Product Description

It is 1917 in rural New Hampshire when twelve-year-old Willard Babson and his father see a roadster slide into a ditch in front of them. "You know anybody can pull me out of here?" asks the tall young driver--and Willard realizes he's staring at Babe Ruth, the best left-hander in baseball.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1559742 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 48 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A chance meeting between a boy and his idol in 1917 leads to an even more exciting encounter years later, as Willard witnesses Ruth's 709th home run. Ages 7-10.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Grade 3-5?Hall pens a gentle tale of a time when both life and baseball were less complicated than they are today. In 1917, while 12-year-old Willard and his father are tending the sheep and geese near their New Hampshire farm, a roaring automobile slides into a ditch while trying to stop. The boy and his father use their ox team to pull out the roadster of the Boston Red Sox star pitcher Babe Ruth. Willard receives Ruth's glove as a gesture of appreciation and is forever a fan of the pitcher soon-to-turn slugger. The story follows the lives of Ruth on the ballfield and Willard as he matures into a man and raises a family. He meets the legendary star one last time in 1935 (he had a second meeting with him at Fenway Park in 1918), when he takes his daughter to Braves Field to watch the Bambino in one of his last games. Moser's graceful watercolor paintings are featured throughout the book and are similar in style to his works in Richard Wilbur's A Game of Catch (Harcourt, 1994) and Willie Morris's A Prayer for the Opening of the Little League Season (Harcourt, 1995). Shelve this title with the chapter books where it's most likely to get in the hands of its intended audience.?Tom S. Hurlburt, La Crosse Public Library, WI
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Gr. 4^-6, younger for reading aloud. You hear a lot of twaddle about how baseball unites generations, but as with most cliches, there is a resonant truth in there somewhere, if only the speaker or writer or illustrator has the talent to reinvent it.

Hall and Moser have the talent to do just that. There is nothing remarkable about this story: a 12-year-old New Hampshire farm boy and his father, both avid baseball fans, are herding their geese across a country road one day when a slick roadster swerves to avoid the animals and winds up in the ditch. Yes, the driver of the roadster just happens to be Babe Ruth, star pitcher of the Boston Red Sox and young Willard's favorite player. The Babe gives Willard a baseball glove, and the family myth is begun. Years of Babe worship follow, extending even beyond the unfathomable trade of Ruth to the hated Yankees and encompassing a new generation, in the form of Willard's daughter, Ruthie (that's right, named after the Babe). What lifts all this beyond twaddle is Hall's ear and Moser's eye for detail. We feel and see the way the world was then--before television, before cyberspace--when the rhythm of the seasons had tangible meaning and when baseball talk was a good way to get through the harsh New England winter. Moser's nostalgic but never cloying full-page watercolors, characteristically sharp despite the abundance of earth tones, give Hall's carefully chosen words additional life. But despite the nostalgia, both words and pictures draw their energy from the sense of universality they bring to the experience of hero worship. We all need the power of myth to endure the dreariness of quotidian life, and for many of us, it is sports stars, from Achilles to Babe Ruth to Michael Jordan, who supply what we most crave. Bill Ott

Customer Reviews

A REAL Field of Dreams: Excellent Baseball Story
This book is as leisurely paced as a day at the ballpark, with the same quality of time passing yet standing still. It traces three generations of baseball fans, growing with the game, and their encounters with George Herman "Babe" Ruth. Baseball changes more slowly than the events around it: war, the Depression, marriage, birth, technology.

The love of baseball is transmitted from father to son to granddaughter, and it is in that slow but certain transmission that the author conveys the beauty of the game. No other sport treasures its history so much. No other major sport is so unconstrained (at least, theoretically) by time.

Donald Hall has written an unhurried look at baseball, growth, and decline. We meet the young Babe Ruth as a star southpaw for the Red Sox, then follow (with the New Hampshire family portrayed here) repeated years of father-son baseball games, rooting for the Babe as he keeps breaking his own home run record, and then, briefly, the Babe's last, uncompleted year in baseball. Between the lines we see the dimmest outlines of a flawed man. The book is both a sentimental evocation of a New England family's enchantment with baseball, and an unstudied meditation on the passage of time.

Of course, the above is from an adult perspective. Elementary school kids (and older) will enjoy the depiction of times past, the two encounters with the young and the older Babe, and, most of all, the outstanding illustrations by Barry Moser. Like baseball, it can seem a little slow, but if you have the time and the inclination, the book will envelop you like an old familiar glove.

A HOMER FOR YOUNG READERS
Master woodcutter Moser's brilliantly conceived watercolors recreate rural New Hampshire in 1917. It was a simpler time, when there was a baseball game between the single men and the married men. For young Willard Babson the game and ice cream were the highlights of his day.

When Willard and his father come upon a roadster that had slid into a ditch, the boy was amazed to find the driver was the most outstanding left-hander in baseball - Babe Ruth.

Great book for kids
My 8 year old son, who normally hates to sit down and read, actually sat down and read this book cover to cover in one sitting. He is a big Babe Ruth fan, which I'm sure helped, but I would definitely recommend this book for any baseball fan.