The Book Shopper

Mini-Review: Robert Weintraub Presents The Victory Season

When & Where: Weintraub did a slide presentation for his new book, The Victory Season: The End of World War II and the Birth of Baseball's Golden Age at the Decatur Public Library on April 15, 2013, which was also Jackie Robinson Day and sadly, the day of the Boston Marathon bombing.

Attendence: ~ 75 people which included the final appearance of Director of the Georgia Center for the Book's Bill Starr who is stepping down as director.

Why I Went. I am currently finishing up Weintraub's book about the history of the game, which focuses specifically on the 1946 season. It was the year, many future Hall of Fame stars (Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Stan Musial ) returned to the game after service in the Armed Forces. It was also the year that Jackie Robinson played for the Montreal Royals in the Triple A International League on the brink of breaking baseball's color barrier in 1947. The season ends with a thrilling seven game World Series between the Musial's St. Louis Cardinals and Williams' Boston Red Sox. (Even though I was to find out neither Musial or Williams had a particularly good Series at the plate.)

By checking the baseball link on the side of this blog, you will know that I read a lot of baseball books especially historical ones (Stengel, The Bill James Historical Abstract, essays by Wilfred Sheed) and I will admit is that there is a lot I didn't know, which speaks well of Weintraub's thorough research. (He even interviewed Jackie Robinson's widow, Rachel Robinson). For example, I had no idea that after the defeat of Germany, the Nuremburg Hitler Youth Stadium was converted to the 50,000 seat Soldier's Field where a kind of Armed Forces World Series was held in September, 1945. In a five game series, the Overseas Invasion Service Expedition (OISE) Allstars led by Negro Leaguers Leon Day and Home Run Brown (yes, the team was integrated) defeated the all-white 71^st Division Red Circlers, representing General George Patton's Third Army, in a five game series.

Q & A. Weintraub's slide presentation lasted about 40 minutes and he covered a lot of territory, except in the book you get the complete back story of equally important figures like New York Yankees owner Larry MacPhail, Dodgers manager Leo Durocher and the millionaire Mexican magnate Jorge Pasquel who competed for American stars with his upstart Mexican League. During the Q & A, I asked Weintraub about Braves Hall of Famer Warren Spahn. Weintraub mentioned in his presentation and wrote his book that only two active major leaguers died in action during World War II – Elmer Gedeon and Harry O'Neill. A kind of amazing number, but many of the players were not at the front. One exception was Warren Spahn who was in an engineering battalion in Germany and barely avoided being killed during the bridge collapse at Remagen. Spahn attributes his war experiences to his success as the winning-est left-hander of all time. Spahn said, “After what I went through overseas, I never thought of anything I was told to do in baseball as hard work. You get over feeling like that when you spend days on end sleeping in frozen tire tracks in enemy threatened territory.”

Bookstore Sales in Atlanta/Decatur - This Weekend

This is a gentle reminder to check the Sponsor Links in the left corner of the blog. Books Again, A Cappella, and Eighth Day Books (located in Wichita KS), all provide gift certificates to the blog, which allows us to provide a small "honorarium" (makes us sound so literary), to our contributors.

Both Books Again and A Cappella have books sales coming up. Books Again is having a deal with sewer construction on MacDonough Street, which makes getting there a challenge, but they are making it worth the effort with 25% off every book in the store. (Sale Dates: Wed. 4/17/13 - Wed. 4/24/13.)

A Cappella is having a used book sale on Saturday, April 20th from 11 to 4 p.m. to support Literacy Alliance of Metro Atlanta. Weather permitting, they will be setting up on the patio behind their store. An author event is also scheduled as Randy Cohen, co-author of 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Atlanta will be at the store at 1 p.m, Saturday.

 

 

Mini-review: Jamie Quatro's Decatur Reading

Reviewed by Jim Simpson

Book & Author: I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro (2013, Grove/Atlantic)

Where & When: Decatur Public Library Auditorium, April 8, 2013. Sponsored by the Georgia Center for the Book.

Attendance: ~50 people ranging in age from early 20s to mid-70s.

Her Work: On the surface Jamie Quatro’s fiction focuses on things most people would rather not talk about: sex, religion, death, infidelity, phone sex. But Quatro almost immediately pulls you in, writing with such intense clarity, intelligence, deep wit and beauty about characters who give themselves over entirely to the physical as well as the spiritual in their unfulfilled lives.

Throughout the connected stories, we follow a woman in her late 30s as she begins and ends a long-distance phone-sex relationship with a friend of her husband. The stories range from traditional to fabulist, casting an unflinching and brutally honest eye on the nature of judgment, guilt, faith, family and death, while seeking their reflections in forgiveness, redemption, doubt, and perseverance. This dualism is strikingly evident in the location -- all of the stories take place in and around Lookout Mountain, Georgia, a town straddling  the Georgia/Tennessee border (almost a fairytale land with whimsical street names), where Quatro lives with her husband and four children.

In “Decomposition: A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives”, a husband and wife are faced with the corpse of the woman’s would-be lover rotting in their bed after the long-distance affair has been broken off. Quatro compares the sense of loss and grief at the relationship’s end to the stages of decomposition: “III. Active Decay: in which the greatest loss of mass occurs. Purged fluids accumulate around the body, creating a cadaver decomposition island (CDI).” Reading this, I found it equally repulsive and hilarious, but I couldn’t turn away. In a nod to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Quatro describes the dead lover with black goo oozing from its crumbling jaws. It’s a story that sticks with you.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement” is one of the more fabulist in the collection, about a near-future marathon race where entrants -- depending on their running prowess -- are given (mostly phallic, mostly heavy) statues that they must carry in backpacks throughout the entire race. This was one of the more surprising in the book, and one I can imagine being studied and dissected and discussed at length in any graduate writing program workshop.

Two of the stories pay homage to Eudora Welty and Steven Millhauser in style (she couldn’t have chosen two finer writers to emulate), but with Quatro’s own unique twists.

What She Read: She remarked that this was her first public reading in Georgia, seemed understandably a bit nervous, but read well, pausing at just the right places. She read “Caught Up” and “Relatives of God” the first and last pieces in the book, and two of the shortest. Both reveal God in the produce aisle with the apples, as well as some heady sexual references, hence the dramatic pauses.