BASEBALL IN 1939: THE WATERSHED SEASON OF THE NATIONAL PASTIME
Review of Baseball in 1939: The Watershed Season of the National Pastime
“[Baseball in 1939: The Watershed Season of the National Pastime] is
partly a traditional kind of history culled from a wide collection of previously
published sources, but it also is, at times, an oral history of the game in which
Katz draws on the memories of the greats of the game....
“One of the strengths of his book is that Katz understands his scope to
be wider than baseball....
“Katz...has produced a serious and richly detailed history of the year that
’bridged baseball’s Golden Era through the Great Depression and the wartime
years, to a new time of growth and strength in the last half of the Twentieth
Century.’”
Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature,
XV:2/Spring 1998, pp. 218-219
Jim Hull
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John Thorn, Official Historian of Major League Baseball, described “Paul
MacFarlane and the Preservation of Baseball’s Nineteenth Century History.”
Nineteenth Century Notes, Society for American Baseball Research, Nineteenth
Century Committee. (Summer 2020): 5-8, as ‘[v]ery fine indeed.”
More praise: “extensive research”―Sports Collectors Digest; “covers a variety of topics...interesting information”―Choice; “a look back at baseball’s centennial season when Ted Williams broke in and the Hall of Fame opened its doors”―USA Today Baseball Weekly; “tells the story of the beginning of the Golden Age of baseball”―Reference & Research Book News.