Thumbs-Up from Pop Matters

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/155627-summer-of-68-by-tim-wendel/

Publication day

Today, March 13, is the official publication date for SUMMER OF '68: THE SEASON WHEN BASEBALL, AND AMERICA, CHANGED FOREVER. Strange how most pub dates are a Tuesday.

'Summer' is one of PW's Top 10

Spring 2012 Announcements: Sports: Olympians, Yogi & the Knuckler
By Michael Coffey
Jan 20, 2012

This June, the Summer Olympics from London will be hard to escape, and there are no fewer than five books in the pages that follow that deal with the history of Olympic competition in one way or the other.

All of the Olympics books would seem to have value, but the one done in association with Olympic Museum in Switzerland wins the gold, at least in this preliminary event: The Treasures of the Olympic Games, an “interactive history” of the games by Neil Wilson, comes from Carlton Books, and features many photos plus facsimiles of Olympic mementoes, some innocent, like rail passes, some chilling, like a police report detailing the fatal hostage-taking in Munich in 1972.

Whether this Olympiad is battered by politics will be a big security question no doubt in the streets of London , but sports and politics have often been inextricably linked. Da Capo’s Summer of ’68: The Season That Changed Baseball—and America —Forever by Tim Wendel revisits a horrendous year in America , with the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and riots and arson in many cities. Detroit was one of the hottest cities, and Wendel recalls the exploits of the Tigers, with several homegrown black stars, who appealed for calm in their hometown and also won the World Series.

Summer of '68 cover

Here's the cover for Summer of '68. This is the pivotal play in that season's World Series recast for the time period.With cover blurbs from Ken Burns, Tom Stanton, John Thorn, David Maraniss and Hampton Sides, Summer of '68 will be out March 13.

Endorsements keep coming

I'm a big admirer of Hampton Sides' writing. Thankfully, he took the time to blurb Summer of 68 (see below). Sides joins Tom Stanton, John Thorn and Ken Burns. The cover goes to the printer next week, and we still may pick up another blurb or two before we close. But I'm thrilled and humbled these great writers took the time.

"A year of great convulsion and heartbreak, 1968 was the closest we've come to a national nervous breakdown since the Civil War. But as Tim Wendel so deftly captures in this fine book, it was also a year when baseball soothed and thrilled us—and urgently reminded us why it's called the "national pastime."   

       

—Hampton Sides, author of Hellhound on His Trail 

Blurb from MLB's official historian

“It seems like only yesterday when both our nation and its pastime seemed in mortal peril. Tim Wendel ’s Summer of ’68 brilliantly evokes the glories and the grim realities of that time, when America and baseball came to a crossroads, and emerged for the better on the other side.”–John Thorn, Official Historian of Major League Baseball and author of Baseball in the Garden of Eden

Another blurb for Summer of '68

This is from my good friend and top Detroit-area author Tom Stanton:
""No book better captures how in 1968 sports changed America -- and vice versa. In splendid fashion, Tim Wendel takes us on a rollicking journey through an unparalleled year of tumult, tragedy and, too, joy. Summer of '68 reads like a novel brimming with surprising action, colorful characters and fresh insights. I enjoyed every page."

First cover endorsement

This from Ken Burns about the Summer of '68:
“As always, Tim Wendel gets to the heart of this game and the complicated republic it so precisely mirrors.”

Book copy edits? Done

I've done with the copy editor's questions/edits for Summer of '68. Now we're hunting down cover blurbs and trying to finish the cover, where we're looking to add some color and perhaps a funky border. 
It's going to get done, it has to, because Amazon and B&N are now taking pre-orders for Summer of '68: The Season When Baseball -- And America -- Changed Forever.
Pub date is mid-March.
Pedal to the metal.

Moving ahead

Just sent off the captions for the 16-pages of photos in the Summer of '68. Next up is reading the copy-edited version. Pub date is officially March 13, 2012.

RFK in Indianapolis

The night Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, it fell to Robert Kennedy, then running for the Democratic Party nomination for president, to tell a crowd in Indianapolis the bad news. Speaking from the heart, from little notes, he told the crowd that his family had suffered from such a tragedy. Of course, that was a reference to his brother's death in 1963.
That evening in Indianapolis, RFK quoted the Greek poet Aeschylus (Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget/falls drop by drop upon the heart) and closed by telling the crowd, "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."
Of course, Kennedy's speech came the night after King gave his "Mountaintop" speech in Memphis. An amazing 24-hour period that's highlighted in SUMMER OF '68, which will be out from Da Capo this spring.

Photos for new book

I've started to line up photos for the new book about the year 1968 in sports. Here's my favorite so far.