Customer Reviews

The Cuban Prospect

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wow! That is my first impression after reading the Cuban Prospect. I picked it up thinking it would probably be a humorous tale about baseball (kinda of a "Bull Durham" in Cuba), but it was so much more that!

It is the story of a washed up minor league ballplayer, turned scout who gets the assignment of sneaking a hot new prospect, Ramon Diego Sagasta, out of Communist Cuba. Along the way, the duo encounters everything from flying fruit to inept Cuban cops. However, while the story is entertaining, the true magic lies in the meaning of each man's journey (the end has a twist).

I found the main characters very real and very engaging. The prose the author uses is amazing and the smart recollection of baseball's past only adds to the enjoyment of the book.

For anyone who ever wanted so bad to be a part of something, but wasn't good enough to do it, read this book. As Ramon Sagasta will tell you, some people will do anything just for the chance to be a part of history.

You don't have to be a baseball lover to appreciate this brilliant novel. The game merely serves as a vehicle for the self-realization and adventure experienced by two men. The character development and descriptive style employed by the writer made the book a joy to read. Like most readers, I can't wait for Brian Shawver's next novel!

Thanks Brian Shawver for writing an excellent first novel. I would recommend to anyone interested in baseball, diverse personalities, moral dillemas, and communism.

What a great book. Everybody should read the Cuban Prospect to come to an understand of the depths people will go to to live vicariously through the success of others. If you can't be a great baseball player, at least you can be remembered for your association with one - or at least that's what the narrator of this fine first novel thinks. His final realization that there is more to life than fame is poignant, as is the ease with which Shawver brings this brief book to its superb conclusion.

I didn't know what to expect when I picked up "The Cuban Prospect" but from page one I could not put it down. This is a gripping story about one man's struggle to escape communist Cuba, and another man's desire to find redemption in someone else's talents. I highly recommend this remarkable first novel by Brian Shawver.

Baseball and what's left of the Cold War meet in first-time author Brian Shawver's story of hot Cuban pitching prospect Ramon Sagasta's attempt to flee to the U.S. He's helped by ill-trained operative Dennis Birch, actually a veteran minor leaguer at the end of his career who's hoping to make a mark in the scouting business. Such defections happen in the real world from time to time, and baseball fans will enjoy the telling of what such an adventure might look like. Both baseball fans and readers of good fiction will be rewarded as the two main characters, the prospect and the scout, wrestle with choices that will affect their entire lives - how much of the present do they want to surrender, and what risks will they take along the way, to pursue their dreams.

The book includes some humor, in at least one case of the semi-disgusting variety, as we learn how the scout's contact in Cuba, grotesquely overweight scouting "director" Charlie Dance, satisfies his sexual appetites with the "hot" prospect's indirect help. Serious baseball fans will be a little disappointed with one serious factual error, as Hall of Fame pitcher Don Sutton is identified as a star with the New York Yankees, a team for which he never played in real life. Otherwise, the baseball content is pretty good from a technical standpoint, though play-by-play, as it were, doesn't make up much of the story.

Still a 3-1/2 star read that I'll round up to four for being well-written fiction about my favorite sport - there's not enough of that around.