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S'està carregant… The Kid from Tomkinsville (Odyssey Classic) (1940 original; edició 1989)de John R. Tunis (Autor)
Informació de l'obraThe Kid from Tomkinsville de John R. Tunis (1940)
Page Turners (171) S'està carregant…
Apunta't a LibraryThing per saber si aquest llibre et pot agradar. No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. This was a re-read of a beloved baseball book I first read when I was in junior high. This book is YA material, but the writing is very good, indeed and I'm really happy I revisited The Kid. The book opens as Roy Tucker is leaving small-town Tomkinsville, Connecticut, to head off to baseball try-outs with the Dodgers. The book speeds us through two up and down seasons with the Bums from Brooklyn (in fact, the speed of events in the major leagues, the rise and fall and even disappearance of players, the changes brought about by sudden fame or sudden injury, is one of the book's main themes). Other than one or two characters, there's not much characterization here, but we see Tucker's transformation from a raw, scared farm boy to a more savvy, if still young, player over the course of the novel. The book was written in 1940, so The Kid gives us an interesting peak into life and baseball 70(!) years ago. But the human emotions of fear, courage and determination have not changed and are very well portrayed, here. Disappointment, set-backs and injustices dog the characters. This book is not just a baseball lesson, but a life lesson. In fact, Philip Roth, in his long passage on The Kid from Tomkinsville in his novel, American Pastoral, refers to the work as "the boy's Book of Job." And yet the book is full of joy, as well. Some of the language, especially the dialogue, will seem dated, and we are talking about a segregated major leagues, here (in fact, the only two mentions of African Americans are cringe-inducing), but that is one of the pitfalls of visiting other time periods. You see their warts, even, or especially, if they weren't perceived as such at the time. And there is some very interesting "inside baseball" intelligence provided, as well. If you love baseball and have a desire to visit a bygone era, give this book a visit. You'll get a reminder of why this is one of the most beloved baseball books ever. fyi, here is Roth's passage about The Kid from American Pastoral (you'll need to scroll down a bit or search on the page for "Tucker"). It is fascinating, but be warned that it contains a spoiler or two: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/displ...
Gr 9 Up -- This timeless novel follows rookie pitcher Roy Tucker as he reports to the Dodgers' spring training camp and plays an exciting first season. Tunis introduces a large cast of characters... [all of whom] find themselves caught in the unpredictable excitement of the game itself that the author so brilliantly realizes. A reissue of a book originally published in 1940. ... Every now and then the outdated forties sensibility intrudes... but, just as baseball has remained essentially timeless and unchanged, so has the power of Tunis's stories. This [book]... contains all the excitement, drama, and power of the game itself — and all of Tunis's ability to draw characters and situations that touch the heart of the reader. Pertany a aquestes sèriesRoy Tucker (1)
As the newest addition to the Brooklyn Dodgers, young Roy Tucker's pitching helps pull the team out of a slump; but, when a freak accident ends his career as a pitcher, he must try to find another place for himself on the team. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
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…. But it’s not a bad book; I wouldn’t call it bad….
Boy finds baseball. Boy loses baseball. Boy gets baseball back. I wouldn’t call it bad.
Of course, I probably won’t read the rest of the series, since baseball and the Forties both really aren’t the centerpiece type of thing on my mental table, you know. But sports stories can be interesting. It bridges the gap between the constructed world of (say) baseball, and…. Well, whatever the rest of it is, you know. Is it a natural world, that we live in? Is it constructed, and we forgot?…. Not that you’ll get that in a baseball book, you know: The Book of the American Boy, right….. But yeah, I know I started this book as a child, but I don’t think I ever finished. Then, I’d rather stay in the world-of-baseball proper, say by playing a baseball video game—which is the mental, if not the physical, world of baseball proper, you know, and not about the (metaphorical) port city where you meet the rest of life. Any novel gives you that latter aspect, the constructed/sport aspect meets the non-sport, and as a child I wanted very little of what perhaps it is not such a bad thing to call real life. Even when I watched, say, the movie ‘The Natural’—of course a child cannot know a man’s love life beyond a certain extent, anymore than I can know what it’s like to grow up in Wales, but a child open to experience probably can figure out, if they’re nine or ten and not three or four, that something other than a man hitting a ball with a stick is going on, but as a child I was afraid of life, you know. A sports story of any decade, watched openly and with a minimum of disrespect, will give you that aspect of ‘the rest of life’ in a way that a video game, or anything within and only within the mental (constructed) world of sport and nothing else, clearly doesn’t, you know.
…. The writer doesn’t create the social world he reports on, but it is funny how men, both now and certainly back then, socialized by saying that other men weren’t good enough, right.
Still, there’s the odd interlude with some wise old mentor, of course.
…. It is kinda a how-one-boy-makes-a-difference (for the collective!) type story, though, and has little to do with his ‘civilian’ life. I guess sports is right there on the edge of the whole civilian thing, sometimes.
But yeah: it is a story about rather hairy men, but it is still kinda cute, in the end. Hirsute-cuties. 😉 ….
Which I guess is me, sometimes. I don’t wait to shave until people start to make fun of me, anymore, but to look 100% your best, every day, that’s just—wasted energy….
Ok.