This is more than a baseball book, but ... that's, sadly, how people will read it. Even given that, this rich, historically detailed book makes even the best other good baseball novells -- The Natural, D. Hays's The Dixie Association, The Southpaw, DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall (which is the 2nd-best baseball novel) -- look slight in comparison. A great novel about race and American imperialism and sex. That a book this good could go out of print is a scandal, but maybe Winegardner's new fame (he's the author of the upcoming sequel to The Godfather) will propel this masterpiece back into print and help it garner the audience it deserves.

The New York Times Book Review, The Nation and USA Today have both called this book the best baseball book ever written. It's actually one of the best American novels of the past 50 years.

Amazing...I'd love to meet the guy who wrote this!

This book transports the reader into the era of pre-Robinson, Mexican baseball and beautifully portrays baseball legends, writers, and dreamers.

This book is an excellent text for any aspiring professional ballplayer. Decisions aren't always based upon the best talent/playing ability, a cold fact of life not mentioned much by recruiters and scouts. Wonderful reading for a baseball fan.

The author tells his story with an honest, easy going approach. It was refreshing to read an athlete who is not bagged down with an enormous ego. I was pulling for Steve the entire way, and I hope that one day his sons will pitch for the Phillies and lead them to the World Series.

even though my dad wrote this book, i never knew what all went on. i think it's enjoyable to read, and very unbiased. i'm glad i read it, and it's fun to see my name in it.

Friedman is a very talented writer, and has chosen a magnificent but largely unknown figure to profile in this book. Filled with humor (wry and otherwise), great insight into baseball, and some surprisingly sober turns in the road, this book will be perfect for any hot-stove leaguers. If you can get it.

This is one of the better "first attempts" at baseball writing ever! Mark Winegardner spends a year w/ baseball's greatest scout and learns & shares all Tony Lucadello has to offer. Pre-draft Baseball is contrasted w/ post-draft Baseball. Several great pointers for baseball coaches and parents!!!! Prophet of the Sandlots (knowingly or otherwise) makes a very strong arguement that Baseball's HOF should make room for it's greatest scout ever.

This book is now out of print. This is unfortunate as it should be required reading for all fans of Baseball. I would make two recommendations to Mark Winegardner if a reprint is on the horizon- 1) Add photographs to the next edition. Ideas: Tony in his player's uniform, Tony at the gravesite of the Ohio born HOF'er, Tony's wedding pictures, Tony w/ Mike Schmidt, etc. 2) Add an index at the back listing people covered in the book w/ page numbers.

I first read this book in the eighth grade and was captivated by the story of Tony Lucadello. This is a truly heartwarming and very disturbing portrait of a part of baseball that no one ever really thinks about. This book, I believe, should be dedicated to all of the baseball travelers who drive the summer roads in search of the next Thurman Munson or Duke Snider. This book should also be dedicated to all those ballplayers who don't make it out of the minors. A must read...

My own time growing up in Cleveland corresponds with the latter portion of the book. Winegardner captures the tone of the time perfectly and the rest of the book has wonderful set pieces, as well. The seques into Dorothy Fuldheim and other subjects are well worth the effort, but may be more useful for Clevelanders than for "foreigners" and sometimes he simply tries too hard with these sections. There also are some minor inaccuracies. A better story would have come from an east sider perspective (just kidding, my roots are in Willowick & Cleveland Hts), but someone else can write that one. Still, the book was evocative and it's derpth in Cleveland lore reminded me why I still feel affection for Cleveland.

Mark Winegardner's epic novel takes Cleveland as not only its setting, but also as an integral character, in Crooked River Burning. Taking place over more than twenty years in the city's history, the characters weave in and out of touch with factual events and legendary figures (Allen Freed, Carl Stokes) in a way that's both self-conscious and proud. In the midst of Cleveland's terrible problems with pollution, race riots, and corruption there is always a sense that the author loves this city right along with its mistakes.

The two main characters, Anne and David, come from opposite sides of the city (which, in this case, might as well be opposite sides of the world). David is poor and dreams of a day when he will be mayor of his city and Anne is rich and trying to be a society girl without giving up her career-mindedness. Without giving anything away, it's really refreshing to see how these two keep going in and out of each other's lives without the novel spiralling into hopeless romantic mush. After all, this book isn't about them, not really. It's about Cleveland.

