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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One old man's love letter to the Red Sox, September 13, 2004
This review is from: Waiting for Teddy Williams (Hardcover)
The dust jacket describes Howard Frank Mosher as a "long-suffering Red Sox fan." It's this fact that is the key to the motivation for this book: namely, that Mosher couldn't be sure he'd actually ever see the Sox win a World Series, so he decided to create every Sox fan's dream.
The story is fairly simple. It revolves around E.A., an eight-year-old boy who is obsessed with two things: the Red Sox and identifying who his father is. He lives in a quirky town, Freedom Common, Vermont, that is populated with often strange, and at times a little unnecessarily silly, characters. My favorite being E.A.'s mother, Gypsy Lee, who spends her time home schooling her son and "entertaining" the local men to make ends meet. One day a drifter wanders into town named Teddy who takes E.A. under his wing. In teaching E.A. the many secrets of baseball, batting, fielding, and, ultimately, pitching, Teddy teaches E.A. much more. Through these lessons E.A. becomes a strong amateur player who lucks out in the greatest way when the desperate Red Sox manager just happens to stumble across him.
The story is not one of great depth or complexity, but there is beauty in its simplicity. Of course, Red Sox fans will love this book unconditionally, but it shouldn't be avoided simply because of the team involved. Most any baseball fan would find something to love in Mosher's moving tribute that isn't just about the Red Sox, but baseball as a whole.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Baseball...of all human endeavors has no room for cynicism", August 16, 2004
This review is from: Waiting for Teddy Williams (Hardcover)
A novel to warm the hearts of baseball lovers everywhere, and especially in the Red Sox Nation, this is the story of dreams and what it takes to make them come true. Grittier and less romantic than Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella (and its film, Field of Dreams), this novel tells the story of Ethan Allen, known as E. A., the son of single mother Gypsy Lee. Eight years old when the novel opens, E. A. lives in Kingdom Common, a rural Vermont town which may be the most baseball-loving town in America.
E. A. is needier than many other local children because no one will tell him who his father is. His mother, Gypsy Lee, who left college after her freshman year, now works as a one-woman escort service and part-time singer/songwriter, living with her crotchety mother, who took to her wheelchair and refused ever to walk again after the Red Sox's 1978 pennant loss when Bucky Dent hit a home run for the Yankees. When E. A. needs someone to talk to, he goes not to the local minister, who is one of Gypsy Lee's kinkier clients, but to the statue of the Colonel in the square, where he pours out his heart--and gets answers.
When a stranger, thought to be a drifter, appears and gives him some baseball pointers, E. A. listens and soon comes to depend on the stranger's knowledge. In time, the drifter is identified as Edward "Teddy" Williams, who, over the next ten years, helps E. A. develop, not just as a baseball player, but as a human being, learning lessons for the real world at the same time that he is honing his skills in pitching, fielding, and hitting. Not surprisingly, a scout for the Red Sox eventually sees E. A., and he, by then seventeen, has the opportunity to help the team in the final push to a World Series.
Mosher tells a charming story of oddball characters who behave outrageously, united only in their love of the Red Sox and baseball. Though the characters are not fully rounded, they are winsome and often very funny. Gypsy Lee, Gran, and several other characters are over-the-top and "unrealistic," but in their love of the Red Sox they become "human" and believable, and the baseball scenes are full of excitement. Light, fun, and filled with lessons of life which can be learned from the game, this is a coming-of-age novel sure to gladden the hearts of baseball fans. Mary Whipple
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Most eloquent baseball novel since 'Shoeless Joe', August 8, 2004
This review is from: Waiting for Teddy Williams (Hardcover)
A long, long time ago - when we still argued whether Babe Ruth or Roger Maris held the single-season home-run record - a little book circulated like a whisper among true fans of baseball and its prose.
By 1982, Roger Angell, Paul Gallico and Tom Boswell had already been dangled like stars in the twilight heavens of baseball literature, but this new little novel told us some-thing about baseball they hadn't. It slid head-first into the incalculable depth of memory and dreams about a sport defined too often by esoteric calculations. In short, "Shoeless Joe" by W.P. Kinsella captured the pure, lump-in-the-throat intimacy of fathers playing catch with sons.
In a very short time, it came pouring out, all the poetry, metaphor and sensuality of base-ball. It was like a literary tarp being dragged across the field of American letters by pa-tient, undaunted groundskeepers whose only job was to keep baseball fiction forever green and unmuddied. The life-imitates-baseball genre provided reading material for little-boy right-fielders who'd grown into love-handled ESPN addicts, as well as the scripts for several Kevin Costner movies.
But nobody captured Kinsella's original and literally fantastic brand of magical realism, where the ghosts of legendary players could play in an Iowa cornfield, or a 2,000-inning Cubs game of mythic proportions could go unrecorded by history.
Until now.
Howard Frank Mosher, one of the most versatile and funny American storytellers since Mark Twain, grew up playing Little League and town ball. On summer nights when the Red Sox played the Yankees, his father and uncle would drive him to a nearby mountaintop, where the play-by-play radio signal was clearer.
So it's probably as natural as outfield grass at Fenway Park that Mosher has written his ninth book about baseball. But as Mosher himself admits, "Waiting for Teddy Williams" is about baseball in the way that "A River Runs Through It" is about fly-fishing.
"Waiting" is more clear-eyed than Kinsella's gauzy and poetic "Shoeless Joe," but equally poignant. Both pluck the chords that resonate with lovers of old-time baseball, who see larger-than-life ballplayers like Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams through the fun-house mirror of memory. That is, larger than larger-than-life.
But for all its echoes of Kinsella, Mosher's blend of quirky characters, contemporary mythology, and mischievous prose is utterly original and entertaining. One needn't be a die-hard baseball fan to enjoy this story, but if you know the difference between a "knuckler" and a "slider" - and the smell of new-mown outfield grass or the taste of sandlot dust - you'll probably read this book then tuck it safely on a shelf beside baseball classics such as "The Boys of Summer" and "The Pride of the Yankees." It's that good.
In "Waiting for Teddy Williams," Mosher has stolen home as a consummate humorist - proving his uproariously funny 2003 Lewis-and-Clark satire, "The True Account," wasn't just a checked-swing triple.
OK, enough baseball puns. But "Waiting" is not just a funny book. It's about faith, fam-ily, common happiness, persistence and the trick of dreaming out loud. As every long-suffering Red Sox fan knows: Ya gotta believe.
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