Man in the Crowd

For Stanley Cohen, baseball is the prism through which he views the events of the last seventy years. In The Man in the Crowd, Cohen chronicles America's changing mood and lifestyle from the years of World War II through the silent generation of the fifties, the revolutionary turmoil of the sixties through the social decay of the seventies, the excess of the eighties through the technological transformation of the nineties, up through the sobering uncertainty of the post-9/11 present day. His narrative spans four generations as he recounts in sparkling prose how, for his immigrant father, sports was a means of assimilation into life in the New World; the warmth of watching his son and, later, his grandson both fall heir to his devotion; and how the game of baseball has provided his life with its truest sense of continuity.