Enjoyable and surprisingly informative, I breezed through Crooked River Burning without much to complain about. Winegardner lets his literary tongue wag a little too much as the book goes on, perhaps, and it's not without pretense. The footnotes he uses get in the way and seem lazy...not to mention the most unreadable typeface I've ever seen (in the hardcover edition). However, tackling a subject like this and keeping it enjoyable is quite a task to begin with, and it's pulled off with much style.

I have lived in Cleveland for 10 years, and I truly enjoyed this book. Mark managed to actually put me back in time in 1948 when Rock and Roll was just getting started in America. His description of the World Series game that the Indians won that year was exciting, and I don't even like baseball. I loved the love story in the book, and I loved the way it ended.

This book is not just a book about Cleveland. It's a book about an era in American history. It's about life in the 50's; the birth of rock and roll; politics of the time; and love, not so different from what you and I experience today.

About the river: It's hard to believe that the river was so polluted back then when it's so clean now -- hard to imagine. We really have come a long way. Cleveland rocks!!!

I hope Mark's next novel will come out soon.

Come and see us in Cleveland!

This is a pleasant read. It's an ecelctic mix of essays around the subject of food. I have pulled out a few essays for my husband's kids to read, to show them how some other people in the world approach the dinner table. Long after having read it, I still think about some of the essays and I will be sure to pick it up and read it again sometime. If you like this genre of writing, you'll enjoy this little book.

I thoroughly enjoyed We Are What We Ate. With few exceptions, the stories were endearing, funny, and very, very real. I loved the tribute to junk food and the touching memoir of the onion pie. A mouth-watering, heart-touching treasure, profits from this book also benefit Save Our Strength, an anti-hunger organization.

Mark Winegardner has followed his epic novel CROOKED RIVER BURNING with a fine collection of eleven stories that capture that that is essentially American. Going back to he Midwest of his youth, Winegardner, while seemingly straying from the mainstream with slightly out of normal characters, really does nail down things that are 'true of everybody.'

Winegardner's stories are well-paced, quickly developing his characters in a manner that makes them both reliable as narrators and recognizable in some way. The language flows smoothly with an excellent and varied vocabulary. Though Winegardner is the Director of the Creative Writing Department at Florida State University, nobody would lump any of these stories into the 'cookie-cutter MFA' variety.

Instead, his stories can be lumped together as efforts that burn with an energy, leading the reader to the conclusion, whether it be thrilling or not, at a rapid pace. While at times, it does not seem like an incredible amount is happening, the writing and tone keep the reader involved. That and a pretty sharp sense of humor, a fair amount of which could be considered black.

The collection opens with "Thirty Year Old Women Do Not Always Come Home." The story revolves around Harry, the proprietor of a bowling alley in the Cleveland area of Ohio, his two daughters, and a lane girl who ends up going AWOL the day she is to receive her first check.

Harry goes to visit his eldest daughter Debra for the opening of her new painting exhibit. Over dinner, Debra and her husband, whom Harry is not a fan of, explain that Harry might not be ready for her new muse; she paints nothing but phalluses. Harry ends up buying one of the paintings and having it shipped home in order to support his daughter. When he arrives home, Jane is out very late, and he has to come to the conclusion that the story title poses.

What he has a difficult time doing however, in an apparent way of dealing with his daughters no longer needing him, is letting go of the fact that his lane girl just quit. He goes to the extreme of driving out to the address she listed on her application, and calling the phone number of her former residence in Nevada numerous times trying to verify she was okay. Throughout all of this, Harry is also going on dates via the personal ad section of local papers in an attempt to find somebody for himself.

The story wraps up nicely with Debra having a baby and Harry realizing what a good father his son-in-law is, Jane moving in with the bartender at the bowling alley, the discover of a dead young woman turning out to not be the former lane girl, and Harry deciding that 'Someday, someone would hear what it was Harry Kreevich was really trying to say.'

