The Oakland A's baseball team has spawned two minidynasties in the last 30 years and currently seems ready to do it again. In his account of the team's glory years, Dickey, a veteran
San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter, effectively mixes a straight narrative approach with lively oral history. The original A's dynasty of the early seventies featured Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter, but the dominant personality belonged to owner Charles Finley. Dickey ably re-creates Finley's larger-than-life persona: penurious, egomaniacal, and a meddler of the worst sort, yet an owner who assembled an organization that worked. In the late eighties, under new ownership, the A's put together another outstanding team, built around Mark McGwire. In profiling the two earlier dynasties and the current team, Dickey conveys a vivid sense of how three very different organizations were able to sign talented young players and nurture them to stardom. A treat for anyone who wants to revisit two of baseball's most colorful teams--and a learner's manual for all those other teams that can't ever get it right.
Wes LukowskyCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Charles Price spent three years interweaving his firsthand experience with Augusta and the Masters that dates back to 1948 (including, uniquely, access to Augusta's prized archives) with an equally unique friendship with the great man himself, Bobby Jones.