Controversial Comment
Seventy years after The Long Valley was published I picked up a reprint from a place that won’t soon be confused with Salinas for what couldn’t have been much more than the price readers paid in 1938. When I read stories, I mark the ones that give the most pleasure. After I finished this collection — my edition also includes the Red Pony stories — I realized the table of contents now looks like a third-grader’s corrected spelling test, with stars next to most of the answers. If I had to pick one favorite it would be “The Harness,” but luckily I don’t have to. I know you visit this blog to watch me dangle on the edge of long limbs like this one: That Steinbeck guy can write.
This post was added on Sunday, August 10, 2008 by Tom Swift at 23:32 and is filed under Reading Material.
"Any idiot can face a crisis. It's day to day living that wears you out." -Anton Chekhov
marcie rendon (Aug.17 08 at 19:07)
Tom - dwight has been calling me non-stop since discovering your book - he is a friend of mine; journalist and wrote the following review of your book - he is impressed and dwight is hard to impress….
mrr
Dwight Hobbes, Twin Cities Daily Planet
Too bad baseball’s Hall of Fame doesn’t have a Most Valuable Book
category. Tom Swift’s biography of historic hurler Charles A. Bender,
Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star
qualifies hands down.
It’s not easy to make a baseball book interesting—even to baseball
fans—but Swift’s easy, engaging hand with details and history
entertains as it informs. And, except for rarities like Michael
Bradley’s The Iceman Inheritance, reading a white writer’s thoughts on
racism hardly can be expected to shed a world of light on the subject.
Swift, though, offers keen, compelling insight into the hell Bender
must have endured as a Native American excelling at the great American
pastime.
Back in the 1900’s, which is when Bender pitched, you were told to
make something of yourself instead of layin’ around eatin’ watermelon,
and we will respect you. Bender prevailed as top hurler on the baddest
team in Major League Baseball. Won games? As the quip goes, all he had
to do was toss his glove on the mound. Dominating? Threw shut-outs
left and right. Off-hand, that qualifies as having made something of
oneself. Yet still, he was looked on as one of the game’s best
pitchers second and looked on first as a red nigger. Go figger.
The media, of course, were no help. In addition to other players
vilifying Bender, he had to read things in print referring to him as
being “on the warpath” or “scalping” the opposition. And he was always
called “Chief,” despite the fact that he was not a chief. Numbing
himself to ignorant insult after insult and anchoring the World
Champion Philadelphia Athletics superb mound staff at the same time,
it’s amazing the man didn’t go stark, raving mad. It’s not surprising
he drank like a fish. Fortunately, he did not lose his Hall of Fame
career in the bottom of a bottle. He lost it to natural causes,
pitching his butt off until the day came to him that comes to all
athletes—when you just can’t do it as well as you used to. Nor did he
languish as a broke, washed-up has-been. He simply got to see more of
his wife of some 30 years and to live comfortably ever after.
Tom Swift tells this and much more with a deft, detailed pen and a
world of passion, giving splendid homage. Adding local interest is the
fact that Minnesotan Swift, who lives in Northfield, is writing about
an Ojibwa Minnesotan. Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a
Baseball Star is written with flawless style. The subject fascinates.
Pick an afternoon when you can relax and enjoy a good book, then go
get this one.
Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star by Tom
Swift, published by the University of Nebraska Press (2008). $24.95.
Andy Alt (Aug.21 08 at 08:55)
John Steinbeck is my favorite dead author. Sometimes after I read a particularly good book I buy one or two more by the same author, but rarely do I like the additional ones (It will be interesting to see if that holds true after I read Chief Bender’s Burden). Red Pony is next on my list. I’m currently re-reading East of Eden (By John Steinbeck) for the Monkey See, Monkey Read book club. I first read it last year, and later last year I read Grapes of Wrath (first time). I enjoyed both, but East of Eden was far more interesting to me. I guess I’d better hold off on a detailed review and save it for the book club or I’ll be at a loss for words.
I’ve decided not to make a joke about that last statement I made.
As for the humble and soft-spoken author that is Tom Swift, I’m going to buy his book the first week of September, and if I’m in the middle of the Red Pony, it will just have to wait. I hope you were telling me the truth when you said that Chief Bender’s Burden contained a little science fiction.
Atmospheric Disturbance is Disturbing Me, and I’m Buying Junk to Stimulate the Economy « Mental Dimensions (Aug.26 08 at 20:08)
[...] one day. The night I arrived home, I put a videocassette in my VCR to record Friends while I read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Three times I hit rewind, and three times the vcr shut off. I put a different tape [...]