![]() ![]() ![]() A small-town rookie lefthander makes it to the Bigs-and in New York to boot! He “don’t speak the King’s English,” Harris wrote in a later preface, “nor the Queen’s neither.” And half the fun is the book’s language. Some readers prefer Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), which served as the basis of the best baseball movie of all time, but the sequel is even better after reading the original Henry Wiggen novel. In a famous passage in American Pastoral, Philip Roth calls it “simply written, stiff in places but direct and dignified,” about the game of baseball back before it was “illuminated with a million statistics, back when it was about the mysteries of earthly fate.” He also says that it is “gripping to boys”-it is a boys’ book-but grownup men will read it with surreptitious absorption. Roy Tucker, a rookie pitcher who wins fifteen straight for the Brooklyn Dodgers, suffers an injury that leaves him unable to pitch again, but painfully works his way back to the majors as a. ![]()
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