Cardboard Gods - Softcover

Wilker, Josh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616200693 ISBN 13: 9781616200695

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2011

Synopsis

The 1970s was a decade marked by Vietnam, Watergate, counterculture, sexual liberation, and stadium rock. For author Josh Wilker, it was a time spent navigating a challenging childhood in which only his prized baseball card collection could give him unfailing faith that a winning season would one day present itself.

Wilker shares his heartbreakingly comic childhood, set adrift by hippie parents harboring utopian dreams, anchored by brotherly love, and buoyed by an obsession with our national pastime. In pitch-perfect prose, Wilker tells his unconventional story through the cards he collected, whose full-color images―of Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, Tom Seaver, Wade Boggs, and many lesser-known players―open each chapter and become the means for expressing all the fears, hopes, bewilderment, passions, and dreams of childhood. Cardboard Gods announces the arrival of a talented new voice in the stadium of big-league memoirs.

About this title

About the Author:

Josh Wilker writes about his life and his childhood baseball cards at www.cardboardgods.net. Since his first posting in 2006, his site has been featured in the New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times and on ESPN.com. He is a winner of the Howard Frank Mosher Prize for Short Fiction and has an MFA from Vermont College. He lives with his wife in Chicago.

From AudioFile:

Using the unlikely device of his childhood collection of baseball cards as a series of metaphors, Josh Wilker recounts his life growing up in a changing America. Narrator Jim Meskimen lends a likable credibility to the story, which began as a blog on the joys of baseball and its players. Wilker particularly delights in talking about little-known facts relating to lesser-known players from the 1970s and 1980s. The skillful part comes when he blends the world of baseball cards with his own successes and failures in coming-of-age, including his growing estrangement from his family. Meskimen's breezy, conversational style makes listeners feel Wilker's enthusiasms--from the heady delights of opening up a new packet of baseball cards in childhood to the delightful memories associated with them decades later. M.S. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1616200693
• ISBN 13: 9781616200695
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 243