Sports - Fiction, Books at the Movies

For Love of the Game

Name: For Love of the Game
Author: Michael Shaara
ISBN: 9781574901924

by Michael Shaara

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Overview

Billy Chapel is a baseball legend, a man who has devoted his life to the game he loves and plays so well. But because of his unsurpassed skill and innocent faith, he has been betrayed. Now it's the final game of the season, and Billy's got one last chance to prove who he is and what he can do, a chance to prove what really matters in this life. A taut, compelling story of one man's coming of age, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME is Michael Shaara's final novel, the classic finish to a brilliantly distinguished literary career.

Billy Chapel is a pitcher who has given his life to the game he loves so well; a man who has retained the endearing qualities of youth; the last of the greatcompetitors in his ranks. Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Shaara calls upon hisintimate knowledge of baseball to create this exciting novel about pride, the fear of aging, and the time when a man's character is defined by the choices he makes.

About the Author, Michael Shaara

In the early 1950s, Michael Shaara published award-winning science fiction stories in the most popular pulp magazines of the day. He later began writing straight fiction and published more than seventy short stories in such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Playboy, and many others. His first novel, The Broken Place, was published in 1968. But it was a simple family vacation to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1966 that gave him the inspiration for his greatest achievement, The Killer Angels.

After seven years of research and rewrite, and then two years of rejections from publishers, The Killer Angels was finally published by Random House, later winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Michael Shaara went on to write two more novels, The Noah Conspiracy and For Love of the Game, which was published posthumously after his untimely death in 1988.

It was Shaara's son Jeff who found the manuscript of For Love of the Game among his father's many works, thus insuring another piece of the Michael Shaara legacy.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Reading this posthumously published baseball novel is best compared to watching a gifted young player whose promise slowly fades with every strikeout and weak groundball, despite occasional flashes of potential. Shaara, who won a Pulitzer in 1975 for The Killer Angels , died just after the book was finished, and one feels he might have liked to give it a rewrite. Just before the last game of the season, star pitcher Billy Chapel, a veteran of 17 years in the major leagues, discovers that his team plans to trade him. Moreover, he learns that his New York editor/girlfriend has inexplicably ended their romance--leaving him adrift and the reader more than a little indifferent. The love affair, seen in flashbacks notably a scene in which they achieve congress in a small airplane, must compete with an unhealthy number of baseball cliches and a series of featureless characters; even Billy, whose thoughts we share, seems a blank. The book does come to life, fittingly enough, as Chapel takes the mound for his final and greatest game. Shaara succeeds in conveying the extraordinary physical and psychological demands of the professional game as well as the dizzying pleasures of its triumphs. But even the account of Chapel's greatest victory is marred by a trite ending. While flawed, however, this is a noteworthy attempt to capture the simultaneous loss of a life's love and a life's obsession. May

Library Journal

Pulitzer Prize-winner Shaara's final work he died in 1988 is about a baseball player's final work. Billy Chapel, a great pitcher, is going to be traded after 17 years of service. He plans to end his career with this game, rather than accept this betrayal by his team's new owners. We follow him pitch by pitch through his perfect game, and memory by memory through his imperfect life. Cushioned by a children's game, he has never quite grown up, never taken the ultimate risk of trusting a relationship; the woman he loves is equally frightened of commitment. They come together now, when Billy has to go home, with no home to go to. As much a psychological novel as a baseball tale, this is a good choice for popular fiction collections.-- Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia.