Perfect; Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game and the Men Who Made It Happen

New York: New American Library, 2009. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. [10], 421, [1] pages. Illustrations. Endnotes. Bibliography. Index. Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitched the sixth perfect game in Major League Baseball history, doing so in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers. This is currently the only no-hitter in World Series history. Lew Paper has authored five books -- John F. Kennedy: The Promise and the Performance; Brandeis: An Intimate Biography; Empire: William S. Paley and the Making of CBS; Deadly Risks; and Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game and the Men Who Made It Happen. Lew's articles and book reviews have appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic, and The American Scholar. Lew is a former Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a former Teaching Fellow in Government at Harvard College. Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers remains the only no-hit game in World Series history. Drawing upon oral histories, contemporaneous articles, and dozens of interviews with commentators and players (including all of the surviving players for the Dodgers and Yankees), Lew Paper brings that extraordinary event to life with a pitch-by-pitch narrative that incorporates profiles of the 19 players who were on the field that day. In an improbable performance that the New York Times called "the greatest moment in the history of the Fall Classic," Larsen, a journeyman pitcher, retired twenty-seven straight Dodger batters to clinch a perfect game and, to date, the only World Series no-hitter ever witnessed in major league baseball. Lew Paper delivers a masterful pitch-by-pitch account of that fateful day and the extraordinary lives of the players on the field-seven of whom would later be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Paper's gripping narrative recreates Larsen's feat in a pitching duel that featured legendary figures such as Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Yogi Berra, and Roy Campanella.