At a Glance
- Narration: Raymond Todd voices an ensemble of transcribed speakers, so the technical question is how many of them stay distinguishable across nineteen hours.
- Themes: A borough's lost team, memory and disagreement, the business behind the ballpark, testimony as history
- Mood: Nostalgic, argumentative, expansive
- Verdict: The deepest primary-source account of the Brooklyn Dodgers, minus the photographs that print readers keep praising.
Brooklyn talking for nineteen and a half hours is what this audiobook actually is, and the format matters as much as the content. Peter Golenbock assembled an oral history of the Dodgers before the team left for Los Angeles in 1957, built from the recollections of former players, sportswriters, front-office men and the people who filled Ebbets Field. Pee Wee Reese, Leo Durocher, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella and Ralph Branca appear in their own words. Raymond Todd reads the whole assembly for Blackstone.
How Bums Holds Up
Oral history is a strange form to encounter by ear, because the thing you are listening to was originally speech, then became transcript, and has now been turned back into speech by someone who was not there. That circuit does something to the material. The anecdotes recover a rhythm that print flattens, and the digressions, the score-settling and the sentences that trail off mid-thought stop looking like editing failures and start sounding like people remembering.
Context for the book's density comes from a five-star grade filed in March 2014. Golenbock worked on this project so long that the advance ran out and the work continued on the generosity of family and friends, which is why the coverage reaches back to 1883 and a ticket seller named Charley Ebbets who found a way to take control of the club. That response calls it the greatest biography of a single baseball team, and the claim is not absurd.
Most impressive is the refusal to smooth the contradictions. Different speakers remember the same seasons differently, and Golenbock lets the disagreements stand rather than adjudicating them. For a listener that requires patience, since nobody arrives to tell you which version is correct, but it produces something a conventional history cannot: a portrait of how a city assembled its memories of a team it lost.
Why Bums Works as an Audiobook
Loss is the subject, and it lands harder spoken. A June 2019 response gets at this from an unexpected direction, describing how well the book conveys the sense of abandonment Brooklyn felt when the Dodgers left, and then addressing the old borough directly from Los Angeles, where the writer was born fifteen minutes from the ballpark and wants Brooklyn to know the flame is being tended. Seventy years on, the wound is still doing work.
Structurally it suits long-form listening better than most sports history. Because the book moves between speakers rather than through a chronology of seasons, you can put it down for a week and pick it back up without losing a thread, which matters when the commitment runs this long. Individual voices arrive, say their piece and hand off.
Todd is doing something closer to ensemble work than to standard nonfiction reading. Dozens of transcribed speakers pass through, from ballplayers to executives to fans, most of them identified only by an attribution line, and a listener has to be able to tell one from another to follow who is contradicting whom. Whether a single reader can differentiate that many voices across a book this size is the central technical question of the recording.
Weak Spots in Bums
One warning here is entirely accidental. The response that bought a copy for a ninety-six-year-old relative in April 2024 recommends the book warmly to anyone old enough to remember, praising the photographs and the pictures alongside the players' memoirs. Those photographs are the part this format cannot deliver. A printed oral history of a lost ballpark leans on its images, and the audio edition hands you nineteen hours of voices instead.
Print fingerprints show up elsewhere on the listing. The title is a single word, while the pool uses the full name, which identifies the work as an oral history of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The description is mostly review quotations from newspapers and magazines followed by an author biography that lists other titles and points readers to a print publisher for one of them. The series field names a baseball line from a book imprint.
Coverage is uneven by design, and one response says so plainly. A lot of new material sits here alongside omissions that a reader with personal memories of the 1940s will notice immediately. Golenbock went where the interviews took him, which means some seasons get hours and others get a paragraph. Approach it as testimony rather than as a reference work and the imbalance stops mattering.
The Right Listener for Bums
Baseball readers who like their history in voices rather than in statistics, and anyone with a family connection to Brooklyn before 1957. The October 2020 response from the Canada market describes the ideal use case precisely: a collection of insights and tales from many perspectives, opened at any page for a while, from a fan who followed the team in the early 1950s while watching their farm club in Montreal.
That response also identifies the one thing the recording changes. Flipping the book open at random is exactly what an audio edition prevents. If your instinct with an oral history is to browse, this format will frustrate you, and if your instinct is to let it run and see who speaks next, the length becomes a pleasure rather than a hurdle.
Newcomers to the era should be warned that the book assumes a working knowledge of who these people were, and current-day fans looking for a narrative arc will find episodes instead. But for a listener willing to sit inside a vanished neighborhood while the people who lived there argue about it, nothing else in the genre offers this much primary material at once.
Before You Listen
Does the audiobook include the photographs described in the reviews?
No. Responses praising the pictures and the historical images are describing a printed edition. This format carries the interviews and the narrative only, so if the visual record of Ebbets Field is a large part of why you want the book, the audio version will leave that gap open.
How does an oral history work in audio when so many people are speaking?
One reader voices every transcribed speaker, with attribution lines marking the handoffs. It works if you can track a shifting cast by ear across nineteen and a half hours. Following who is contradicting whom is the main demand the format makes on your attention.
Do I need to know baseball history to follow this audiobook?
A working familiarity helps a great deal. Players, executives and sportswriters are introduced as people the speakers already know, not as figures being explained to a newcomer, so listeners without a grounding in the era will spend early hours assembling a cast list from context.