The middle of the collection contain a trio of stories: The Visiting Poet, The Untenured Lecturer, and Keegan's Load, under the heading Tales of Academic Lunacy: 1991 - 2001. These cover, in great detail and insight, topics that very easily could have gone under easy stereotypes. The Visiting Poet goes after the professor bedding students issue; the Untenured Lecturer takes on the one-hit wonder professor; and Keegan's Load very adeptly handles the aging department head not being understood by a younger generation of professor's. Readers with friends who have received MFA's or are professors have undoubtedly heard comparable tales, but Winegardner makes each of the three stories seem like totally new concepts. He avoids the stereotypes and creates three dimensional characters and issues.

The final story in the collection, "Halftime," allows Winegardner to experiment a little. His main character, taking prescriptive medication seems to be falling apart right in front of the reader. Trying to determine if the events being written are truly occurring or just going on in the protagonist's mind creates an added sense of interest for the reader.

In each of the stories, Winegardner allows a bit of separation from his characters. While he develops them quickly, he never really pulls the reader inside their minds. It is this separation that allows the reader to believe that the actions they are reading could be true of everybody. What Winegardner does so well, is have his characters, no matter what is going on in their lives, positive or negative, keep hope. Here's hoping that he continues to write fiction in its shorter form in the future.

I first read Winegardner with his epic, brilliant novel CROOKED RIVER BURNING, a book I can't recomment highly enough. It was a pleasure, and even a shock, to see him as at home writing short stories as he is writing a big, visionary novel.

I'm not sure if there's any American writer who's been shortlisted as often for Best American and other prize anthologies and been overlooked by the annual judge. But it's important to note that the stories here that have had such attention--"Keegan's Load," "Song for a Certain Girl," "That's True of Everybody" (which appeared in TriQuarterly and is collected here as "The Untenured Lecturer") and "Ace of Hearts" are, as a group, as good a quartet of stellar stories as you're going to see from any writer the past five years.

I very rarely give 5 stars to books, but this one blew me away.

I grew up in the mid-west in the seventies. When I remember the hot, dry summers riding my banana seat bike, the neighbor kid on a skate board behind me holding on to the sissy bar, I can smell the air and I can feel the sweat on my skin from the hot sun. When I think about the muted screams of the neighbor kids yelling from their snow forts to ours - the ones we built out of the three feet of snow that fell the night before - I can feel the stinging cold and my itchy scalp from my sweaty matted hair under my stocking hat. While I didn't get married in high school ("Song for a Certain Girl"), I don't suffer from narcolepsy ("Halftime"), and my parents never owned a business ("Last Lovesong at the Valentine" and "Thirty Year Old Women Do Not Always Come Home"), I know that Winegardner gets it right: the mood, rhythm, and vibe of these stories ring true. I felt the stillness in the summer air when I read, "Ace of Hearts," the sun on my shoulders when I read "Song for Certain Girl," and I could hear the crickets at dusk when I read "Last Lovesong at the Valentine." At the heart of the collection are three stories set in academia. I'm not an academic. But I felt no less moved by Murtaugh's failures, as a parent and as a human, in "The Visiting Poet." These stories took me to a place I'd never been, but a place that I could have been a thousand times. And you don't have to be from the midwest to appreciate that. Highly recommended.

I guess all the refugee's of Miami U./ Oxford's "Monday Night Smoking and Drinking" from the early 80's are commenting here.

I knew Mark, I knew Jim, I knew Akers. I forget who's idea the trip was, but Akers was supposed to go before she had something come up. Some sort of poetry emergency. Anyway, Jim was/is a better writer than Mark, Akers was better than both, and doing a book about it was her idea. That's the way I remember it and I am bigger than any 2 of them.

The best thing I can say about Winegardner is that as a writer and original thinker he was very good looking.

I know Wingardner, and I know his road trip buddy, Jim. Trust me, Jim would have written a MUCH better story. Wingardner's prose is flat, his tone is at once snide and "gosh golly gee whiz," and he scripts himself as the hero in nearlly every chapter. I agree with the first reviewer that "Elvis Presley Boulevard" is more "Me, Glorious Me," which is a shame, given the potential richness of the material. Jim sent me a postcard of a fur-bearing trout from this trip, and the message on the back had more drama, wit and affection for the subject than this whole book.

Winegardner's later, amazing novels--The Veracruz Blues and Crooked River Burning--are the places to start reading this first-rate American writer. But this book really does give an intriguing taste of what this writer will do later. A smart, seminal American road trip, written with heart and verve.