A sturdy sports novel with much greater appeal.
A coming-of-age novel about a young man’s ambition to play Major League Baseball and the lifelong friendship that guided him along the way.
Baseball: our national pastime; a game of tradition and history that recalls a simpler era. It’s also a billion-dollar industry that showcases celebrity talent. Snellgrove, in his debut, looks deep into the psychology of the game’s players as they fight for a big-league position. Ultimately, it’s a novel about the myth of boyhood dreams, the limitations of ability and the realization that wanting it all can be too much. The unnamed protagonist begins his story by recollecting his earliest competitive desires, which were fulfilled by the challenges he and his best friend, Danny, waged for nearly any activity—at times risking their lives. The two boys grow up, however, and learn that the childish games of their past have now perfectly primed them for higher-level sports. While Danny excels at both football and baseball, he grows despondent at being only 5 feet 7 inches; he knows scouts will never notice him. But the narrator becomes a standout ball player, and his skill is matched by his stature; he’s drafted into the minor leagues right out of high school. From this point on, the two men grow distant as their competitiveness leads them into different lives: Danny becomes a local football coach, and the narrator continues to persevere through grinding but successful minor league seasons. The narrator feels like Danny is just as capable as he is of playing at this level, but he also recognizes his own talent and fortune, which doesn’t make success any easier. Snellgrove deftly illustrates the pressures on ball players vying for select spots, even on a minor league team. In one particularly heartrending scene, the narrator succumbs to his cutthroat competitive nature by taking testosterone supplements to give him an edge. Solid character-building makes such real-life decisions that much more believable and tragic.
A sturdy sports novel with much greater appeal.Pub Date: April 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0979788505
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Loaded Press
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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