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Written by Our Reviewer
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Saturday, 15 November 2008 |
Pinch Hitter: Baseball Fantasy Becomes RealityReviewed by Stuart Nachbar
 Pinch Hitter But David also has a secret that is a driver to the story. His older brother Danny was also a baseball protégé. Unlike David, Danny is an over-confident pitcher with quality stuff, good enough for a scholarship or a major league contract. However, Danny’s promise ends when he is hit above the eye by a line drive—off the bat of his younger brother. Immediately after that fatal incident, David ends his own baseball dreams, and years later, Danny disappears from his life, crippled by lingering pain and lost dreams. At the start of this story David has not seen his older brother for nine years.
Pinch Hitter is a moving story and I could see that Whitney spent a lot of time around a major league baseball team. The clubhouse and front office scenes are more detailed than I would expect to find from an author with no personal day-to-day connection to major league baseball, and Whitney also shows a strong knowledge of the situational game, where managers have to strategize again each other, using mind and matter to win. It’s no surprise that his main character is a pinch hitter, since that is a situational position in a game, as opposed to an everyday star. Reading Pinch Hitter, I was reminded of Rudy, the Notre Dame football movie, where a 26 year old college senior has overcome dyslexia to earn a degree and have a chance to play for a national championship team. Rudy is carried off the field at the end of his only game, just as David is heralded by his teammates at the end of this story. |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 15 November 2008 )
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Wednesday, 21 May 2008 |
Succession: A Story of Corporate PastReviewed By Stuart Nachbar
 Succession
Succession has a shorter timeframe than the author’s career, but it is based on the same idea. Jake Garrison, an aspiring Civil War fiction novelist has a pregnant wife and sick father and he must return to a career of handling undercover due diligence for investors who want to purchase businesses.
The business in Succession is a large, struggling typewriter manufacturer that has been merged into an even larger corporate conglomerate, as was the practice during the 1960’s when the novel takes place. The company, Kensington has been in a losing battle on price, sales practices and technology; IBM has fast become a dominant player in the business-to-business with the Selectric and it is feared that they will enter the consumer market as well under their label or someone else’s. Some Kensington executives want that someone else to be Kensington, though Garrison’s client is not one of them.
To make matters worse, Garrison’s client has supposedly impregnated his wife. However, needing money, he follows a lesson he has lived by his whole life: show no pain. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 21 May 2008 )
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Monday, 10 September 2007 |
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Interview with Helen Barer, author of Fitness Kills  Fitness Kills Lauren Smith. What inspired you to create a work of fiction? Helen: One day, after a visit to a 'fitness ranch' in Baja California, I thought it would be fun to take myself back there in fiction. It was such a classic set up for a mystery: we all arrived on Saturday and left on Saturday; there were only 100 guests, so in the course of the week we all became instant intimates; it was exotic and completely different from my 'regular' life. And it was a rich mine for jealousies and competition. Something like a cruise ship. There's a magnet that I've had on my refrigerator for years: "It's never too late to be what you might have been." George Eliot wrote that. And I'd always dreamed of writing fiction. |
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