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Booklist Review of the Day:

Dawidoff, Nicholas (author).
May 2008. 288p. Pantheon, hardcover, $24.95 (9780375400285). 070.4.
REVIEW. First published May 1, 2008 (Booklist).

In the nine-inning artifice of America’s national pastime, Dawidoff limns the only integrative pattern for a perplexed young man watching a father spin into madness, a mother sagging beneath twin burdens of grief and responsibility. Sport thus metamorphoses into profoundly personal metaphor in this piercingly candid memoir, probing the pain and pathos of a difficult passage into adulthood. A solicitous grandfather initiates an eight-year-old Dawidoff into the magic of a Mets game at Shea; yet, as an adolescent, he transfers his loyalties to the Red Sox, finding in their legacy of failure an imaginative complement to his own frustrations. As he regularly tunes his Chronomatic 9 clock radio to Sox games, this lonely teen forgets his personal distress—scornful peers’ taunting, his father’s latest outrage—by joining other Sox fans in irrational hope. Spectator longings solidify into real human ties when Dawidoff wins a place on his high-school baseball team, skill with a glove giving him a deeply cherished claim on a piece of the infield. In an epilogue, Dawidoff poignantly ponders his curiously enmeshed reaction to his father’s death in 1997 and to the Red Sox astonishing triumph in 2004. A reminder of how deeply sports still shape the American psyche.

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