Showing posts with label baseball. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baseball. Show all posts

Living the Dream: An Inside Account of the 2008 Cubs Season Review

Living the Dream: An Inside Account of the 2008 Cubs Season
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Living the Dream: An Inside Account of the 2008 Cubs Season ReviewEven if you're not a Cubs fan (I am not) this is a good read with lots of baseball and Chicago sports history and plenty of entertaining stories throughout. The author had unbelievable access to the team and its fans. Go White Sox!Living the Dream: An Inside Account of the 2008 Cubs Season Overview

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Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited Review

Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited
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Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited ReviewAs always, Matthew Stevenson's essays -- part travelogue, part history, part literary narrative - are immensely satisfying. With this collection, he adds serious investigative journalism to a unique blend of genres. His fluid prose and humor appear so effortless, that only a writer who is expending a great deal of effort can achieve it. Despite choosing a number of well-covered topics, he dives into each on a unique journey of personal exploration, carrying along readers who, like me, seriously need vicarious travel with a literate guide. He brings his own compelling perspectives to the Alger Hiss story and the war-ending assault on Japan; new historical approaches to Armenia, the Balkans, and Lebanon; and an Intro to Banking in the form of a brief disquisition on the Medicis and their modern successors. Even critics of sports doping will come away with something to think about. The best thing about a collection of good essays is that you can actually read them in pieces - say, on the Amtrak from Baltimore to Penn Station - without losing the flow. On the train, exactly as the author intended.Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited Overview

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Billy Goat Hill Review

Billy Goat Hill
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Billy Goat Hill ReviewChildhood stays with us long after we've passed the age of innocence, and this tale of growing up too fast is a testament to the resilience of children and the power that making the right choices can bring to lives riddled with despair, fear, lies and uncertainty.
The story opens in 1958, and anyone who is 40-something years of age, will recognize the nostalgic antics we participated in as kids. But Billy Goat Hill isn't just a story about childhood and coming-of-age. It's a narrative about emotional and physical survival, the power and positive imprint a stranger can leave on a young life; and the rewards that a stubbornness to overcome can bring.
The Parker family is trying to recover from the death of an infant brother, and a mother's grief tends to distance her from her two living sons. Lucinda, as Wade refers to his mother, is a lost soul, and 8-year old Wade assigns himself the responsibility to care for his foundering family.
Earl, the Parker brothers' father, is mostly missing; a carefree alcoholic who can't seem to connect with his role as a father. Wade wonders how life might be different if Duke Snider, the famous player for the Dodgers, were his father, instead. Wade weighs most of his major life decisions as a child against what Duke might think, say or do, and it's a running theme throughout the book.
But Wade Parker's most urgent dilemma at 8-years-old is completing a dare to ride a cardboard sled down the infamous Billy Goat Hill on the outskirts of Los Angeles. It's during his early morning escapade, which involves sneaking out of the house with his six-year-old brother, Luke, that the Parker brothers first meet a man and woman who will forever influence their young lives.
Convinced they will be killed for witnessing what looks like a motorcycle gang confrontation, the young Parkers instead become fascinated with a dynamic couple they first know as Scar and Miss Cherry, both of whom are police officers and who are in on a prank to initiate a rookie officer.
From that moment, the Parker boys form a lifelong bond with Scar, aka Sergeant, and Miss Cherry.
At times, the Sergeant and/or Miss Cherry are absent from the continuing lives of the Parker boys; and the incidents that separate the foursome are such that tend to happen in life, but still birth the question of "why."
Also running throughout the story line is a thread of Christianity, which gets picked up off and on through dilemmas and the people who come into a life. Like a needle slipping in and out of fabric, it nicely ties the story together and brings all the pieces together like a well-made quilt.
This is not intended as a touchy-feely feel-good book; but it is a well-above-average, satisfying read that leaves a good feeling behind anyway.
Morris writes with a lyrical voice and uses vivid, innovating descriptions that beg to be read aloud. Morris was born and raised in Southern California, a background that brings a richness to the setting for Billy Goat Hill.
Told in first person from Wade's point of view, Billy Goat Hill spans the defining years of childhood and early adulthood, throws in some life events in the middle and ends with Wade at 40 years old and coming into his fullness as a man of God.
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Fanatic: Ten Things All Sports Fans Should Do Before They Die Review

Fanatic: Ten Things All Sports Fans Should Do Before They Die
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Fanatic: Ten Things All Sports Fans Should Do Before They Die ReviewJim has a great way of showing how people share their love of sport. Fantastic story-teller, very humorous and laugh-out-loud.
-"Ian"Fanatic: Ten Things All Sports Fans Should Do Before They Die Overview

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American Boy Review

American Boy
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American Boy ReviewLarry Watson's AMERICAN BOY is an all-American, universal kind of story that will resonate with anyone who grew up in the American heartland of the 50s and 60s. The typical small town of those decades is portrayed perfectly - those downtown blocks that held hardware and grocery stores with the local lawyer and doctor upstairs over the drugstore. Even the latest Plymouth-Dodge innovation, that infamous and short-lived push-button transmission, is featured, the same one that was immortalized in songwriter Greg Brown's "Brand New '64 Dodge."
Matthew Garth is our unlikely hero, a fatherless 16-17 year-old in the 1962-63 school year, who has attached himself for the past several years to the Dunbars, a prominent family in Willow Falls, Minnesota, a small community of a couple thousand. Johnny Dunbar is his classmate and closest friend, but all that will change when an "older woman" enters the picture in the person of Louisa Lindahl. The head of the family, Dr. Dunbar, is a pillar of the local community, although there are early intimations of that pillar being made of salt, with feet of clay.
Like many small towns, Willow Falls is a study in contrasts and opposites. The falls is not really a falls; Frenchman's Forest is not really a forest, but a dark and secret place where the two then-younger boys first learned about the mechanics of sex from an ill-informed older boy, and which later serves as backdrop to more intimate experimentation. Because one of the things that makes AMERICAN BOY such a universal tale is its minutely descriptive attention to all those familiar rites of passage - smoking, drinking, reckless driving, and of course backseat groping with all the heavy breathing, passionate kisses, frenzied frustrations and furtive fumbling with zippers, clasps, breasts and thighs. There is even a very "Mrs Robinson" scene between Matthew and the local lawyer's wife, but it has its own variations making it both original and derivative all at the same time.
Matthew becomes obsessed with the not-so mysterious twenty-something Lydia, who, through a sequence of shocking events, takes up residence with the Dunbars, destroying and changing not just Matthew's friendship with Johnny, but the whole family dynamic.
Yes, this is a masterfully rendered story of a friendship and family torn assunder and innocence lost. An old tale to be sure, but Watson makes it all seem new and fresh, employing characters all too human and flawed.
As a coming-of-age story, countless comparisons could probably be made. I've already suggested The Graduate, but the ones I first thought of were Evan Hunter's Last Summer and Herman Raucher's Summer of '42, both books from 30-40 years ago, and, more recently, Donald Lystra's northern Michigan story, Season of Water and Ice.
AMERICAN BOY is, in the end, an old tale made new and fresh through the story-telling skills of a master hand at fiction. Larry Watson burst onto the book scene nearly twenty years ago with his first novel, MONTANA 1948., a shocking and beautiful book. His latest offering shows he is still at the top of his game. If you appreciate serious literary fiction, READ THIS BOOK!
- Tim Bazzett, author of the REED CITY BOY trilogyAmerican Boy Overview

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