There’s a fair amount of the generalized negativity of American guys in the 1940s, although nothing that rises to the level of a scandal, not the way it’s written—if there was, it got clipped out, you know. (In one of two possible ways, by the editors, or, probably, by the author. Or, occasionally, neither. A “Chinese home run”? What’s that, you ask, Virginia? Well, a long time ago, wise men passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, but a little boy named Home Run, from Hong Kong….) So I guess in that sense it’s a sort of respectful. (It’s generally not intentionally disrespectful, anyway.) I guess that is a sort of accomplishment for 1940; even today baseball and sports guys often like to mouth off about all sorts of things and sometimes get carried away. But it’s not like it’s the best book I’ve ever read either, or the best, you know, entertainment book, right. Entertainment books per se aren’t worse than lit-style ones, but sometimes one’s not as fun as another, of course.

…. But it’s not a bad book; I wouldn’t call it bad….

Boy finds baseball. Boy loses baseball. Boy gets baseball back. I wouldn’t call it bad.

Of course, I probably won’t read the rest of the series, since baseball and the Forties both really aren’t the centerpiece type of thing on my mental table, you know. But sports stories can be interesting. It bridges the gap between the constructed world of (say) baseball, and…. Well, whatever the rest of it is, you know. Is it a natural world, that we live in? Is it constructed, and we forgot?…. Not that you’ll get that in a baseball book, you know: The Book of the American Boy, right….. But yeah, I know I started this book as a child, but I don’t think I ever finished. Then, I’d rather stay in the world-of-baseball proper, say by playing a baseball video game—which is the mental, if not the physical, world of baseball proper, you know, and not about the (metaphorical) port city where you meet the rest of life. Any novel gives you that latter aspect, the constructed/sport aspect meets the non-sport, and as a child I wanted very little of what perhaps it is not such a bad thing to call real life. Even when I watched, say, the movie ‘The Natural’—of course a child cannot know a man’s love life beyond a certain extent, anymore than I can know what it’s like to grow up in Wales, but a child open to experience probably can figure out, if they’re nine or ten and not three or four, that something other than a man hitting a ball with a stick is going on, but as a child I was afraid of life, you know. A sports story of any decade, watched openly and with a minimum of disrespect, will give you that aspect of ‘the rest of life’ in a way that a video game, or anything within and only within the mental (constructed) world of sport and nothing else, clearly doesn’t, you know.

…. The writer doesn’t create the social world he reports on, but it is funny how men, both now and certainly back then, socialized by saying that other men weren’t good enough, right.

Still, there’s the odd interlude with some wise old mentor, of course.

…. It is kinda a how-one-boy-makes-a-difference (for the collective!) type story, though, and has little to do with his ‘civilian’ life. I guess sports is right there on the edge of the whole civilian thing, sometimes.

But yeah: it is a story about rather hairy men, but it is still kinda cute, in the end. Hirsute-cuties. 😉 ….

Which I guess is me, sometimes. I don’t wait to shave until people start to make fun of me, anymore, but to look 100% your best, every day, that’s just—wasted energy….

Ok.

This was a re-read of a beloved baseball book I first read when I was in junior high. This book is YA material, but the writing is very good, indeed and I'm really happy I revisited The Kid. The book opens as Roy Tucker is leaving small-town Tomkinsville, Connecticut, to head off to baseball try-outs with the Dodgers. The book speeds us through two up and down seasons with the Bums from Brooklyn (in fact, the speed of events in the major leagues, the rise and fall and even disappearance of players, the changes brought about by sudden fame or sudden injury, is one of the book's main themes). Other than one or two characters, there's not much characterization here, but we see Tucker's transformation from a raw, scared farm boy to a more savvy, if still young, player over the course of the novel.

The book was written in 1940, so The Kid gives us an interesting peak into life and baseball 70(!) years ago. But the human emotions of fear, courage and determination have not changed and are very well portrayed, here. Disappointment, set-backs and injustices dog the characters. This book is not just a baseball lesson, but a life lesson. In fact, Philip Roth, in his long passage on The Kid from Tomkinsville in his novel, American Pastoral, refers to the work as "the boy's Book of Job." And yet the book is full of joy, as well.

Some of the language, especially the dialogue, will seem dated, and we are talking about a segregated major leagues, here (in fact, the only two mentions of African Americans are cringe-inducing), but that is one of the pitfalls of visiting other time periods. You see their warts, even, or especially, if they weren't perceived as such at the time. And there is some very interesting "inside baseball" intelligence provided, as well.

If you love baseball and have a desire to visit a bygone era, give this book a visit. You'll get a reminder of why this is one of the most beloved baseball books ever.

fyi, here is Roth's passage about The Kid from American Pastoral (you'll need to scroll down a bit or search on the page for "Tucker"). It is fascinating, but be warned that it contains a spoiler or two: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/displ... ( )

This was the book that got me interested in baseball and started my collecting baseball books- Go You Brooklyn Dodgers! ( )

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