Bookworm, no. 104
Stacey May Fowles reviews “From Bytown to the Big Leagues,” edited by Steve Rennie and Bill Nowlin. Ray Reid on Lee Kvern’s “Catch You on the Flipside.” Poetry by Maria Giesbrecht.
Dug Out
From Bytown to the Big Leagues: 150 Years of America’s Pastime in Canada’s Capital, Ottawa Baseball from 1865 to 2025
Edited by Steve Rennie and Bill Nowlin
Society for American Baseball Research
168 pages, softcover and ebook
On a hot July afternoon in 1920, the Ottawa-trained Urban Shocker was on the mound facing Babe Ruth. The future Hall of Famer had already established himself as an unstoppable force, and most pitchers played it safe with an intentional walk. In a bold move, Shocker motioned for his outfielders to come in closer, then he somehow managed to strike out the Bambino. Sharon Hamilton relays this “delightful piece of baseball theatre” in From Bytown to the Big Leagues, where sportswriters and historians take a comprehensive look at Ottawa baseball lore from 1865 to the present day.
Edited by Steve Rennie and Bill Nowlin, the essay collection shines when it leans in to the nostalgia-drenched storytelling that the game encourages, using newspaper accounts to meticulously reconstruct a magical, evolutionary period. In David McDonald’s “The Babe Comes to Town,” a swarm of kids pursues the Sultan of Swat and Lou Gehrig’s car through the streets of Hull, Quebec. Christopher Sailus’s “Baseball’s Ottawa-Born Maple Wood Revolution,” a brief but particularly entertaining entry, reveals the origins of the wood used to make Major League bats. David Gourlay’s “Reflections on the Ottawa Champions Baseball Club” shares a moving personal story about community, beginning with the author as an ’80s kid who saves his nickels and dimes to buy trading cards.
Because of the many contributions on one subject, the collection can become repetitive, but it does contain enough gems to make it a worthy acquisition for enthusiasts. With portraits of such past Ottawa Triple-A franchises as the Giants and the Lynx, along with the current Titans, the book goes deeper than the usual Blue Jays and Expos fare.
—Stacey May Fowles
Murder, She Wrote
Catch You on the Flipside
Lee Kvern
Enfield & Wizenty
252 pages, softcover
In Lee Kvern’s debut novel, Catch You on the Flipside, a snake-loving stalker, an aspiring artist, and a card-counting dissident walk into a casino. Rather than a goofy punchline, what follows is a tale that connects domestic violence in Calgary with political unrest in Manila. Through clever misdirection and suspenseful foreshadowing, Kvern shows that the flipside of a person is “not always what you think.”
In 1983, Amado Barcelona witnesses the assassination of Benigno Aquino, a prominent critic of the Filipino president, Ferdinand Marcos. Barcelona flees to lay low as a blackjack dealer in Alberta, where he meets a colourful cast of characters. There’s Elle, whose romantic vision of casino work has been “gradually stripped away by the regularity”; Erik, a Dutchman who only opens up when drunk, about “strictly casino gossip, never personal”; and Russell, who has “glacial eyes in combination with his acne-scarred cheeks.” Whether describing the plight of a country or a few seedy gamblers, Kvern renders these individuals with equal humanity and detail.
The book jumps between two subplots: the political fallout of Aquino’s death in the Philippines, and the lives of Amado’s acquaintances in Canada, which unfold over thirty years and include a murder. While the narrative threads are, at times, awkwardly cobbled together, each one suggests how small moments may lead to unforeseen ripple effects.
—Ray Reid
Poet’s Corner
Dear Sister, I’m Sorry
I found your body limp
like tulips
when I couldn’t obey
the earth
for you. Sorry for Father’s scream,
as sharp as a dry corn husk—
it must
have woken you. I watched
your eyelids retreat
like low tide,
each white ball a sorry
moon.
—Maria Giesbrecht has completed the postgraduate creative writing program at Humber College, in Toronto. Find more of her work in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada, on newsstands now.
Inside the July/August Issue
“An enthusiast can make almost anything interesting for a little while; things get silly only when they insist their preoccupation defines the cosmos and vice versa. This author has the good sense to make his book short and cheeky, thereby keeping his adulation for the bivalve more or less restrained.” J.R. Patterson on Andreas Ammer’s Portrait of an Oyster: A Natural History of an Epicurean Delight.
J.D.M. Stewart reviews Peter Unwin’s Playing Hard: A Life and Death in Games, Sports, and Play.
“A meditation on the devastation wrought by war and its lasting generational effects.” Ruth Panofsky on Vinh Nguyen’s The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memoir.
And much more!