Cialis benefits side effects, Edited by Ronald E. Kates and Warren Tormey, BASEBALL/LITERATURE/CULTURE: ESSAYS 2008-2009 presents 23 pieces and papers on the sport of baseball, as presented at the 2008 and 2009 Conference on Baseball in Literature and American Culture held at Middle Tennessee State University.
McFarland has been publishing these collections, along with the Cooperstown Symposium papers, for a number of years, and it’s an invaluable service it provides, making these scholarly contributions more accessible not just for those in academe, but serious students of the game, cialis benefits side effects.
The 23 works are broken down into a few subthemes: spirituality, culture and literature, history, general essays, and even fiction. Cialis benefits side effects, As to be expected, there are highlights and lowlights in any collection of this sort. One criteria to apply when reading such a book is, “Would you have wanted to be there to attend the event to hear these papers being read?” And the answer to that is a resounding "yes."
The spirituality section contrasts Andrew Hazucha’s laughable and infuriating take on evangelical religious belief and how it relates to the 2007 Colorado Rockies, all of which somehow morphs into an incoherent and egregious critique of George W. Bush, with the much more interesting piece by Kevin Grace on a short-lived periodical called SAM THE SCARAMOUCH, which contained some poignant thoughts on very early Sunday baseball, cialis benefits side effects.
The culture and literature section is the largest in the book. Cialis benefits side effects, Here,
• Jeremy Larance teaches us that we can learn much about baseball and society from the literature on cricket;
• Daniel Anderson contributes a fascinating look at intellectualism and the Negro Leagues, which could easily be expanded into a much longer paper;
• Travis Stern discusses the ahead-of-its-time 1913 Broadway play THE GIRL AND THE PENNANT;
• Steve Andrews takes an unfortunate visit to la-la-land with his article connecting baseball with the 1951 sci-fi film THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (note: not much connection at all, and it distracts from his more interesting take on baseball, literature and Communism);
• Rebekah Billings has an enthralling account of what it means to re-read Bernard Malamud’s classic baseball novel THE NATURAL and to teach it to students who are only familiar with it as a movie;
• Crosby Hunt offers fascinating looks at the neglected Don DeLillo film GAME 6, while Aaron Miller does the same for baseball in the sitcom SEINFELD;
• and the section closes with four thoughtful pieces on the game and major literary writers: Gary Land on Robert B. Parker, Nicholas Bush on Harry Stein, Warren Tormey on Robert Coover, and Phil Oliver on John Updike.
The two fictional pieces are surprisingly polished, as they seem to come from authors who haven’t published fiction before, cialis benefits side effects. Tom Wells tells of a single Little League game played out against small-town politics and gossip, while Steven L. Cialis benefits side effects, Walker provides a more international focus of a college team playing against the Japanese.
The closing section on historical vignettes and reflections on the sport tends to be a little flat, with:
• straight descriptions by Douglas Malan of a 1926 pro/amateur exhibition game in Connecticut;
• Harriet Hamilton on Negro League team owner Tom Wilson and his effect on Nashville;
• Thomas Veve on the sad tale of Pumpsie Green, who became the first black man to play for the Boston Red Sox (at the outrageously late date of 1959);
• and Robert Barrier on the postwar boom of the minor leagues.
The three closing essays are a bit stronger, more impassioned and include thoughts from R. Dean Johnson, Carl Schinasi and Sarah Bunting, who turns in an excellent putdown of baseball whiners.
So it’s a mixed bag, but a good one. Let’s be clear: This is a pretty traditional academic work, with all the major culprits one normally finds: pomposity; obscurity; muddled, highbrow prose that has that hard-gloss intellectual patina, but which could be said in fewer words and in so much clearer of a way. And strangely, there is a jarring lack of copyediting that strikes the reader’s eyes on almost every page.
But the good far outweighs the bad, because these are scholars and writers who are committed to the belief that baseball, if it means anything at all, means something to the American psyche and soul, that it is a subject worthy of study, and that we can learn something of ourselves by studying this game that is so deeply entrenched in our history. These essays are worth the expense for any serious student of baseball. There’s going to be an error or a dropped fly along the way, but at the end of nine innings, the home team has scored the victory. —Mark Rose
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