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fur72
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This morning I logged on to Amazon and ordered The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran by Dirk Hayhurst that I have been greatly awaiting the release of and ready to rip into.
As I was checking out I noticed a book cover that auomatically caught my eye. Cardboard Gods An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards. Looks pretty cool and I had to add it to my cart. Read a review below. Release is April 4th so I will need to read fast.
REVIEW
Let us, for a moment, consider Kent Tekulve’s prescription sunglasses. The unorthodox reliever for the Pirates throughout much of the ’70s and early ’80s, the guy had Coke bottles that made Ron Kittle’s eyewear appear subtle. They didn’t even vainly feint at athleticism like the plastic goggles of Chris Sabo.
For that reason, Tekulve was something of a nerding-class hero for bespectacled baseball fans everywhere. As Josh Wilker writes in his new memoir, Cardboard Gods (Seven Footer Press, $24.95), the gangly Tekulve was a totem for loners: “This is the fantasy:…they will then stride to the very center of the predicament and, despite their thick glasses and bulging Adam’s apple and mathematician wrists and ungainly, unmanly submarine delivery, earn widespread grateful weeping adoration….”
Tekulve and dozens of other baseball players—stars and also-rans alike—provide all kinds of metaphorical grist for Wilker, whose memoir takes the reader through his childhood, one baseball card at a time. Though plenty has been written about the lost art of baseball-card collecting, what Wilker is doing in Cardboard Gods is more sophisticated: using the cards of his youth for vessels and triggers to tell the unusual story of his childhood.
Born and raised for six years in New Jersey, Wilker lived with his brother and three parents: his mother, his mother’s boyfriend Tom, who had moved into their home, and his father, who slept on the couch. Wilker’s dad was a sociologist, and his mother and Tom hewed more toward the hippie ethics of the day. Eventually, the neo-nuclear family combusted, and Josh and his brother Ian moved with their mother and Tom to rural Vermont to get back to nature. The couple bought a wrecked, foreclosed home and settled into a tenuous existence. Josh and Ian had difficulty fitting in—with Josh fading to the background and Ian fighting his way through the town’s kids. The family’s television couldn’t even get Red Sox games over the airwaves, so Wilker devoted himself to collecting baseball cards.
“It was a weird duality for me,” says Wilker, 42, who works as a proofreader and copy editor for an educational testing publisher. “On the one hand, I was trying to connect to something that was bigger than my world, but I was also trying to connect to things that were in my world that I couldn’t connect to anymore, like my brother.”
No sport spurs literary aspirations like baseball, and Wilker is certainly inspired by his card collection (a card is also featured at the beginning of each chapter). In one chapter about his parents’ attempts to forge a new kind of family, Wilker writes about the Oakland Athletics’ experiment with signing Herb Washington, a sprinter with no baseball skills, as the game’s first exclusive pinch runner. In another, he writes about how Bill “Spaceman” Lee took the edge off his parents’ hippie-outsider status. Being a baseball fan helps, but isn’t necessary. Wilker actually saves some of his most incisive and perceptive commentary for the mores of the ’70s.
“It’s such an easily dismissed time,” he says. “It’s easy to say ‘Everyone looked like an idiot back then.’ But the experimentation of it, and the aimlessness of it, was really endearing to me. The norms had been shown to be useless or fraudulent so new ones had to be made up.”
Wilker has stayed focused on this project for years. The book began as a novel, covering similar ground, and then he started writing the baseball-card stories on a blog, knowing the whole time he had a book in there somewhere while developing a sizable online following. It’s not his first book; he’s written a series of nonfiction books for young adults as a gun for hire (“If people continue to buy a book I wrote about Confucius ten years ago, I stand to make some money”).
“I’ve been writing towards this book for a long time,” he says. “I knew all along that I wanted to make it a book, so I had to just keep writing. This is a long time coming.”
It’s paid off. Though baseball cards once introduced the world to Wilker, now they can introduce Wilker to the world.
As I was checking out I noticed a book cover that auomatically caught my eye. Cardboard Gods An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards. Looks pretty cool and I had to add it to my cart. Read a review below. Release is April 4th so I will need to read fast.
REVIEW
Let us, for a moment, consider Kent Tekulve’s prescription sunglasses. The unorthodox reliever for the Pirates throughout much of the ’70s and early ’80s, the guy had Coke bottles that made Ron Kittle’s eyewear appear subtle. They didn’t even vainly feint at athleticism like the plastic goggles of Chris Sabo.
For that reason, Tekulve was something of a nerding-class hero for bespectacled baseball fans everywhere. As Josh Wilker writes in his new memoir, Cardboard Gods (Seven Footer Press, $24.95), the gangly Tekulve was a totem for loners: “This is the fantasy:…they will then stride to the very center of the predicament and, despite their thick glasses and bulging Adam’s apple and mathematician wrists and ungainly, unmanly submarine delivery, earn widespread grateful weeping adoration….”
Tekulve and dozens of other baseball players—stars and also-rans alike—provide all kinds of metaphorical grist for Wilker, whose memoir takes the reader through his childhood, one baseball card at a time. Though plenty has been written about the lost art of baseball-card collecting, what Wilker is doing in Cardboard Gods is more sophisticated: using the cards of his youth for vessels and triggers to tell the unusual story of his childhood.
Born and raised for six years in New Jersey, Wilker lived with his brother and three parents: his mother, his mother’s boyfriend Tom, who had moved into their home, and his father, who slept on the couch. Wilker’s dad was a sociologist, and his mother and Tom hewed more toward the hippie ethics of the day. Eventually, the neo-nuclear family combusted, and Josh and his brother Ian moved with their mother and Tom to rural Vermont to get back to nature. The couple bought a wrecked, foreclosed home and settled into a tenuous existence. Josh and Ian had difficulty fitting in—with Josh fading to the background and Ian fighting his way through the town’s kids. The family’s television couldn’t even get Red Sox games over the airwaves, so Wilker devoted himself to collecting baseball cards.
“It was a weird duality for me,” says Wilker, 42, who works as a proofreader and copy editor for an educational testing publisher. “On the one hand, I was trying to connect to something that was bigger than my world, but I was also trying to connect to things that were in my world that I couldn’t connect to anymore, like my brother.”
No sport spurs literary aspirations like baseball, and Wilker is certainly inspired by his card collection (a card is also featured at the beginning of each chapter). In one chapter about his parents’ attempts to forge a new kind of family, Wilker writes about the Oakland Athletics’ experiment with signing Herb Washington, a sprinter with no baseball skills, as the game’s first exclusive pinch runner. In another, he writes about how Bill “Spaceman” Lee took the edge off his parents’ hippie-outsider status. Being a baseball fan helps, but isn’t necessary. Wilker actually saves some of his most incisive and perceptive commentary for the mores of the ’70s.
“It’s such an easily dismissed time,” he says. “It’s easy to say ‘Everyone looked like an idiot back then.’ But the experimentation of it, and the aimlessness of it, was really endearing to me. The norms had been shown to be useless or fraudulent so new ones had to be made up.”
Wilker has stayed focused on this project for years. The book began as a novel, covering similar ground, and then he started writing the baseball-card stories on a blog, knowing the whole time he had a book in there somewhere while developing a sizable online following. It’s not his first book; he’s written a series of nonfiction books for young adults as a gun for hire (“If people continue to buy a book I wrote about Confucius ten years ago, I stand to make some money”).
“I’ve been writing towards this book for a long time,” he says. “I knew all along that I wanted to make it a book, so I had to just keep writing. This is a long time coming.”
It’s paid off. Though baseball cards once introduced the world to Wilker, now they can introduce Wilker to the world.
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