Summer Up North: Henry Aaron and the Legend of Eau Claire Baseball

by Jerry Poling

Book Overview

June 12, 1952--only a local sportswriter showed up at the Eau Claire airport to greet a newly signed eighteen-year-old shortstop from Alabama toting a cardboard suitcase. "I was scared as hell," said Henry Aaron, recalling his arrival as the new recruit on the city's Class C minor league baseball team.
Forty-two years later, as Aaron approached the stadium where the Eau Claire Bears once played, an estimated five thousand people surrounded a...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299181847
• ISBN13: 9780299181840
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.5" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Early Hank Aaron

The information provided prior to purchase was accurate and sufficient. The product is a great book describing the early days of the great Hank Aaron. A superior product that every baseball fan should consider adding to their collection.

Wonderfully well-written addition to baseball history

This book is incredibly well written and offers the reader insight into an early part of Hank Aaron's life, but the book is so much more than that. It also vividly describes minor league baseball and its impact on one community. It delves into race relations in one Wisconsin city in the 1950s and today. It offers story after story, engagingly told, of how baseball affected lives of individuals and how individuals had an impact on the world of baseball, often through simply accepting someone like Aaron into their homes in an era where racial tension led too many to stare rather than welcome him. Poling's book is one of the most well-written sports histories I've read; I read the book in a day as I couldn't put it down. Granted, partly I was interested in it because I went to college in Eau Claire and lived in Duluth, Minnesota, for a couple of years (another city in the Northern League he discusses). However, I really believe that even those with no ties to Wisconsin but rather a love of baseball or an admiration for Aaron as a person and a baseball player will enjoy this book.