Cardboard Gods [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Josh Wilker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2011

The 1970s was a decade marked by Vietnam, Watergate, counterculture, sexual liberation, and stadium rock. For author Josh Wilker, it was a time spent navigating a challenging childhood in which only his prized baseball card collection could give him unfailing faith that a winning season would one day present itself.

Wilker shares his heartbreakingly comic childhood, set adrift by hippie parents harboring utopian dreams, anchored by brotherly love, and buoyed by an obsession with our national pastime. In pitch-perfect prose, Wilker tells his unconventional story through the cards he collected, whose full-color images—of Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, Tom Seaver, Wade Boggs, and many lesser-known players—open each chapter and become the means for expressing all the fears, hopes, bewilderment, passions, and dreams of childhood. Cardboard Gods announces the arrival of a talented new voice in the stadium of big-league memoirs.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A baseball-loving loner deciphers his complicated childhood through his old box of trading cards. . . . Wilker's book is as nostalgically intoxicating as the gum that sweetened his card-collecting youth. [Grade:] A" --Entertainment Weekly

"Unforgettable . . . it summons time and place and nostalgia in a rush of feeling and memory. In Wilker's hands, a pack of baseball cards becomes a Gen-X tarot deck, as if arranging them just so can unlock life's secrets. . . ."--Ted Anthony, Associated Press

Cardboard Gods is a worthy descendant of (Frederick Exley's) A Fan's Notes in showing that when it comes to sportswriting, what the games mean to its fans is often more interesting than the games themselves."--New York Times Bats Blog 

"Wilker uses these frayed, sugar-scented relics of pre-Facebook kid culture as a means to understanding just what happened to him and his fractured family during the '70s--and in doing so, he pays tribute to that lost decade's zany awesomeness." --AOL's Asylum.com 

“Wilker connects baseball cards to more pop culture references than a season of Family Guy—everything from Louis L’Amour westerns to Jack Kerouac to Elvis Costello . . . You’ll love this book.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune



“I couldn’t put it down . . . In much the same way Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Wait Till Next Year is as much about growing up in the 1950s as her being a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Wilker, too, uses baseball as a backdrop in writing about the ’70s.” —The Boston Herald

Review

“Poignant and vivid . . . If you love the writing of Dave Eggers or Augusten Burroughs, you just may love Cardboard Gods, too. I did.” —Wally Lamb, author of The Hour I First Believed

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 243 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books (March 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1616200693
• ASIN: B005FOENBS
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #526,186 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Josh Wilker is the author of eleven books and writes about his life and his childhood baseball cards at cardboardgods.net. Since his first posting in 2006, his site has been featured in The New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and ESPN.com. He is a winner of the Howard Frank Mosher Prize for Short Fiction and has an MFA from Vermont College. He lives with his wife in Chicago.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Gum not included April 28, 2010

By R. Timmermann

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I should preface my review that I was a blogger alongside the author at [...] and I'm mentioned in the acknowledgments for the book. However, I bought the book myself.

When I tried to describe what Cardboard Gods was about to some friends, I had a hard time. It's a book that is not just read for pleasure, but it also takes you back in time in a way that even a history book can't do.

Cardboard Gods is, in a nutshell, one man's way of piecing together a narrative about his life (especially his childhood) using baseball cards. But that really doesn't do the book justice. The baseball cards are not just pictures of players from over 30 years ago. Instead, they are launching points to get the reader involved with the life of the author.

Wilker expertly weaves together the two threads about his life (growing up most of his life in Vermont with his mother and her boyfriend while his father lived in New York) and the baseball cards and players of the late 1970s.

For a book of a little over 240 pages, there is so much to learn. Even for someone who had a pretty good idea how Josh Wilker's story would come out, I was captivated by the story. It is a unique contribution to baseball literature. It is a valuable contribution to literature all together.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Baseball's Relationship with Everyday Life July 23, 2010

By Larry Underwood

Format:Hardcover

Baseball cards have been around forever - at least since the latter part of the 19th century - giving fans from all walks of life a tangible link to the players on display; from the frequently stiff and absurdly posed phony "action shots" on the front, to a statistical summary of the players' on field performance on the back. Holding the players "in the palm of your hand", or on display in protective card albums typically gives fans a wide range of emotions; from the warm fuzzy feeling we have for our personal heroes to the sheer disdain we have for an enemy player, or one of marginal ability who seems to be in every new pack we buy, taunting us with their useless duplication.

Without a doubt, we're hooked on collecting these little "cardboard gods"; and the author of this book, Josh Wilker, has paid a personal tribute to many of the cards he collected as a kid from the mid '70s - early '80s, with a wonderful narrative that is well-written, at times humorous, and at times quite poignant, as he relives the memories - some good, some not so good - that each card evokes.

From Bake McBride to Thurman Munson; from Jim Rice to Rickey Henderson; each story is told with refreshing candor and eloquence as Wilker rehashes various events from his rather difficult and mundane childhood; always, it's the memories which are attached directly to his personal collection. For every memory the author shares, the reader will more than likely relive their own personal anecdotes that are directly related to that particular card. As an avid collector for many years, I have most of the cards the author shares, including the 1980 Rickey Henderson rookie card, which by chance, seemed to be the most common card that came in the batch of "random" cards I purchased. I'm sure the folks at Topps had no idea this guy was going to be the best leadoff hitter in baseball history when they doled them out to buyers in time for the '80 season.

Whether you're a big baseball fan or simply interested in American pop culture, you'll more than likely find this "All-American Tale" a fascinating, compelling, and highly enlightening journey through Josh Wilker's childhood. It's quite a story and one that I highly recommend reading for yourself.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A life story told through cards May 14, 2011

By Andy Shuping

Format:Paperback

Couple of things right off the bat:
1) This is NOT a book about baseball cards or how to collect them or anything like that
2) This book is a memoir of the author
3) Recommended ages for this book 16+

With that out of the way...I've collected baseball cards for over 25 years now so when I saw this book and saw images of baseball cards from the 70's and 80's throughout the book I was excited. I thought "Here's a book that's going to talk about how collecting cards influenced the writer's life" or how it impacted his life in some amazing way and that each of the cards had some great significance. But...honestly I was left disappointed. Yes baseball card's were a major part of his life and was one of the ways the writer connected with his brother and at some points the cards did have an impact in his life. But, often times it felt like the card chosen was tacked on to the story and really had no bearing. Even worse this story was, I don't want to say boring, but it was depressing. It seems like he didn't really have any happy moments growing up. He was called names constantly, his family life was weird, he and his brother didn't always get along, and on and on. Even moments that should have been happy, such as going to a concert, become depressing because a) they didn't really know anything about the guy playing and b) they didn't realize that there was an act beforehand the main guy and left before he ever came on.

Honestly I wish I could have liked this book. I even tried picking it up on different days in hopes that I just wasn't in the right mindset when I started...but the feeling didn't change. The book, while well written, is just depressing to me. It is a creative way to tell a memoir, using baseball cards as the starting points for the chapters, but it just doesn't work for me. Perhaps it will for others though.