|
Paul Hemphill is an author from Birmingham, Alabama, who has written books focusing on both the the south and on baseball (The Nashville Sounds, The Heart of the Game: The Education of a Minor League Ballplayer, among others). Hemphill’s first novel, Long Gone, is raunchy, and kind of low brow, befitting the characters in the book, but it is also a fun look at life in the deep south in the fifties and life in the Alabama-Florida League. Being no book reviewer, I’ll let the jacket’s liner notes tell you more: This raunchy Novel with a heart of gold is about love and loss of innocence at the bottom of the most minor league in baseball – The Alabama-Florida League, Class D, in the summer of 1956. Specifically, it is the story of Cecil B. « Stud » Cantrel, a 39 year old maverick sour with promise gone bad, once a rising star with the Yankees and now, with shrapnel in one knee and a failing marriage behind him, the hard-drinking, womanizing player-manager for the Graceville Oilers: a man, and a team, in last place, literally and figuratively. But then Stud’s path crosses that of Jamie Weeks, a teenage second baseman who hitches from Birmingham into Graceville with nothing but his bat, his glove, and his spikes, his hopes and dreams, and a prepared speech. More important, Stud meets a determined young woman with the improbable name of Dixie Lee Box who refuses to be relegated to the status of Saturday-night recreation and who surprises Stud – and the rest of us – by making him fall in love with her. The disgraceful Oilers – partly through the efforts of Joe Louis (Jose) Brown, a black catcher masquerading as a Venezuelan to avoid retaliation by the Ku Klux Klan – begin, amazingly, to climb out of the cellar. The owner of the Oilers, the Reverend Q. Talmadge Ramey – a homosexual sometime used-car dealer, fertilizer czar, moonshine entrepreneur, and evangelist DJ for station WGOD in Graceville – even stops threatening to cancel Stud’s contract. Suddenly it appears that Stud has a chance at a kind of innocence and promise again, until men and events conspire to show him that even this last chance is long gone. Long Gone is long out of print, but you can get a hardbound copy for for either Long Gone, or Paul Hemphill. A listing of bookstores with copies will be returned along with the price the store is going to charge. Complete the info and an email is sent to the store. They will contact you back with purchasing information. I’ve bought many hard to find books here and highly recommend the site! |
|
Long Gone: A Novel by Paul Hemphill
|
|
Long Gone: A Novel by Paul Hemphill set in the AFL
|