Still Pitching A Memoir Author:Michael Steinberg Still Pitching is a coming-of age-memoir about growing up Jewish in New York in the 50's. It spans the years 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the major league color barrier to 1957, when the Dodgers and Giants left New York for California--thus marking not only the beginning of baseball expansion, but other significant chances in the larger cul... more »ture. The narrators personal story begins in the early 50s, toward the end of grade school, and continues through high school graduation. The heart of the story is the authors struggles with two baseball coaches, one of whom was an anti-Semite, and the other, a Jew who pushed his Jewish players harder because he thought they were too soft. A parallel motif is the narrators identification with the hard luck Brooklyn Dodgers, the resilient underdogs of that era-- a team whom the author views as a kind of personification of his own struggles. The memoir focuses on those struggles--the narrators yearnings to find a place to belong and something to excel at. That something was baseball. Still Pitching is set against the rich cultural and intellectual, backdrop of New York in the 50s--the advent of the Beats, the Greenwich Village jazz scene, and the beginnings of both rock and roll, and Off- Broadway avant garde theater. The drama also takes place during the period that most baseball writers called "the golden age" of New York baseball--when one or two of the three New York teams, the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants appeared in the World Series ten times. The memoir ends with the Brooklyn Dodgers only World Championship, after decades of failure--while at the same time as the narrator earns his own success as a high school relief pitcher. In the final scene, the author, by pure coincidence, is once more following his childhood team, the Dodgers. Hes on a plane to Los Angeles, where he will attend college at UCLA.« less