasionally slips easily into the first person. But he's also unable to be critical when circumstance calls for it. His account, for example, of the slow desegregation of the Yankees is brief, dry and emotionless. Of greatest interest are Appel's descriptions of the early years of the team--their first park, the great stars of Murderers' Row (Ruth, Gehrig and company), the building--and later remodeling--of the original Yankee Stadium and its emotional razing eight decades later. The author also offers the odd detail (Yogi Berra used a woman's falsie to pad his catcher's mitt), close looks at the great and not-so-great Yankee managers (Huggins, Stengel, Houk and Torre among the former) and a careful chronicle of the bizarre hire-and-fire-and-rehire history of Billy Martin and the irascible George Steinbrenner. Appel also notes the contributions of PA announcers, National Anthem singers, groundskeepers and others. But the author rushes through the most recent decades, trying to do justice to Reggie Jackson, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and so many others--an effort highlighting the near impossibility of his task: cramming between the covers of a single book the complicated history of a most complicated franchise. Torrents of information (good portions of which are genuinely interesting) cascade over readers, who will feel at times as if they're trying to fill a water glass beneath Niagara Falls.
COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from April 15, 2012
This is magnificent. Appel, a veteran writer and PR person (longtime for the Yankees), manages the near-impossible: a huge, incredibly detailed history of the New York Yankees that never bogs down or spends too long in any one place. The style is as smooth as can be, as Appel moves from the team's murky beginnings in money, politics, and graft and on to Sunday baseball, the Titanic benefit (who knew?), the first Yankee no-hitter, the first World Series win. The Yankees, always conservative, came late to radio, night games, field lighting, and fan promotion. The DH, free agency, the Red Sox rivalry all show up, along with every player you want to remember and some whom fans might not. There were very good years (1927) and bad stretches (196575), and Appel rolls right through, chronologically, with a nugget on almost every page: a 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell struck out Ruth and Gehrig on six pitches in an exhibition game in Chattanooga in 1931; no exact transcript exists of Lou Gehrig's luckiest man speech; Yogi Berra comes to spring training every year, and former All-Star Ron Guidry drives him about, wearing his Driving Mr. Yogi cap. Yogi himself and Bernie Williams wrote a foreword and a preface respectively; Frank Graham Jr., whose father wrote the first major history of the Yankees, contributes the introduction. Indispensable for any fan and for historians of the game of baseball.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)