I flat out love this book.  The Celebrant has to be one of my favorite novels of all time.  If it is not the best baseball novel ever written, then it has to be among the top three or five.  Mark Harris must get his due of course, along with Bernard Malamud and Darryl Brock (see my review of If I Never Get Back.)  Still, Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s novel stands out for its beautiful writing and wonderfully complex story.

This is a work of historical fiction, meticulous in its recreation of the early 20th century, set most vividly in New York City.  Christy Mathewson, the greatest pitcher of his era, and the quintessential “All American Boy” and man, is the main baseball figure in the book.  Matthewson is the center of attention of the celebrant, Jackie Kapp, an immigrant Jewish jeweler, who after witnessing Mathewson’s first no-hitter, is struck with a strong case of hero worship of the great pitcher and whose life then becomes entwined with his hero’s.

This book is “about” baseball, the way it was played in an earlier time, and what it meant to the fans who watched it, but as with any great novel, the story transcends.  For example, Jackie loves the game, and in particular Christy, The Big Train, while in contrast, his brother simply gambles on baseball.  But there is much more to this beautifully written story.  The Jewish experience of America is embodied by Jackie - whose “real” name is Yakov Kapinski.  His love for baseball and the All-American Mathewson represents his love for America, what it means at its best, the highest and best principles it stands for, even as its players and owners, mere mortals all, are subject to all the failings and foibles of modern life.  The Black Sox Scandal of 1919 thus becomes a critical point in the book, challenging all who believed in and cared about baseball as beautiful and capable of transcendence, with the reality of its darker side.

Here’s a great and illuminating quote from the book:

“Have you ever considered what he is to himself? What it’s like to be Christy Mathewson? Imagine it. You know perhaps five hundred people by name, but fifty million know you. You make no more than ordinary demands upon people; you don’t insist that the sandwich you order for lunch be the most marvelous sandwich ever made, or that the bootblack’s shine dazzle the blind, yet the sandwich-maker and the bootblack and millions like them expect the superhuman from you, and finally they’ll accept nothing less. Expectation becomes demand, and it extends to everyone and everything. You hear the crowd groan if you give up a single hit; they expect a no-hit game. Give up a run and people say you’re off your game. Even your teammates turn to you to save them after they foul up the simplest plays. The writers make you a standard of excellence, and if a rival wins nineteen games in a row you’re expected to win twenty. The world makes you a god and hates you for being human, and if you plead for understanding it hates you all the more. Heros are never forgiven their success, still less their failure.” … Fullerton put on his hat. “Matty told me you were once a pitcher. I suspect that your [jewelry design] work is infused with the wish that you were he. You’re not alone. Inside every sportswriter there’s a frustrated athlete, according to the old saw. Why not? The same thing is inside every fan, or anyone who ever picked up a bat and a ball. But Kapp, you ought to thank God that your arm went bum. It might be you in Gethsemane tonight.”

Baseball is, after all, the most spiritual of American sports, and therefore has the capability to show us who we are through our love for it.  For me, The Celebrant captures the spirit of what baseball has meant and still means to the millions of Americans who have believed in its essence, despite everything in the “real” world that tends to make it harder for us to believe in the essence of what it is to be human.  A truly wonderful book.

Reviewed by David Wilk, unabashed fan

Now published by the University of Nebraska Press Bison Books - paperback - 978-0803270374 - $17.95

Available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or find it at your local independent store via Indie Bound

Atlas Shrugged is a brick of a book. No publisher would touch it today, for it is too long, too deep, and not written for a 20-something woman with a tenth grade reading level. If you like your literature in advertisement-style sound bites with head banger music in the background, don’t read this book.  But if you want to read a masterpiece written by a woman who could barely control her primal scream under a veneer of exquisite literature, Atlas Shrugged is for you.
Ayn Rand was a citizen of communist Russia who witnessed the economic and social devastation caused by Marxism. After emigrating to the United States, she wrote her bitter masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, as an homage to freedom and capitalism. The book retains its relevance because the insipid do-gooders in the story who lead the world into darkness are prescient in their use of the same mealy-mouthed vocabulary of altruism that many well-meaning politicians use today. Today, religious conservatives read the Bible, while true economic and amoral conservatives read Atlas Shrugged.
But while the book is a political tour de force, it achieves its influence because it is such a thrilling story, written with great verve. The story focuses on Dagney Taggert, the beautiful and brilliant railroad executive, whose railroad is falling apart due to the lack of qualified employees and equipment. Hardworking people have disappeared, gone to start their own society in a secret corner of the world under the leadership of the mysterious John Galt. As the engineers, teachers, construction workers, and entrepreneurs disappear, civilization is left to nincompoops who believe that the world owes them a living, and who impose increasingly desperate obligations and taxes upon the remaining pillars of industry like Taggert. Finally, Taggert throws in the towel to join Galt, one more victim of the vampire-like authorities in their relentless need for one more source of production to suck dry. Meanwhile, the government also seeks to find Galt and to kill him, for his creed of hard work and honest profit threaten those who would demand that those who work hard support those who don’t.
Ayn Rand was a woman possessed and she wrote like one.  The prose may be a little purple by today’s standards, but the sense of gloom,  the character development, and the mystery of John Galt are rendered with uncommon virtuosity. The ultimate resolution of Galt’s whereabouts and the plot dénouement are a little abrupt, as if Rand realized she had screamed herself out and it was time to wrap it up, but the book nevertheless leaves you exhausted and fulfilled.  Atlas Shrugged will bowl you over like one of Dagney Taggert’s freight trains.

