Reviews and Comments

The world's hegemonic culture is secularized Arab Muslim rather than secularized Euro Christian; and the forces of "modernity," immigration, and fundamentalist terrorism play out from there. Europe is corrupt, exotic, and underdeveloped. The Americas seem to belong to indigenous nation-states alone, although that is only implied.

A classic detective duo - the earnest senior partner and the rumpled, cynical, yet all-knowing sidekick - arrive from civilized North Africa to assist the authoritarian ... but religiously moderate ... Italian monarchy against the fanatical Aquinists. These terrorists want to revive what they imagine was a glorious premodern Christendom. And they really hate Jews.

The plot has a few twists and it didn't end how I expected. I loved some of the cultural puns in this alternate world. The writing, however, seemed barely edited. What I mean is some dialogue and descriptions were repeated almost word for word only a couple chapters apart, and there were even a couple typographic errors. Not a big deal though.

This book has funny, impressive, dark, and bizarre incidents on nearly every page for 316 pages. I didn't want the book or good times to end.

A few of the stories are famous even to non-baseball fans, like Ten Cent Beer Night, Dock Ellis's no-hitter on LSD, and Disco Demolition Night. But there are dozens and dozens more. (A 10 watt amateur radio station with exclusive broadcasting rights? The future MC Hammer spying on ballplayers? Fistfights in the team showers? Hot Pants Patrol? Wife-swapping pitchers? Oversized helmets for guys with afros?)

Besides the colorful anecdotes, the book highlights a lot of great but non-Hall of Fame players who don't get talked about as much these days. So the baseball content is just as good as the cultural material.

If you ever wonder if the United States has real culture of its own - whether the US is merely a site for other nationalities to bring their stuff while capitalism ruins everything fun - read this book.

It's a truism that to point out "all P.G. Wodehouse's plots are the same" is to miss the point by several miles. He was a virtuoso. You probably can't catch all the layers of humor and nimbleness in his prose in a single read-through anyway, so what's the difference if you read the plot more than once?

This particular book about Uncle Fred a.k.a. Uncle Dynamite was published more than seventy-five years ago, and I still laughed out loud.

One noteworthy bit is that Wodehouse, who is the omniscient narrator here (unlike in the Jeeves novels which are in Bertie Wooster's first-person perspective), freely uses the editorial "we" and gets a bit meta. One passage near the end heaps praise on the high moral fortitude of publishing houses. Another aside seems to describe his own sentence as "clever." Who could argue?

A content warning: this story, which was written right after WWII but set in the vague earlier heydey of the British upper class, refers frequently to "the natives" of colonized Africa and the Amazon jungle. The colonizer / "explorer" characters are ridiculed along with everyone else - but it's pretty dated, and something to be aware of.