Dark Wood Research Articles

A View From the Bridge

A View From the Bridge

Macrophomina phaseolina associated with grapevine decline in Iran

Grapevines exhibiting general decline symptoms were observed in July 2012 in Arbatan, a region in Marand county, north-western Iran. Leaf necrosis symptoms were also observed in affected grapevines. Dark brown necrotic lesions and wood discoloration were observed in the vascular tissues of affected cordons. Fungal isolates, all with similar cultural and morphological features, were obtained from symptomatic tissues. Morphological characteristics indicated that the isolates were Macrophomina phaseolina . Sequence analysis of the elongation factor (EF-1α) gene from isolates confirmed this identification, with 100% similarity to the reference M. phaseolina sequences obtained from GenBank. Pathogenicity assays of two M. phaseolina isolates on 2-year-old potted vines (cv. ‘Keshmeshi’) demonstrated that M. phaseolina was pathogenic on grapevine. This study confirmed the association of M. phaseolina with grapevine decline symptoms, and represents the first report of this fungus associated with grapevine trunk diseases in Iran.

Lisbon, June 2016: A Brief, Very Personal History of Portuguese Literature in Three Mind Paintings

Lisbon, June 2016:A Brief, Very Personal History of Portuguese Literature in Three Mind Paintings Peter LaSalle (bio) 1. Pensão Brasil-África I've been in Lisbon for a few days. And now I am stretched out on the bed, still dressed and reading from Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, nine at night. Then maybe I just place the book beside me on the made bed. I doze off, to awake an hour or so later, having slipped into an easy dream, soon dissolving. Alone, I am staying in the Pensão Brasil-África. ________ A modest but quite homey place on a short side street, the Brasil-África occupies the top floor of an old apartment building. It has an ornate blue-and-white tile facade and iron-railed balconies rife with well-watered geraniums. I like how the location is central, a few blocks away from the entirely regal esplanade of the Praça do Comércio, which opens up to a fine panorama of the wide River Tagus. Waking, it takes me a little time to get oriented, realize exactly where I am. I suppose I know that one of the small pleasures of travel is to wake in a room in an unfamiliar place, almost still in the dream you were having (was it something about Marion—or I'll call her that here—a woman from Baton Rouge who I sometimes wonder if maybe I should have married when young; we'd met as students at a summer writers' conference to which I'd received a scholarship; I remember we joked, laughingly back then, agreeing that with romance so rampant among attendees, most any writers' conference, such as ours in the rolling green hills of Vermont, probably had more to do with just that—romance, all but scenarios from the old TV show The Love Boat—than what normally constitutes writing-workshop instruction), yes, there is a feeling half jarring but half soothing as well, to coming out of sleep that way with a sense of disorientation, even a soft lostness, looking around, asking yourself where in the world you are . . . until you do, in fact, recognize enough of the surroundings to return once more to what commonly passes for the here and now. I slowly pivot and sit up on the bed's edge in the spacious, high-ceilinged room. [End Page 131] I look around some more. There's a single lamp on the night table, glowing, a glossy orange porcelain base and conical parchment shade; there are the bedspread's bright pastel stripes, the cracked yellow walls and the brown linoleum floor, the heavy Portuguese furniture, such dark wood for the huge armoire and the vanity/desk with its clouded mirror, a couple of intricately carved, straight-backed chairs to match. There are the long gauzy curtains on either side of the open French doors that give way to a balcony here on the top floor, the fourth, as reached by winding wooden stairs, creaky. And fully awake now, I do know for certain where I, well, am. I'm wearing old khakis and a long-sleeve dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the collar open, my usual travel attire. Sweating a bit in the warmth, I think of Marion from Baton Rouge some more, wondering why she chose this time and place to turn up in a dream when I hadn't thought of her for so long. I stare at the paperback that I'd let drop beside me when I dozed off, a copy of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet; it's more or less the reason why I am here in Lisbon for these two weeks, rereading and thinking about the work of Pessoa, others in Portuguese literature, too. I've been doing a lot of this kind of travel lately, going to a place where literature I love is set, immersing myself in the world of the words of the other country for a while. And this time it is, very much so, Pessoa, the great modernist poet of twentieth-century Portuguese literature. He died in 1935 at age...

