From The ForeWord
From the May/June issue of ForeWord magazine:
“Fans of baseball’s Pre-Golden Age will appreciate the scholarship that went into ‘Chief Bender’s Burden,’ Tom Swift’s sad but sweet biography of the Native American pitcher who toiled for Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics.”
This post was added on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 by Tom Swift at 10:40 and is filed under Media Alert.
"Any idiot can face a crisis. It's day to day living that wears you out." -Anton Chekhov
Jim Haas (May.27 08 at 13:50)
I’m only about a third of the way through the book, and I’m enjoying it very much. The connection between Pop Warner and Chief Bender was news to me and a fascinating bit of history. I also like the way you weave the narrative around the World Series game and Bender’s approach to it.
One picky question: You use the word “supposedly” quite often in the book and I have to confess I don’t know quite what it means. Does it indicate that something shows up in the historical record but conflicts with some other part of the record, or that it is witout confirmation?
Tom Swift (May.28 08 at 12:01)
Supposedly means something was alleged to have happened.
As I tried to articulate in the biblio essay, baseball history contains all kinds of interesting and fantastic stories — and some of them are even true. I tried my best to separate the verifiable from the apocryphal. Where I couldn’t I let the reader know. I didn’t want to write as fact something I couldn’t prove was the case. And yet some of those stories and details are so pervasive that I couldn’t ignore them, either.
Good question, Jim. I hope my answer helps and that the device does not inhibit the narrative. I am happy to hear you are enjoying the book.