Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

Webster's parents (now my inlaws!!) gave me this for Christmas last year and I just got around to it. After the baseball book I was feeling kind of uninspired about reading and thought this would get me back on track. Russo's Empire Falls had been one of my favorites.

Unfortunately this book did not hold my attention quite as well. It was about a man looking back at his life, focusing on his childhood relationships with a best friend and a girlfriend. The girlfriend becomes his wife and the best friend becomes estranged from the couple, and the book switches between past and present to detail how this threesome ends up where they are. Several marriages were explored, and the action takes place both in the U.S. as well as Italy.

Russo's writing is consistent: deeply-developed characters and great descriptions of time and place. However, the book was not as well-formed as Russo's other books and I didn't like the characters enough. Overall, not a win for me.

The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World by Joshua Prager

I liked this book, but wow, was it detailed. It took me weeks to get through (which is unusual for me) and at times I must admit to skimming some pages.

The story is about the 1951 National League pennant race where Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit a home run off Ralph Branca of the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the playoff game that brought the Giants into the World Series. Prager gives a great history of baseball in telling the story, describing well the role baseball played in America's psyche, particularly in New York.

One theme he explores is the sign-stealing that may have enabled Bobby Thomson's home run. His style was to stipulate early in the book that there was spying, then weave extensive biographical information about all the characters in the story, including the electrician who first set up the sign-stealing system and the bat boy who slapped hands with Thomson after his homer. Prager also focused on the archtypes of the "hero and goat" that Thomson and Branca took on, following their lives after the game.

Overall, I liked the book and found many of the themes very accessible. Sign-stealing brought to mind last season's Patriots. And Ralph Branca became to Brooklyn what Bill Buckner had been to Boston. I loved how well Prager described New York's attachment to baseball. I just thought the detail in some cases was a little overwhelming and I could have done without the 100+ pages of endnotes as an airport read.