Paradox in the Woods: The Twin Destiny of Elves and Men in the Forests of Beleriand

Abstract In J. R. R. Tolkien’s tales set in the fictional region of Beleriand, the paradox of a union between immortal and mortal beings, and all that this dichotomy implies, is consistently reflected in wooded settings. At the same time, we can also discern a general direction, which will eventually bring both Elves and Men out of the dark woods and into the light in a symbolical process of enlightenment. However, the woods in the tales reflect both pitfalls and promises, making it impossible to interpret this natural environment as unequivocally positive or negative, but a mixture of both. Tolkien’s stance towards trees and forests can thus be seen as realistic rather than escapist in these tales.

“In My End Is My Beginning”

A vertical reading of the Commedia exposes Dante's practice of continually revising his text, such that it looks back on itself as it moves forward. The poet accomplishes this in part through dramatic contrasts and reversals. One way to follow these “repetitions-with-difference” is to observe their relationship with a theme that Dante explores throughout his career: loss. The loss of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova becomes the loss of Florence in Dante's works written in exile. It then becomes the spiritual desolation explored among those in the Inferno who have lost “the good of the intellect.” Looking back from the end of the Commedia, however, reveals that what has been lost is eventually found in a new form. In the beatific “white rose” of Paradise we recall the “dark wood” of the poem's opening; when Beatrice is no longer by the pilgrim's side in the Empyrean we remember the tragic disappearance of Virgil on the top of Mount Purgatory; anticipating the joys of the City of God not only mitigates the pain of Dante's Florentine exile but also gives the poet a foretaste of true citizenship.

From Hollywood to Norway and back again: The transnational horror film and Norwegian directors in America

Abstract In the nearly fifteen years since the release of Villmark (Dark Woods), the Norwegian horror genre has been a regular cinema attraction in Norway. In the same period, many directors who made their mark in Norwegian horror have been hired for work in American film. In this article, I argue that the genre sensibility that these directors have displayed, a fairly new characteristic of Norwegian cinema, is the reason their services have been wanted in Hollywood.

Geographic origin and individual assignment of Shorea platyclados (Dipterocarpaceae) for forensic identification.

The development of timber tracking methods based on genetic markers can provide scientific evidence to verify the origin of timber products and fulfill the growing requirement for sustainable forestry practices. In this study, the origin of an important Dark Red Meranti wood, Shorea platyclados, was studied by using the combination of seven chloroplast DNA and 15 short tandem repeats (STRs) markers. A total of 27 natural populations of S. platyclados were sampled throughout Malaysia to establish population level and individual level identification databases. A haplotype map was generated from chloroplast DNA sequencing for population identification, resulting in 29 multilocus haplotypes, based on 39 informative intraspecific variable sites. Subsequently, a DNA profiling database was developed from 15 STRs allowing for individual identification in Malaysia. Cluster analysis divided the 27 populations into two genetic clusters, corresponding to the region of Eastern and Western Malaysia. The conservativeness tests showed that the Malaysia database is conservative after removal of bias from population subdivision and sampling effects. Independent self-assignment tests correctly assigned individuals to the database in an overall 60.60−94.95% of cases for identified populations, and in 98.99−99.23% of cases for identified regions. Both the chloroplast DNA database and the STRs appear to be useful for tracking timber originating in Malaysia. Hence, this DNA-based method could serve as an effective addition tool to the existing forensic timber identification system for ensuring the sustainably management of this species into the future.

The fungal composition of natural biofinishes on oil-treated wood

BackgroundBiofinished wood is considered to be a decorative and protective material for outdoor constructions, showing advantages compared to traditional treated wood in terms of sustainability and self-repair. Natural dark wood staining fungi are essential to biofinish formation on wood. Although all sorts of outdoor situated timber are subjected to fungal staining, the homogenous dark staining called biofinish has only been detected on specific vegetable oil-treated substrates. Revealing the fungal composition of various natural biofinishes on wood is a first step to understand and control biofinish formation for industrial application.ResultsA culture-based survey of fungi in natural biofinishes on oil-treated wood samples showed the common wood stain fungus Aureobasidium and the recently described genus Superstratomyces to be predominant constituents. A culture-independent approach, based on amplification of the internal transcribed spacer regions, cloning and Sanger sequencing, resulted in clone libraries of two types of biofinishes. Aureobasidium was present in both biofinish types, but was only predominant in biofinishes on pine sapwood treated with raw linseed oil. Most cloned sequences of the other biofinish type (pine sapwood treated with olive oil) could not be identified. In addition, a more in-depth overview of the fungal composition of biofinishes was obtained with Illumina amplicon sequencing that targeted the internal transcribed spacer region 1. All investigated samples, that varied in wood species, (oil) treatments and exposure times, contained Aureobasidium and this genus was predominant in the biofinishes on pine sapwood treated with raw linseed oil. Lapidomyces was the predominant genus in most of the other biofinishes and present in all other samples. Surprisingly, Superstratomyces, which was predominantly detected by the cultivation-based approach, could not be found with the Illumina sequencing approach, while Lapidomyces was not detected in the culture-based approach.ConclusionsOverall, the culture-based approach and two culture-independent methods that were used in this study revealed that natural biofinishes were composed of multiple fungal genera always containing the common wood staining mould Aureobasidium. Besides Aureobasidium, the use of other fungal genera for the production of biofinished wood has to be considered.

Hauntings: a performance by Tessa Carr and Deanna Shoemaker

"Hauntings: a performance by Tessa Carr and Deanna Shoemaker." Text and Performance Quarterly, 37(1), pp. 84–85

Differential diagnosis of hyponatraemia: moving forward?

Hyponatraemia is a resident’s nightmare. A water balance disorder disguised as decreased serum sodium concentration. A plethora of diagnostic algorithms seem to have been developed with the sole purpose of getting you lost as quickly as possible. Nothing but untrustworthy parameters to guide you through this dark wood. And when you finally see light at the end of the tunnel, there is always some staff member, alias electrolyte aficionado, who enjoys public interrogation and makes you feel you are back to square one. [...]

Characterisation of Silicon Carbide from Dark Red Meranti Wood

Porous biomorphic silicon carbide is a promising ceramic materials for used in wide variety of applications especially in filtration and separation. Wood derived silicon carbide retains the heterogeneous structure of initial wood. Silicon carbide ceramic was derived from Dark Red Meranti wood precursor in this study. The derivation process was prepared by reaction between liquid silicon and carbon preform. The carbon preform was obtained via pyrolysis process at 850 °C in Argon gas flow atmosphere. This process was followed by Si infiltration at 1500 °C for different holding hours. The density was determined using Archimedes method. SEM was performed to observe their microstructures while the compositions and phase analysis were analysed by EDX and XRD respectively. Thermogravimetric analysis showed that a major weight loss of about 60% of carbon perform due to the decomposition of cellulose and lignin.XRD results revealed the presence of SiC and excess of silicon. It was found that conversion efficiency of carbon into SiC has been improved when the holding time was increased.

Deep Waters

Deep Waters

From Sacred Grove to Dark Wood to Re-enchanted Forest (Part I)

Many human cultures have venerated forests and trees. I argue that the ubiquity of arborphilia across hemispheres, wherever forests have existed, suggests an evolutionary process that allowed adaptation to such arboreal realms throughout the world. Because trees in their constant recycling through the seasons evoke the ambivalence associated with death and renewal, paradoxical perceptions of forests and trees have coexisted throughout history. Depending on the era and culture, such attitudes about forests and groves have ranged from viewing them as hallowed sanctuaries deserving of protection from desecration, to fearing them as places inhabited by Satan or demonic spirits (explored in Part I), to appreciating them as not only aesthetically worthy but crucial for human survival (explored in Part II). An ecocritical examination of some of the many ways that tree veneration has been expressed culturally—through music, poetry, folktales, literature, film, and even jokes and advertising—reveals that loving trees provides a fundamental root for neo-romantic environmental ethics.

From Sacred Grove to Dark Wood to Re-enchanted Forest (Part II)

Many human cultures have venerated forests and trees. I argue that the ubiquity of arborphilia across hemispheres, wherever forests have existed, suggests an evolutionary process that allowed adaptation to such arboreal realms throughout the world. Because trees in their constant recycling through the seasons evoke the ambivalence associated with death and renewal, paradoxical perceptions of forests and trees have coexisted throughout history. Depending on the era and culture, such attitudes about forests and groves have ranged from viewing them as hallowed sanctuaries deserving of protection from desecration, to fearing them as places inhabited by Satan or demonic spirits (explored in Part I), to appreciating them as not only aesthetically worthy but crucial for human survival (explored in Part II). An ecocritical examination of some of the many ways that tree veneration has been expressed culturally—through music, poetry, folktales, literature, film, and even jokes and advertising—reveals that loving trees provides a fundamental root for neo-romantic environmental ethics.

Music, Movement, and Word at the American Shakespeare Center

Music, Movement, and Word at the American Shakespeare Center Pamela Royston Macfie (bio) While attending A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry VI, Part I, and The Winter’s Tale this season at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, I found myself haunted by words that close another play. In the final act of The Merchant of Venice Lorenzo muses that “soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony.” In the moonlit space of Portia’s gardens Lorenzo, reading the star-fretted sky as if it were a score, links the music produced by the turning spheres with that created by human voice and instrument. We cannot hear the singing orbs. We can, however, note their earthly equivalents, whose harmonies transform our very nature. Lorenzo crowns his celebration of the earth’s “concord of sweet sounds” with an imperative that is both immediate and mysterious: “Mark the music.” Music is a vital part of this company’s offerings, and this year “marking the music” enlivened all three productions. Through the magic of music this company engages their audience’s imagination even before a play begins. From the gallery above the stage the actors present songs before each performance and again at the interval. They play guitars and fiddles, drums and tambourines, saxophone and bass (to say nothing of tabor and pipe). They sing together and alone. Their sets establish mood and movement within the audience: some people dance in the aisles; some raise a familiar chorus; everyone claps to the beat. In course, when the plays call for a catch or a ballad, for satyr dance, funeral dirge, or fairy benediction, the company’s energies keep perfect time. Their energies also confirm the promise informing Lorenzo’s directive. To mark the music is to be open to revelation. At the American Shakespeare Center, in the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare’s death, to mark the music is to realize the importance of hearing Shakespeare. Early modern Londoners did not talk of going to see a play. Like Hamlet anticipating the performance of “The Mousetrap,” they said they were to “hear a play.” When A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Puck discovers Nick Bottom and his homespun cohort rehearsing “Pyramus and Thisbe” in the fairy forest, he thrills that he will be “an auditor” and, perhaps, “an actor too.” Noting these cues, the American Shakespeare Center emphasizes the primacy of what we hear in the theatre over what we see. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival will introduce contemporary translations of certain plays during the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death. The ASC sustains a different conviction: Shakespeare’s language will move its audience. A beautiful reconstruction of Shakespeare’s indoor playhouse at the [End Page 354] Blackfriars, this company’s modern facility is lit by candelabra suspended from its oak ceiling and sconces fixed to its paneled walls. In this setting the ASC re-creates the intimacy of the space where Shakespeare’s company performed during the winter months. Bolstered by universal lighting rather than lighting projected onto the stage, that intimacy permits its actors to engage their audience, and the audience to become part of the play: Peter Quince requires a young woman perched on a gallant stool to consult an almanac (so he may know when the moon shines); Joan of Arc challenges those seated front and center to hiss her curses out of hearing; a shepherd conjuring a tempest directs those “gallants” seated on one side of the stage to toss like waves and those seated opposite to roar. Beginning with each performance’s musical prelude and running to its final speech, the American Shakespeare Center’s players connect with their audiences to release the insistent charge of Shakespeare’s words. Universal magic was released in Ralph Cohen’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Conjuring the fairy forest from the play’s loveliest language, Cohen countered recent interpretations of its green world as an anarchic wilderness. In 2013 Julie Taymor created at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience a dark wood she compared to the savage island in The Lord of the Flies. In 2015 Nick Bagnall interpreted the wood at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre as...

Novel color stabilization concepts for decorative surfaces of native dark wood and thermally modified timber

Abstract UV and visible light exposure of dark colored wood and thermally modified timber (TMT) is strongly connected with discoloration and photobleaching of the respective wood surfaces. Conventional and nanoscale UV absorbers as well as radical scavengers (HALS), mainly effective for the protection of softwood and bright hardwood, were found to be improper for the light stabilization of dark wood surfaces. In the current work discoloration mechanisms are discussed considering the role of wood extractives and the sensitivity of dark colored wood types to visible light and results are presented which were obtained by applying novel protecting systems for the light stabilization of transparently coated surfaces from dark colored wood types and TMT.

KEEPING WATCH

1 2 3 R K E E P I N G W A T C H H O P E C O U L T E R My parents in their seventies sat in a thicket near the shore, where they watched for waterthrush, heron, and owl – or just watched, in green gloom descrying roots, splayed vines, and one fritillary wavering by a water oak smothered in fern. At their feet the shadows stirred and became a dark, thick rope: a cottonmouth ‘‘big around as my arm, and six feet long,’’ my mother said later. ‘‘Seven,’’ corrected my father. What gets me is how they sat quietly, so calm, side by side, so trusting – like Hansel and Gretel in their dark wood, like Becky and Tom in the cave – till it summoned its muscly length and slithered away. They stepped with care on the path as they left. With care they came back the next day. The gaze of the old is wide, unafraid. ‘‘Is it you,’’ it asks, ‘‘new lump, twinge, mole? Is it you, swerving headlights in the night? Snake, how about you? Will yours be the white, yawning mouth of my death?’’ ...

Słowiańsko-germańska tragifarsa literacka – post(-)kolonialna konfrontacja wschodu i zachodu w twórczości Andrzeja Stasiuka

In the article I look at the confrontation between East and West in the works of Andrzej Stasiuk through the context of post colonialism – both understood as an original cultural diagnosis and as a method of reading the writer’s works. Firstly, mythologizing “little homeland”, secondly, designing “the great motherland” of Central Europe, Stasiuk finally made a step toward describing and confronting Polish (Slavic, Central European) and German (Western) cultural and psychological experience (plays Night. Slavo-Germanic medical tragifarce, Dark Woods and the quasi-travelogue book Dojczland). The latter works are examples of cross-border stories in which ethnic clichés (auto- and heterostereotypes) resulting from centuries-old relationship became not only the main literary subject but also a creative method, with the help of humour and irony, as well as provocation.

Reading Roberts’s The Haunted Mirror

Reading Roberts’s The Haunted Mirror Jessica M. Nickel The stories within Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s The Haunted Mirror work together to form a complete whole; they work so well, in fact, that one may even call the collection a spiritual bildungsroman. Throughout The Haunted Mirror, Roberts weaves together tropes connecting life and death: sometimes, she introduces a spiritual death and rebirth; often, she writes of the death of an old self as it makes way for the new. She tackles the very obvious death of the flesh in her story, “Death at Bearwallow,” the tale of Dave Nally, who encounters death both as a boy and a young man. The contrast between the two instances of death helps illuminate Dave’s coming-of-age at the same time that it is used to tell a story of true love and the tragedy of its loss. “Death at Bearwallow” juxtaposes the death of old Terry Polin and that of a young woman, Valeria. It centers on Dave Nally, who finds himself lost in the dark woods after visiting his grandmother and who then enters the home of Terry Polin, only to find him on his deathbed. Dave sits in a corner on the floor, drifting in and out of sleep, hearing the voices of Mulligan and Scruggs, the two who stand watch over the dying man. When the time finally comes to read the Prayer for the Departing, Dave runs from the house, back into the darkness. The story then switches to that of Valeria’s death years later, when Dave is asked to spend the night watching over her corpse. He does so, but while there, he is reminded of his time spent in Terry Polin’s house. Dave drifts in and out of clarity of thought as he feels he is Terry Polin lying on his deathbed. He then hears the Prayer for the Departing—whether in memory or in actuality—and he leaves the room, heading outside into the darkness. By the end of Valeria’s tale, the darkness, once threatening and unpredictable, is described as simply being complete. Campbell and Foster aptly describe the counterpoint Roberts employs in her story to “unify the two divisions” of “Death at Bearwallow” (232), suggesting that the experience of being near Terry Polin’s bedside is “so firmly imprinted on [Dave’s] memory that years later, as a grown young man, sitting by the corpse of a girl, Valeria, whom he has loved though she was engaged to another, the early experience becomes mingled (contrapuntally) with his present reverie” (233). While I believe Campbell and Foster misread Dave’s feelings for Valeria, they do correctly imply that the memory of Terry Polin profoundly affects Dave as a young man. McDowell further calls Dave’s dealing with Valeria’s death a “growth in spiritual [End Page 246] awareness” (34). Unlike Campbell and Foster, McDowell understands that the feelings Dave harbored for Valeria were not romantic but rather those of a deep understanding of a love between his friend, Bob, and Valeria, Bob’s fiancé. McDowell writes that Valeria “in her short life had developed a fullness of being which Dave has not yet reached; and the dying man … also had known moments of ecstasy as yet denied to the boy” (34). Further, he adds that “The death of these two people matters less than the promise of emotional fulfillment they extend to the living boy” (34). His assessment suggests that while Roberts utilizes the theme of death in her story, it is used only to illuminate Dave’s own ability to one day experience the same emotional fulfillment that both Terry Polin and Valeria enjoyed in their respectively long and short lives. From the start of “Death at Bearwallow,” one is met immediately with a sense of foreboding. The story begins, “He had been to see his grandmother” (159), which reads, in my estimate, like an in media res version of “Little Red Riding Hood” or perhaps a sequel to the Grimms’ tale. While the word “grandmother” often connotes feelings of comfort and safety, if one were to read this opening line with knowledge of “Little Red Riding Hood,” one might...

Going the Distance by Michael Joyce (review)

Reviewed by: Going the Distance by Michael Joyce Joseph Dewey Michael Joyce. Going the Distance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. 236 pp. Paper, $24.95. In our clearer-sighted moments, of course, we know there is no magic in baseball. Despite earnest magic realists intent on coating the national pastime with a thick patina of pixie dust, we know there really is no compelling spaciousness to the tight confines of a baseball field. If you were to jerry-rig a baseball field in some nondescript cornfield in, say, mid-Iowa, you might interest the local little-league team but not the thunder ghosts of Chicago’s Black Sox. Despite the legacy of baseball fictions that regularly traffic in the paranormal, baseball is actually played by men and women, at once heroic and imperfect, who deal with the hammer-strike intrusion of bad luck and the unexpected largesse of good fortune while making their way through the unpredictability of relationships, ultimately succumbing to the body’s grinding concessions to time, all the while agonizingly aware of the gravitational pull of mortality. They are, in fact, pretty much like the rest of us, save they can work a ball. There are no Yoda-managers or oracle-scouts; no exotic goddess-muses enchanting the bleachers; and no miracle bats. Not every ragtag collection of misfits melds into a championship team. The field of dreams is, as it turns out, more a field of seems. I mention this only because the opening set piece of Michael Joyce’s marvelous tour de force Going the Distance appears all too familiar. Jack Flynn, a pitching wunderkind who achieved fleeting celebrity for two championship seasons, is edging now into life after the game, his career threatened by a painful shoulder injury. It is midsummer, and Flynn has returned home to upstate New York. He is accompanied by a mysterious woman, at once supernal and carnal, a woman he does not know (cue the theremin). She is there, we are sure, to serve as his guide out of the depths, another avatar of the mysterious muse-angel (see Glenn Close or Susan Sarandon) sent by unknown cosmic energies to salvage an aging athlete. Joyce certainly knows his magic baseball [End Page 123] fiction—he plays on such expectations. But if he knows his Malamud and his Kinsella, he knows his Faulkner far better. Rather than the clichés of magic realism, we get a dense, deliberately conceived excavation into a wounded man executed in a supple, lyric prose line in which everyday objects lift effortlessly into the symbolic, a tale of a terrified man who finds himself at a crossroad, compelled finally in the dark woods of midlife to grapple with his past. Here is a deftly executed reconstruction of the emotional life—nonlinear and fragmentary, yes, but subtly coaxed into a satisfying portrait of a fascinating character, a man-child who happens to be an athlete, trapped, as we all are, in the heartbreaking impermanence of is. Completed more than twenty years ago, the text existed for years in the eccentric ether of digital archives, available as a download, where it occasioned generous plaudits. When the editors of Excelsior Editions, a trade imprint of the State University of New York Press, wisely released it in late 2013 as a handsome paperback edition, the book found a second life, ultimately being shortlisted for Spitball magazine’s prestigious Casey Award, which annually recognizes the best in baseball fiction. Although it is interested in broader ideas, the book surely succeeds amply as baseball fiction. Joyce, a distinguished academic, commands the imaginative brio to inhabit his jock, to re-create with stunning immediacy game moments (particularly Flynn’s single disastrous World Series mound appearance) as well as the goofy optimism of a young talent, the first brush with the magnitude of making it to the pros, and then the inevitable struggle with the body’s sudden surrender to mediocrity. The story line of Flynn’s love-hate relationship with a charismatic hitter named Wolfman, which culminates with Wolfman charging the mound when Flynn costs him a consecutive at-bat hits record, is as engaging as it is psychologically...