Kahn, an ultimate baseball insider, covered all three New York area ballclubs for various publications during The Era, and knew most of the participants personally. In THE ERA he avoids the deification of ballplayers that was so common in the contemporary press, bringing these men into realistic focus. By so doing, he reduces some giants to the stature of ordinary men and creates giants out of pygmies. Carl Erskine of the Brooklyn Dodgers has said that, “baseball is a reflection of society,” and never was this more true than during The Era, when baseball became the cutting edge of an increasingly powerful trend toward liberalism (the signing of Jackie Robinson), a battleground of the conservative ethos (the suspension of Leo Durocher), and a stage play wherein a small army of more talented and less talented heroes, scoundrels, clowns, jerks and geniuses helped create the national mood against a backdrop of increasing prosperity, Cold War paranoia, and tectonic sociological change.

Although THE ERA is ostensibly about the rivalry between the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants, and the New York Yankees, it is really about so much more. It is about the “good old days” when things perhaps were not so good as we recall and far newer than we remember. THE ERA is a time-travel visit to the world of the Eisenhower Baby, the first world many of us remember. So return with Roger Kahn to those thrilling days of yesteryear, the Spoiled Bratdom of America.
Rating: 5 / 5