World Series picks up immediately where The Kid from Tomkinsville leaves off. Roy Tucker and dem Bums have somehow made it to the World Series where they have to face the Cleveland Indians.
With two of their best hitters out, with an injured catcher behind the plate, the Dodgers wen after that two run lead.
I’ve read this young adult baseball book a million times and loved loved loved it, which is why I picked it up when I was stressed out and needing something easy and comforting to ease my monkey mind. I can’t say it was everything it had always been to me when I plucked it from my shelf this time around. It was as absorbing as ever, but I was more conscious this time through of how dated it is--and not just because Tunis uses the word “pickaninny” casually once to refer to the Dodger mascot. It was originally published in 1940--just seven years before Jackie Robinson broke into the majors. Weird, right?
"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful." is the opening sentence in the novella that was originally the prologue to DeLillo's 827 pager Underworld. It’s a striking line, a powerful one, and to me, someone who reads few books written by men, a masculine line. I wonder if a woman, or for that matter a person of color could have written it. That's not to say women and POC can't write stunning openers, it's to say that there's a confidence in DeLillo's sentiment, that others will relate to him, that his voice is "your voice." One of the main characters in the book is a 14-year-old African-American, but there are no women present in the whole 81 pages, except a mention toward the end of a photograph of Frank Sinatra (also a character in the novella)'s wife Ava Gardner's cleavage, and perhaps a few other reference to everymen's wives. I'm not pointing this out to criticize necessarily, but to say that in reading this book, I was not on my own turf.
When you see a thing like that, a think that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history. p.17