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Nostalgia is a trickster. It can turn a decade like the 1950s, when racism, McCarthyism, Cold War fear and sexism did great damage, into a golden dream when everyone got along and life was peaceful. The softening of memory takes place in both individual and collective ways. Whether it's in our own minds, or the mass media, the old days get more credit than they deserve. This happens because most of us prefer to remember the good, and there is almost always enough good to supply the ingredients for an entirely happy story.

In the case of baseball, Brooklyn, and the period just after World War II, the memories of vibrant neighborhoods where kids grew up happy and safe and the play-by-play calls of the games at Ebbets Field spilled out of radios up and down the block are real. No one has to exaggerate the achievements of Jackie Robinson and no one needs to embroider the shared memories of World Series games won and lost. Brooklyn truly did go deliriously mad when the team finally beat the Yankees for the 1955 championship   

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Some of the most inspiring roles in the story of the Dodgers of old were played by fans. In Brooklyn, and later Los Angeles, they came to cheer even when their boys lost because, I think, they could see a bit of themselves on the field. When the bumbling bums of the 1930s missed fly balls, or set their pants on fire with cigars (this really happened) they still gave their all and the faithful appreciated it. In the 1950s and 1960s when they became dominant on the field, they were still men you could relate to. They were great athletes, yes, but in the pre-steroid era when few players were made genuinely wealthy by their contracts, they seemed more like us.

Today, after a decade or more that saw players bulk-up like cartoon superheroes, it's hard to imagine them being anything like us. Add the enormous wealth so many enjoy thanks to free agency, and the distance between the fellow on the field and us in the stands grows even greater. Of course no one can begrudge a player who seeks the highest pay for the comparatively short period of time he'll enjoy in the game, and many of their problems are not unique. The downside of celebrity can be seen in every field where people come under media scrutiny, from Wall Street, to Washington, to Hollywood.

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Like a few other teams - the Yankees and Red Sox come to mind - the Dodgers are the subject of an entire subgenre of baseball literature and it would be natural to wonder - What could be new in Forever Blue?

The first thing a Dodger die-hard will notice is that I set aside the judgments made by others about Walter O'Malley and other key figures in the Dodger story and followed instead the trail of documents. Internal team memos and private corporate records showed O'Malley began his effort to build a new stadium in Brooklyn in 1946. O'Malley made mistakes, but it's hard to refute his devotion to the borough. Yes, he was responsible for the final decision and cannot escape responsibility for moving the team and breaking a lot of hearts. But the record also shows O'Malley and the public were manipulated by the city's great power broker Robert Moses, who never wanted a stadium in Brooklyn, and failed by Mayor Wagner who let two great teams - the Dodgers and the Giants - leave at once.

Other new material in the book includes the inside story of how an old-fashioned gossip columnist in Los Angeles named Vincent X. Flaherty courted the team for years and helped the city's real leaders bring baseball to the coast. Formally private letters revealed new details on the struggle over the Chavez Ravine, where Dodger Stadium was built, and show how O'Malley risked financial ruin to make his ballpark a reality. Mixed in with all these historic events are fresh takes on players, insights into the arrival of the player's union, and new evidence of O'Malley's influence on the game itself, over thirty years.    

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Judging by what you would find in my office, a biography is made of a few thousand pages of documents, a few hundred clippings from newspapers and journals, a couple of dozen dog-eared old books and a pile of notebooks filled with quotes and anecdotes collected during interviews. Forever Blue is made of these items as well as the many feelings - love, anger, pride, hope, fear etc. - I uncovered in all these sources.

My goal, with every nonfiction book, is to create a clear but also complete picture of a person, event, or moment in time. My only assumption when I begin is that nothing is as simple as it first appears. Of course I also want to explore a worthy subject and in Walter O'Malley, who became the center of unending controversy when he moved the Dodgers out of Brooklyn, I had one guaranteed to hold my interest and yours.  

I began with the basics - old works of baseball history and journalism - and then began seeking more original sources. A few phone calls led me to the man's surviving son and daughter who held thousands of documents that once belonged to their father and the team. After a couple of discussions about my starting point - I was interested in discovering the story not creating one -- they turned me loose in the rooms where the files were kept, asking only that I keep an open mind.  To their credit, they never tried to influence me and didn't ask to see the book before it was in print.

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Michael D'Antonio is our guest blogger during the week of March 23rd. If you have any questions for Michael D'Antonio, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information about Forever Blue: