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.

Mr. Holland's Opus

A few summers ago, when I was in Texas researching High Heat, I spoke with Derek Holland about what it was like to have Nolan Ryan as the president of the ballclub he pitched for. What kind of influence did Ryan have, if any?
"We talk a fair amount," said Holland, who was struggling at the time. "The bottom line is he wants me to step up. He wants me to become a pitcher."
It took a while but Holland stepped up in helping the Rangers square this year's World Series.

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.