A thoroughly entertaining exploration of baseball as a font of meaning.
Virtue, courage, beauty, justice—it’s all there on the baseball diamond, according to Sheppard’s lyrical paean to America’s enduring pastime.
In Homer’s Odyssey, the mighty Odysseus returns home from the Trojan War after vanquishing his foes only to find his wife Penelope surrounded by a bunch of pesky suitors bugging her to finally forget him and marry one of them. Definitely not one to shrink from a challenge, Odysseus (in disguise) proceeds to win the hand of his beloved by executing an incredible display of athletic prowess and virtuosity that immediately awes Ithaca’s populace. In the author’s careful estimation, this is the very same kind of excellence baseball legends like Willie Mays, Carlton Fisk, and Andre Dawson once exemplified in ballparks and stadiums all across the country. “Baseball can help us recover this essential sense of excellence. Every ball game tells once more the ancient story about virtue and victory that modern folk can witness with their own eyes,” Sheppard observes. A close examination of the Chicago Cubs’ remarkably dramatic 2016 World Series Championship win yields further authentic insights into baseball’s revelatory power to lay bare the human condition: “Even as we come to credit the truth of our victory, we still ask, what does it mean?” the author muses. Such lofty sentiments might strike some as being overly romanticized if they were not accompanied by Sheppard’s earnest and very personal reflections on what the game of baseball has always meant to him. He shares this love of the game (and of the Chicago Cubs in particular) with daughter Cecilia as she grows, and their dynamic is enough to hook any reader—whether they understand what made Nolan Ryan such an intimidating force on the mound or not. “I have cultivated a connoisseurship of the game and indulged in a fanatical passion for the Cubs,” the unabashed author confesses. “I have given baseball the same quality of attention that priests give to scripture, that Buddhist monks give to sutras, that the ancient philosophers gave to Homer’s epic poems.” Sheppard may have long ago given up his Catholic conception of God, but he still worships the game of baseball.
A thoroughly entertaining exploration of baseball as a font of meaning.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798886453041
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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