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 One of the best books I've read in a long time Mar 29, 2010
By Lectrix alata
This book is now among my favorites. I heartily recommend it to anyone who is old enough to appreciate looking backward and trying to fit together the pieces of one's life. On one level, it is just an amazingly interesting book: it covers a wide range of topics and always pulls me in to the author's own absorption in whatever he turns to next. On deeper levels, though, I think maybe it's a masterpiece. One doesn't tend to realize how much philosophy and intellectual rigor is there, hiding under the surface of these essays, until the entire work begins to take shape in the mind and heart of the reader. It's continually touching and often very moving to follow this writer's journey-- looking back over his life and trying to make sense of the little moments and the emotions. I think that's what we all come to, at some point in our lives, if we live long enough and are honest with ourselves. I especially admire the way that he uses objects--things--as a way into his memories and emotions. This develops into a creative way of opening his memories, but it also makes his stories memorable to me, as well, because I can picture that old baseball glove or his newspaper clippings. I have similar objects that hold mysterious keys to my childhood, too. But this writer is relentless in confronting not only his memories but his mistaken memories, and in treating both as revelatory, he attempts to understand the essence of what memory IS, of what a place IS to the heart, of how we build our identities over time out of what happened and what didn't happen. The cumulative effect makes this book one of the most enlightening, as well as fascinating, reads that I could ever want. I noticed that Amazon.com asked, "Are you over 13?" before it allowed me to write this review, and I think that's probably an especially good idea in regard to this book, because I suspect that readers younger than 40 or 50 may simply "not get" its profundity. Even so, I think it ought to be a fascinating experience for any reader interested in narratives and the art of writing a memoir.
A review (excerpted) from Aethlon, by Richard C. Crepeau Mar 27, 2010
By James S. Baumlin
"James S. Baumlin"
Prof. Richard C. Crepeau of the University of Central Florida reviewed Jim's book, "The Heroes Have Gone," in Aethlon: A Journal of Sport Literature (May 2008)[...]. The following is excerpted from Crepeau's review:
Those who have heard the voice of Jim Corder will hear it again in these five essays and one poem contained in this delightful, thoughtful and, at times, profound little collection. The voice and accent were from West Texas, as was the man. West Texas also provided the bedrock of his view of the world. The pen and ink drawings illustrating these essays are Jim Corder's doing....
The opening essay "The Glove" starts with Corder's recollection of his first baseball glove and the circumstances of its Christmas appearance in the later years of the Great Depression. Over the course of some eighty pages, Corder walks through his childhood, commenting on most everything imaginable out of his West Texas life: his parents, his brother, his hometown of Jayton, population 638, and, of course, his first glove, later gloves, his brother's glove and other gloves he came know and see.
That is but the surface. While commenting on the books he read as a child and the world revealed by the local newspaper, Corder seeks the sources of his values, his perceptions and misperceptions of the world in which he was living and growing into an adult. He writes of baseball and language and his heroes and what they may have taught him about life. He reflects on his wife and their relationship, his two daughters with whom he did not play catch and his son with whom he did. He talks of softball and his preference for slow pitch over fast pitch, his views on basketball and football and his feelings about the 1994 baseball strike.
In the end, all this is much more than the sum of its parts. It is a marvelous meandering through memories, some real, some distorted and some without any perceived grounding in reality. It is an attempt to find the stuff of one's identity that is about as puzzling a task as a human can take up. Or so it seems.
In "Making Las Vegas," Corder talks of his many trips to that city with his wife. He ponders what his love of Las Vegas may say about himself and about the human attachment to place. In Vegas he has his rituals, his favorite places and even his favorite slot machines. He avoids the poker tables as he finds the people at them too serious. He finds the poker machines much more congenial.
He asks: "What makes a place a place? When does a place become a place? How do you know when you get there?" (p.159) By the time you digest all the descriptions of Vegas and think about all the sociology, geography, theology and Eastern philosophy that Corder cites, you begin to understand the significance of these questions, not to mention the significance of the title of this essay.
In "World War II on Cleckler Street," Corder recalls the war as he saw it as a child and contrasts it with the war he came to understand as an adult. He spent most of the war years on Cleckler Street in Fort Worth at a time when comic books occupied a central place in his life. He saw the war through the actions of the superheroes and through the movies he watched. It was a war of simple truths and obvious villains, fought with courage and precision by decent American boys, and it was without consequences for the civilian populations.
When Corder served in the military and spent several years in Germany in the post-war years, he saw the consequences of the war for the ordinary people who were caught in its path. He learned that the war he had seen in the comics and in Time, Life and Look had no relationship to reality, unless it was an inverse one. He came to regret that he was ever attracted to war stories or to war. As an antidote, Corder tells us, he repeatedly turned to accounts of the Battle of Verdun, the horror chamber of the First World War.
Corder revisits the meaning of manhood that he learned as a boy and finds that he never measured up. He never learned to face pain stoically, to "prove himself" in athletic competition or to accept the notion that the best place to prove yourself as a man is in war. He tells us that these failures always embarrassed him but that he had a determination to leave competition, war and these distorted definitions of manhood behind. And he tells us he's not sure he can.
In "The Heroes Have Gone from the Grocery Store," Jim Corder seeks to solve one of the great mysteries of his life. Why is it that he clearly remembers that Dizzy Dean was on a Wheaties Box, describing the details of his greatest day in sports, namely the final game of the 1934 World Series? Why does he remember cutting that narrative off the box and placing it in his scrapbook? Why does he remember it so clearly? In point of fact, Dizzy Dean was never on a Wheaties Box and Wheaties never had a feature on their boxes titled, "My Greatest Day in Sports." The quest to solve this mystery is a marvelous exploration of memory and its deceptions....
1 of 2 found the following review helpful:
A Great Book to Read Apr 02, 2008
By KF
This is a great book to read. The author illustrates the essence of creative nonfiction and provides factual information in an interesting way. I loved how the author was able to grab the reader's attention with vivid descriptions and details. This allowed the reader to follow the author's journey in life, his passion for baseball, and the journey of the glove. It was interesting to see how the author was able to use a simple object and turn it into several stories that helped represent his life and define who he was.
0 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 Reads like rants, which were not well thought out May 19, 2009
By I. Flasterstein
"reading lover"
This is a boring book, that reads less like essays with insight from the author and more like rants. He goes into different subjects, without ever letting the reader know, why he chose to focus on that subject. this book was published for him, after his death, and honestly thats the way it reads, like a bunch of rants which were not revised and i find it hard to believe that anyone would enjoy reading this book.
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