Customer Reviews

A Day at the Ballpark, and Other Stories (Harvard Perspectives in Fiction)

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I loved this book !!! Don't be fooled by its small size..it's filled with real life in all its pain, mystery, pathos and laughter. If the excerpt of Realworl.com is but a tease, bring it on, Steve !!!! I will try to wait patiently for the full text...

It is not often that a woman sees into the heart and mind of a young man. This is one of the gifts Holt brings us in this lovely little volume of stories. Young Jimmy, in 'A Day at the Ballpark', comes to grips with the adult failings of his parents, and his uncle JD. He also muses about his sister - in spare, unemotional language, Jimmy details the shocking and sad fate of Kate.

'Checkup' is more a prose poem than anything else. As such, it cuts to the core and with no wasted words shows us an unhappy relationship -- lies, deception, and despair. Three pages -- a moment in time that promises the years ahead for this couple.

I live on Cape Cod. I have seen Jimmy. I've seen those guys sleeping on the beaches. And Holt explains why they are there-- or at least why Jimmy is there. 'Outside' puts the reader into the head of this young man. It's not a comfortable place to be.

But the surprise is in the except from Holt's novel 'Realworld.com'. Peopled with movers and shakers of the online world, with high-tech geniuses, and assorted brainy types, the novel also introduces us to Willow, a young teen-age girl. Well, now. Willow comes alive on these pages. She is torn between independence and reliance on her mother. She is ambivalent about life and her inability to make decisions for her own future -- she is still young enough to do as her mother wishes. Willow is not a main character to this story, but she is so well drawn I wish she were. As she discovers her talent for basketball, and excels at the sport, we wonder about her parentage --- but I get ahead of things here. Holt stops the excerpt: a king-sized cliffhanger if I ever saw one! And there are no promises of when we get to read the rest of 'Realworld.com'!

There's more to look forward to in this novel than Willow. But this character was a surprise. Tucked in among some larger-than-life characters (well, I think I can guess upon whom they are modeled!) is this one young girl who shines and shows us without question the perception and sensitivity of Steve Holt. I'd like to see more of what Holt has to offer and am waiting for the rest of this book!

I heard about this from a friend in Chicago and I decided to give it a read. Kind of an amazing book. The narrator in the short stories seems to be the same guy, at different stages in the process of a difficult life, growing up on Cape Cod. The voice is very simple yet it registers a pretty powerful range of emotion, whether the scene is a baseball game, an exchange between father and son, an incident that occurs to the kid while hitchhiking, or whatever. You can feel the kid trying to hold onto important things in his life as he is losing his innocence and things are kind of breaking down all around him. Great stuff, and you don't often get it in guy fiction. I haven't seen other stuff by Holt, but he knows his baseball, among other things. Then there's a long excerpt from a novel, called Realworld.com, and that is totally different, almost slick in a way similar to Turn of the Century (Kurt Andersen), but with hilarious caricatures of day traders, a pretty scary Bill Gates-like character, etc. and a very likeable main character named Overtime Overton, who's a washed up pro basketball player. I recommend it, although I'll be kind of ticked off if I never get to read the rest of the novel.

Funny, the Random House blurb says the short stories read like Richard Ford's writing, but I think the novel reads like Tourist Season by Carl Hiassen. It moves very easily from South Beach to rural Vermont to Harvard Square to backwoods Arkansas to an internet chat room, but each place is very real and so are the characters. When is the rest of the novel coming out? Has Bill Gates read this?

It is not often that a woman sees into the heart and mind of a young man. This is one of the gifts Holt brings us in this lovely little volume of stories. Young Jimmy, in 'A Day at the Ballpark', comes to grips with the adult failings of his parents, and his uncle JD. He also muses about his sister - in spare, unemotional language, Jimmy details the shocking and sad fate of Kate.

'Checkup' is more a prose poem than anything else. As such, it cuts to the core and with no wasted words shows us an unhappy relationship -- lies, deception, and despair. Three pages -- a moment in time that promises the years ahead for this couple.

I live on Cape Cod. I have seen Jimmy. I've seen those guys sleeping on the beaches. And Holt explains why they are there-- or at least why Jimmy is there. 'Outside' puts the reader into the head of this young man. It's not a comfortable place to be.

But the surprise is in the except from Holt's novel 'Realworld.com'. Peopled with movers and shakers of the online world, with high-tech geniuses, and assorted brainy types, the novel also introduces us to Willow, a young teen-age girl. Well, now. Willow comes alive on these pages. She is torn between independence and reliance on her mother. She is ambivalent about life and her inability to make decisions for her own future -- she is still young enough to do as her mother wishes. Willow is not a main character to this story, but she is so well drawn I wish she were. As she discovers her talent for basketball, and excels at the sport, we wonder about her parentage --- but I get ahead of things here. Holt stops the excerpt: a king-sized cliffhanger if I ever saw one! And there are no promises of when we get to read the rest of 'Realworld.com'!

There's more to look forward to in this novel than Willow. But this character was a surprise. Tucked in among some larger-than-life characters (well, I think I can guess upon whom they are modeled!) is this one young girl who shines and shows us without question the perception and sensitivity of Steve Holt. I'd like to see more of what Holt has to offer and am waiting for the rest of this book!