Lecturer Peter Richardson Reviews Book about Dodger Stadium

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS -- Peter Richardson teaches Humanities and American Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of “No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead” (2015); “A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America” (2009); and “American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams” (2005). He received the National Entertainment Journalism Award for Online Criticism in 2013. “In ‘City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles,’ Jerald Podair chronicles the political slalom Walter O’Malley ran to create one of the nation’s premier sports venues,” Richardson writes. “Dodger Stadium — that seemingly permanent feature of the Los Angeles landscape, now the third-oldest ballpark in the major leagues — almost didn’t happen. That it succeeded on a grand scale, Podair claims, helped make Los Angeles a global metropolis instead of a gaggle of neighborhoods.”