last season

The Last Season : A Team in Search of Its Soul
$15.00
This is a great book about the Lakers by Phil Jackson, their coach. It was sritten when he thought this would be the last year for that Laker team and the last year for him too. It has been very interesting.

The Last Season (P.S.)
$14.99
Would Randy Morgenson have approved of Eric Blehm's chronicle of his life and the portrait conveyed of him? Those who knew him personally and wrote reviews on this site can answer that much better than I, but somehow my intuition tells me he would. Blehm does a commendable job of piecing together the life of a complex man who lived according to his own ideals, the love/respect for nature being among the highest. Like anyone, Randy's life was not without its blemishes and complications, but in many ways he was a self-made man, educated by one of the grandest and most reliable and trustworthy of teachers--nature herself. Unfortunately, such a teacher is greatly undervalued, if it is even given any passing respect or credibility today. Randy knew this and he knew nature's teachings in an intimate way that others might only dream of.

It is sad and ironic that a man who harbored his own writing ambitions didn't live to tell his story, but I see Randy as one of those living artists whose canvass is reality itself. He carved out a deeply human story while living season after season in the grand Sierra mountain range. His life (while far, far from perfect) was a kind of high art whenever he put on his ranger uniform and followed his calling.

I liked one simple antecdote Blehm gave that captures much of Randy's philosophy that often put him at odds with greater society. He would let the front lawn of his home grow and grow, leave it to its natural state, while the neighbors would be up in arms about this "transgression." The lawn didn't get cut until Randy's wife finally did it. There are a great many things to explore and discover in this book!

Last One Standing The Complete 1st Season (6 DVD Set)
$49.95
I bought this for my husband for Christmas. We watched this when it originally aired on TV with our grown son. This show is a really fun
show to watch. The contestants have great personalities and rapport
with each other as well as a healthy competitive spirit. It was fascinating learning about the customs and people who they visited. I look forward to our son coming to visit so we can watch it again with him. We also were able to catch a couple episodes which we had missed. We are hoping that they have a second Last One Standing on TV.

The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together
$19.00
Michael Shapiro does a superb job not only of capturing the excitement of the Brooklyn Dodgers' last pennant-winning season but also of explaining just what the Dodgers meant to so many Brooklynites. Set against the background of the Walter O'Malley-Robert Moses negotiations that would determine the fate of the Dodgers, Shapiro provides logical proof that it was not O'Malley's intention to move the ballclub but that Moses kept making a fool of him to the point where remaining in Brooklyn would have been rather humiliating for O'Malley.

Though never elected to any office, Robert Moses was the most powerful official in New York City in the late 1950s. His power was further enhanced by the fact that the Mayor at that time, Robert F. Wagner Jr. was both lazy and indifferent, and would not have gone far in politics except for the fact that his namesake father was a very popular U.S. senator. If O'Malley was going to get the land and permits to build a new ballpark, he was going to have to go through Moses and Moses couldn't have cared less as to what became of the Dodgers.

O'Malley tired desperately to be taken seriously by Moses and the NYC politicians to where he even had the Dodgers play seven "home" games in Jersey City in 1956. In the end, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, not because O'Malley plotted to take them there but because L.A. politicians eagerly and actively courted O'Malley to move to their city while their New York counterparts, especially Moses, gave him the brush-off.

O'Malley wanted to build a ballpark at the junction of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, where multiple subway lines and the Long Island Railroad converge. Moses at first wanted O'Malley to build a ballpark in a hard-to-reach part of Bedford-Stuyvesant and later proposed having the city build a ballpark on the site of what is now Shea Stadium. Anyone familiar with Brooklyn knows that if you're riding the subway, it's easier to get to Yankee Stadium from Brooklyn than to go out to Flushing Meadows, where Shea Stadium is.

In any case Los Angeles made O'malley an offer he couldn't refuse--300 acres in the heart of the city, where multiple freeways converge. New York officials made no effort to compete as Brooklyn didn't count for much in their eyes. When the Mets were created a few years later there was no question in their minds that they should represent New York and use the orange "NY" logo formerly used by the New York Giants, rather than the Brooklyn Dodgers' "B."

50 years have now passed since the Dodgers moved, and Walter O'Malley has been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The ballpark he built and paid for (which opened in 1962) remains one of the most beautiful and popular in major league baseball. Shea Stadium, on the other hand, built by Robert Moses with taxpayers' money and opened in 1964, will soon be torn down. What is more, New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner is currently trying to arrange to move his NBA basketball team to that same junction in Brooklyn that O'Malley originally wanted.

Michael Shapiro is an excellent writer and his book is highly recommended!