The national pastime is the backdrop for an incisive exploration of manhood in modern America.
The game of baseball and a passion for traditional values bring two men into an unlikely confrontation.
Rising from his working-class roots in Union, New Jersey, to a first-ballot election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, former Boston Red Sox star Joe Grudeck, the “last of the hard-knuckled catchers,” should be ecstatic. Instead, he’s a lonely, bitter man, questioning the high price of his hard-earned fame while fearing his on-field feats soon will be forgotten by the fans of a game whose ethos he no longer recognizes. Horace Mueller, an archivist-turned-blacksmith at a farm museum in Cooperstown, New York, is as obscure as Grudeck is famous, but he’s no less disgruntled about the “culture of cheapness and idiocy that decayed this great country.” He’s especially dismayed that his 14-year-old son is a talented baseball player, and his complaint that the boy may choose "sports over intellect and meaningful work" only heightens the tension in his foundering marriage. The lives of these men intersect, with disastrous consequences, on the day of Grudeck’s induction, an event that epitomizes the cultural forces and trends that are central to their dissatisfaction and their respective critiques of a world each glimpses through a cracked lens. Di Ionno (The Last Newspaperman, 2012, etc.) succeeds in creating two believable principal characters who are, for all their surface differences, strikingly similar in crucial, and ultimately tragic, ways. Whether it’s Joe’s forceful response to the complaints of a disgruntled teammate or Horace’s simmering rage at the loss of his family that boils over in the heat of a July afternoon in Cooperstown, Di Ionno starkly portrays a dangerous and frightening passion for violence that too often has become synonymous with the expression of the American male psyche. And in a digression to recount the story of the 1869 hoax known as the Cardiff Giant, he offers an entertaining, and tantalizingly plausible, origin story for the country’s obsession with celebrity and diversion.
The national pastime is the backdrop for an incisive exploration of manhood in modern America.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7890-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
