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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A sweet retelling of an amazing season via father and son, June 10, 2002
Tim McCarver's "The Perfect Season" was the first book about the spectacular 1998 baseball season to hit the bookshelves. Mike Lupica's, "Summer of 98" was not far behind. What makes owning both books worth it is that each one presents a different way of remember that season. "The Perfect Season" is an excellent companion piece and reference manual for that year because McCarver breaks down all the events vividly in separate chapters. Lupica's presentation is more chronological and revisits the day-to-day emotion every true baseball fan felt following baseball that year. There have been many past baseball seasons that have been romanticized in newspaper print and book pages (notably the "Summer of 41", with the amazing seasons of Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio), so the precedent had been set for narrative of "Summer of 98". Lupica, in true McGwire fashion, hits a home run in reliving the year. The centerpoint of the story focuses on how he and his son shared and developed an indelible bond following everything from the record home run chases by both Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to the amazing excellence of their beloved Yankees (on their way to a record 125-win season... counting playoffs). On nights when his son could not stay up to watch McGwire at bats or Yankee games, Lupica would leave him notes in the morning recapping what happened the night before. As a fan of baseball myself, it took me back to that year and seasons past when I would get up at the crack of dawn the grab the paper and go right to the sports section to see what happened. I had fond memories of following my beloved Orioles during their almost miraculous 1989 season and of trying to see if anyone could break Roger Maris' record of 61 home runs. 1998 had all that amazing magic and "Summer of 98" relives it with such vivid detail.
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Good book savoring the '98 season, August 8, 1999
Overall, I thought this was a very good book. Lupica tries a little too hard to find "coincidences" and "reasons" for everything but other than that it is very well written. It gives the '98 season from many different perspectives.
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Big Disappointment. Really. I thought so., October 6, 2002
I bought this book only because I love baseball and only because it was [inexpensive]. My uncle is also mentioned in the book, so I thought Id give it a try. I assume Mr. Lupica is a sportswriter, but I wish he would stick to his day job. This book is an abomination. Lupica thinks by writing constant incomplete sentences that it adds emphasis to his sentences. Sure, this works for a while, but when there is one in every paragraph, it gets old. Fast. Real Fast. Example. Here for you. The Reader. Of my review:
(PG. 20-- "McGwire had attended one of those Fan Fests that big-league teams hold during the winter, and had signed more than 300 autographs. For free. It only made him more of a giant. More like Babe Ruth." I mean, how does this drivel slip past the editor? I found myself skimming this book instead of reading it. Lupica repeats OVER AND OVER the phrase, "magical season," to the point where it's just not so magical anymore. When authors include their real life experiences, I like to hear how everyone really sounded. Lupica's 8-year old child just does not speak like this. I'm sorry. Ugh, I regret spending [money] on this and am sad that someone I know was mentioned. In it. Blegh
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
For Lupica Family members only, December 5, 2001
Dont' read this book if you want a recap of the 98 baseball season. Do read it if you want to know more about Mike Lupica's kids, their favorite player, the name of their little league team, and the rules at the Lupica house for the boys bedtime. If you are related to Mike Lupica or are a friend of the family, by all means buy the book, you'll love it, since most of it is about people you know. For the rest of us, who bought it thinking we were getting the story of the 98 season, it is a waste of money.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Lupica Keeps Memories Of Great Baseball Season In Family, August 1, 2000
"Summer of 98" is sports reporter Mike Lupica's sentimental, fast-read reaction to the heroes restoring baseball (if but for that season) to the forefront of American sports conversation. Lupica writes as father and son, journalist and fan while weaving the season's top stories (Kerry Wood; the New York Yankees and stars David Wells and Darryl Strawberry, most notably the Sammy Sosa-Mark McGwire chase of Roger Maris' home run record) into a seamless, personal account.As McGwire chases Maris, then as Sosa chases McGwire, Lupica feels their impact most through his sons (for whom he updates the games with notes by their bedsides) and dad (who shared the Roger Maris chase of Babe Ruth when Lupica was nine). It's a refreshing, reassuring story: posters, cards and uniforms decorating a kid's room; the first day of Little League; dad taking kids to baseball games or watching them late on TV, then the chatter at the breakfast table before school; the reaction to McGwire's 62nd homer traveling from son to father back to sons. Despite occassional corny prose, Lupica succeeds by casting the story not in a mythical Iowa cornfield but in the lives of those who saw respite in these successes: a rest from the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, from the cynicism and avarice grown over sports, especially baseball, like Wrigley Field ivy. Lupica also draws the game's legends back into his narratives. Strawberry and the legendary Joe DiMaggio battle life-threatening illnesses (DiMaggio's two appearances at Yankee Stadium that year provide touching bookends to the story; Strawberry's travails here are made more notable by his recent relapses.) Orlando Hernandez shares a private, then public moment with his daughters as the Yankees march through the playoffs. Tony Gwynn takes his son to the monuments at Yankee Stadium where Lupica took his father. It adds up to what Lupica calls "a love inside a greater love" where news unites and bonds, not divides, generations. This story could only have been told about winners; it is thus a story Lupica's sardonic, brilliant ESPN colleague, Bill Conlin, could not have written. "Summer of 98" succeeds because ALL its characters are heroes: managers, old players, new players, fathers and sons (and Lupica praises the "baseball moms" too). Like any championship effort, everything had to go right to win. In the summer of 98, as in "Summer of 98," it did.
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Recap of the '98 season from a family point of view, May 14, 1999
I recently brought this book and Tim McCarver's "The Perfect Season" at the same time to get a recap of the '98 baseball season. I read McCaver's book first and was sadly disappointed by it. His short essays only touched on the things I wanted to read about (the home run race, Cal Ripken sitting down, etc.) and he wrote about things that did not have any interest for me. So I approached this book with little hope for anything better. I instead found myself hooked when I read the preface in which he said he promised his wife not to buy his new born daughter her first baseball glove for awhile, say when she is three. The rest of the book just flowed. He reviews the season from the prospective of how it affected his family from getting hooked on baseball during the '61 season with Maris's record by sharing it with his father and how he shared the '98 season with both his three sons and his father. I liked the insights about the game and what it means to people that have been affected by the game, such as Roger Maris's boyhood friend or a fan from the Dominican Republic that now lives in Washington Heights in New York. The fact that he is a sports writer and was able to give his boys an insiders look at the game only made me envious. Hey, why couldn't my Dad have been a sports writer during a dream summer like this and let me have this fun. I read this book while having an uncomfortable medical proceedure and it took my mind right off what was happening in the real world and took me back to the dream summer of '98 and how my family shared the excitement. Mr. Lupica even made me like the Yankees (a team I have loved to hate since growing up in Ohio in the '50's and I was rooting for the Indians.) All in all I found that this is a book that I had wanted to read but did not know existed. Read this book if you want to relive the Summer of '98.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
This Book Is A Gonner, May 22, 2001
In the season of the "home run," Mike Lupica adds to that massive number with a well-hit "dinger" of his own. I have always admired his remarkable writing ability, and this book clearly displays it.Lupica has the personal knowledge of the sports' world to write hundreds of books, but here, he goes about it in a completely different way. The baseball summer of 1998 will always be remembered for the home run battle between Mark McGwire and Sammy "Say It Ain't" Sosa, and their epic run at "61." However, Lupica entered the human element of the season. He added wonderful personal stories that brought out the emotions of his family during the wild ride. He also peppered the book with humorous tidbits from the fans that made the book gel cohesively. This book was truly a pleasure to read, and one that any baseball fan would enjoy. It is the perfect tribute to a sensational year.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Not much new...and hideous sportwriter prose, July 29, 1999
You should read this book if you fall into one of the following categories:1. You can't remember what happened last baseball season (perhaps the most memorable season of our generation); 2. You remember what happened but you don't mind reading about it for the zillionth time; 3. You want to know which of Mike Lupica's kids is the "nester"; 4. You crave more turgid sports writing, with its transparent efforts to create dramatic effect by using endless clipped sentences and paragraphs. Lupica is a master of this style. Why write a whole sentence when you can break it into two fragments? Or three fragments? Better yet, you can really enhance the drama of a sentence fragment. By making it a paragraph. The following are examples of "sentences" written by Lupica: "With the game." "And memories of Kerry Wood." "Then Jeff Bagwell." "And the Cubs right fielder, Sammy Sosa." "Yet." "Even in Grand Prarie, Texas." All of these are found on just two pages. Page 39. And page 40. And the last four examples were entire paragraphs! To be fair, Lupica does throw in some behind-the-scenes material, including conversations with: the scout who discovered Sammy Sosa, the best friend of Roger Maris, the high school coach of Kerry Wood, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Bobby Thomson, Daryl Strawberry, Cal Ripken, Derek Jeter. Even these are mostly predictable, though. The scout remembers Sammy as a ragamuffin in old spikes. Roger didn't like to talk much about his 61 homers. Kerry struck out a lot of guys in high school. And so on. Still, these little vignettes, wedged between the bad writing and the stories about Lupica's precocious kids and fabulous wife (who smiles, shakes her head, and sighs...'oh, those boys!'...as Mike and the kids sit glued to the tube watching yet another game) at least make the book tolerable. Plus it's a pretty quick read and the 1998 season was a great story. Just don't expect much insight, and put on some hip boots to wade through the Lupica prose.
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5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
not very well written, November 2, 1999
I am about 2/3 through this book and find myself continuing to read more to see if the bad writing could get much worse than for any other reason.Mike Lupica is just not a very good writer. The 1998 baseball season was definitely an interesting and memorable season. Thankfully, this book is a quick read - how could it not be with paragraphs like this: "Yet." I also find myself irritated at Lupica's lack of sense of what baseball is like to the average fan. He talks about baseball as experienced by a famous journalist, with access to much that we average fans will never get to see. Of course, that would be fine for a retrospective of the 98 baseball season. Unfortuantely, this book is also about Lupica's passing of his baseball love to his children. Very nice, but it would be hard to pass this along to my son to read, as I cannot bring him to the Yankee clubhouse; or to my father, who would probably love to set foot on the field in Yankee Stadium just once. He tells a story about racing down the highway to try to catch a possible perfect game at the Stadium while listening on the radio - hey, that could have been my family he endangered while driving like a maniac! He couldn't watch it on TV like the rest of us? It must be nice to have those connections. Yes, I know that Lupica has worked to gain these advantages. It seems in reading the book that Lupica takes them for granted. The one thing I like about this book (aside from the quick read) is that Lupica is positive about everything. He somehow even finds a way to praise the Yankee announcer John Sterling - no small feat. So I give this book one star - readable, but just barely. If you are looking for a restrospective of the 1998 baseball season, you might want to hold out to see if a good baseball journalist (Roger Angell?) will write one.
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