Reviewed by Richard H Dickinson,  author of the excellent novel, Acts of Honor

Published by Signet Books - Mass Market paperback - 978-0451191144 - $8.99

Buy from Amazon,  Barnes and Noble or from your local bookstore via IndieBound

Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon starts with a murder, a clumsy, unpremeditated affair that
happens almost naturally. It was easy, Helen Knightly tells us in the book’s first sentence:
“When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.”
It’s a sentence that makes you want to read more. The book continues:
“Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it. My
mother’s core was rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks-old vase of flowers. She
had been beautiful when my father met her and still capable of love when I became their
late-in-life child, but by the time she gazed up at me that day, none of this mattered.”
One paragraph in and it’s clear that you’re in for something special.
What follows that delicious opening is the story of how Helen came to kill her mother–the toll that Claire’s
mental illness took on the family over decades, its unexpected consequences, the mental abuse, the
exhausting intensity of Helen’s love-hate relationship with her mother. This back story is interspersed with
the continuing story of what’s going on in the present: what Helen does immediately after the murder
(whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong), the eventual discovery of the body by outsiders.
That Helen commits murder so clumsily, with only the most amateurish attempt made to cover it up, is a
great strength of the book, I think. This is the sort of mess that a real person might make of matricide. And
while Helen’s behavior after the fact seems bizarre, that too lends the story credence. Who in such
circumstances would be fully sane?
While The Almost Moon is not a suspense novel per se, it is certainly suspenseful. What will become of
Helen, given the murder investigation and her own feelings of…not quite remorse, is never clear, not until
the book’s last page. And when it comes the ending is, really, just right. This one’s highly recommended.

-Reviewed By Debra Hamel from her great book-blog.com

Published  by Little Brown - 9780316067362 - paperback - $14.99

Buy from Amazon or buy from Barnes & Noble or from your local bookstore via IndieBound

Having read Joseph Boyden’s amazing Three Day Road, I was more than eager to read his second novel Through Black Spruce.

Three Day Road was set during The Great War, a time period I particularly enjoy reading about. And, of course, the ending left every reader wondering what had become of Xavier Bird.
I was disappointed when I opened Through Black Spruce, as it is set in the present day and so seemed completely unrelated to Xavier. Nonetheless, Boyden pulled me in with his skillful prose that paints pictures in just a sentence. The first chapter ends with Will Bird talking about his youth: “I was young still, young enough to believe you can put out your gill nets and pull in options like fish.” I was completely hooked like one of those fish.

The story is told in alternating chapters by Will Bird, a Northern bush pilot (and, we find out, a son of Xavier’s second marriage) and his niece Annie Bird. Will is lying in a coma (we are not at first told why) and Annie has come back home at the request of her mother to visit him. Annie’s friend Eva, a nurse at the hospital, suggests that Annie talk to Will in the hopes that he might respond to her voice & awaken.

At first, the two stores being told in flashback – Will’s of his life in the North, and Annie’s, of her recent, prolonged travels to Toronto & New York in an attempt to find her sister Suzanne, who has lost contact with her family after achieving super-model status – appear to have nothing in common. Each of the characters speaks without reference to what the other has just finished saying.

Will’s story includes Marius Netmaker, the “kingpin” of local drug dealers and a family enemy. Marius is the grandson of Elijah Whiskeyjack, boyhood companion and best friend of Will’s father Xavier. Annie’s story includes her attempt to make a life for herself after returning from the city.

But slowly, the threads of the stories come together & we see the fabric of their lives – Will’s, Annie’s, Suzanne’s, and the girls’ mother Lisette. Just as the movement of a butterfly’s wings sets in motion untold wonders, so Suzanne’s leaving the North sets a knotted pattern for all of the lives around her.

Boyden’s writing has been often & highly praised - and rightly so. I may not be able to find a superlative that has not already been used.

It’s deft & nimble, it captures images & sets them precisely down in a few words, and it finds the cadence of the Northern people about whom he writes. Annie’s “Ever tipsy, me” after having too much wine typifies the softness & frugality of his spoken language passages. I was as delighted as the character Violet at this phrase – but for much different reasons.

If you’ve read Three Day Road, you MUST read this. If you haven’t, then get a copy & read it – and then read this. I rate it a secure five stars.

P.S. Readers can only hope that rumors are true that Boyden is writing more in this series. My personal wish is that he will fill in the time between Xavier’s return from France & his death. What do you think?

Reviewed by Debbie Rodgers, http://www.exurbanis.com

Published by Viking - 978-0670020577 - $26.95 hardcover

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If this is not the best baseball book I have ever read, it comes mighty close.  I have read this book three times and am looking forward to reading it again.  I love the characters, I love the conceit of the book (waking up in the 19th century and getting to hang out with and play with the Cincinnati Red Stockings is a pretty compelling fantasy for anyone who loves baseball and I most certainly do), and I completely bought the emotional complexity of the story.  It doesn’t hurt to have a believable Mark Twain show up.  On top of  a great story and wonderful characters you want to spend more time with, Darryl Brock is a fine writer who never skips a beat.  Just a knock out book that I love deeply.  Reviewed by Readiac.

Published by Frog Books - 978-1583941874 - $15.95 - paperback.