Brittle Innings Author:Michael Bishop For seventeen-year-old Danny Boles, the summer of 1943 will be a season to remember. With the country at war, professional baseball needs able-bodied men. And the Highbridge Hellbenders, a class C minor-league team in the Chattahoochee Valley League, need a shortstop. Danny's a scrappy player with one minor quirk: a violent encounter on the ... more »train to Georgia has rendered him mute.
Danny's new roommate is the Hellbender's power-hitting first baseman, an erudite seven-foot giant names Jumbo Hank Clerval. Over the course of a hot pennant race, the unlikely roommates form a special kinship. As the season comes to a dramatic - and ultimately violent - close, Danny realizes that Hank is not an ordinary man, but something more complex...more mysterious than he'd ever imagined.
Brittle Innings is a brilliant evocation of a uniquely American drama: a season-long contest in which heroes are created and destroyed, and innocence is lost forever.« less