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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   

But if you recall that Ebbets Field was sold-out the day Robinson had his debut, you're wrong. Thousands of seats were empty that day, just as they were during some of the World Series games in Brooklyn. That's right. You could have walked up to a ticket window on the day of the game, paid the price printed on the ticket, and gone straight to you seat. Away from the field, and the game, Brooklyn's bustling warmth was challenged by organized crime, the loss of high paying jobs, and pockets of extreme poverty. In Washington the anti-Communist witch hunt was so out-of-control that few objected when Robinson was called before a committee to pledge his allegiance and condemn his fellow racial pioneer Paul Robeson.

The whole idea of doing history, and Forever Blue is both a biography of Walter O'Malley and a history of his time, is to honor every element of our past and hope it teaches us something about ourselves. Seen with greater nuance, O'Malley, the Dodgers, and the people of Brooklyn in the 1950s are even more compelling because we can appreciate the challenges they overcame. We can also appreciate the time and place we inhabit. Jackie, Campy and the old neighborhood live only in memory now, but maybe it's better to live in a time when a ball player's race is no longer remarkable and McCarthyism is an evil we all recognize.   

Michael D'Antonio, Forever Blue, Riverhead, Penguin Books