Review: Perfect, Once Removed

August 17, 2007

From Oneminutebookreview, this piece on Phillip Hoose’s memoir of growing up in the 1950s and discovering a connection with an improbable Yankees hero.

Perfect, Once Removed is the rare baseball book that has something for fans at all levels. In this lively memoir Phillip Hoose tells how his cousin once removed, Don Larsen, pitched a perfect game for the Yankees against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series and, in doing so, helped him adjust to being a fourth-grader in Speedway, Indiana. The book could have become an exercise in special pleading for a famous relative. But Perfect, Once Removed gives such balanced view of Hoose’s and Larsen’s entwined stories that it may appeal to many people besides baby boomers who love to recall the great Yankee-Dodger games of yore, including a baseball-loving adolescents.

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1 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom August 17, 2007 at 4:44 pm

So glad you could show the cover of “Perfect, Once Removed” (which I couldn’t do on my site). This book has an unusual intergenerational appeal. It’s also the rare baseball book I’ve seen that has a cover not in the colors of the team under scrutiny but of its arch-rival. (I wonder if anybody would think, at first glance, that it’s a book about the Red Sox?) I take the red-and-white cover on a book about the Yankees as a sign of the publisher’s faith that the book will sell on the basis of its writing, which is well-founded

Thanks a million for the link.
Jan Harayda
One-Minute Book Review

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