It was the year that Joe DiMaggio set his 56-game hitting streak, that Ted Williams batted .406, that the Dodgers and the Yankees battled each other in a classic World series—and that the United States went to war.

In this look at what he calls "the best baseball season ever, " Robert Creamer skillfully intertwines all these epochal baseball happenings with an informal history of a pivotal period in American life, as well as with his own memories of what it was like to be eighteen and a baseball fan when the game he loved vied for his attention with a looming war.

For all who love baseball, Baseball in '41 makes it clear why the game is still the purest representation of the American Dream.