Book Reviews
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LitPicks™ are written with Book Clubs in mind. Every month we we publish three reviews—one in each category—to satisfy different styles for reading and discussing: A Lighter Touch: books that can delight, offer hope, or inspire personal reflection. |
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LitPicks Book Reviews—February 2012
| Theme—Baseball and the Art of Perfection Baseball in the eyes of literature is life—the heroic stand of the lone individual against forces both within and out. Three books this month use the sport as a central metaphor reflecting our desire for perfection pitted against fate and our own human frailties. |
The Batboy
Mike Lupica, 2010
256 pp.
February, 2012
Brian Dudley needs his dad; Brian's idol—famous hitter Hank Bishop—needs his inner child, the kid Hank used to be, the one who once loved baseball. That's the premise of this delightful tale about a boy, a man, and their love of the game.
Fourteen-year-old Brian gets his dream summer job as a batboy for the Detroit Tigers. He's nuts about the game and thinks, hopes, prays that the sport will somehow bring him closer to his father, a washed-up major leaguer who's left home for good.
The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbach, 2011
528 pp.
February, 2012
For many reviewers, The Art of Fielding stands alongside Bernard Malamud's The Natural as one of the true baseball classics.
Chad Harbach channels Malamud, to be sure, but Herman Melville is his real muse. Melville is here in the quirky asides and even more in the dark Romantic theme of life as unknowable, undefinable, and indescribable.
The Natural
Bernard Malamud, 1952
231 pp.
February, 2012
In his beloved baseball classic, Bernard Malamud bestows mythic status on America's national past-time. Baseball becomes the quest of the Arthurian hero facing down forces of evil, both internal and external.
We first meet our hero, Roy Hobbs, on the cusp of adulthood, staring at his reflection in a train window. He may be Narcissus gazing at himself in the pond—a self-love that can only bring disaster. Or perhaps the reflection mirrors back to him his own purity, which neither he nor the world will enable himself to live up to.
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