clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Viva el Libros: Bang the Drum Slowly

“The sky was just beginning to light up a little, the quiet time when all the air is clean and you can hear birds, even in the middle of New York City, the time of day you never see except by accident, and you always tell yourself, "I must get up and appreciate this time of day once in awhile," and then you never do. Don't ask me why.”

By lil_scooter93

If you buy something from an SB Nation link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

Bang the Drum Slowly, by Mark Harris is a type of sequel to The Southpaw, following the lives of fictional baseball player Henry Wiggen and his friend and teammate, Bruce Pearson. More than a novel about baseball, Bang the Drum Slowly follows the team, the New York Mammoths, as the group slowly learns one of their teammates is dying of cancer. While the baseball team is good, it is obvious that it lacks team unity. With the knowledge of a teammate's illness, they band together in an attempt to win the World Series. According to Charles Poore of The New York Times, 1956, " In its elementals, Bang the Drum Slowly has two familiar themes. One is the story of the way a doomed man may spend his last best year on earth. The other is the story of how a quarrelsome group of raucous individualists is welded into an effective combat outfit."

I am excited about this book for several reasons:

  1. It is fictional, which allows for more literary freedom and a type of romanticism that non-fiction usually cannot allow due to being a servant to history
  2. It is highly acclaimed, being called at the time "the finest baseball novel that has appeared since we all began to compare baseball novels with the works of Ring Lardner, Douglass Wallop and Heywood Broun," (Poore, 2) (Wallup, you might remember, penned The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant)
  3. It was made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and Michael Moriarty in 1973 that was given four stars and called "the ultimate baseball movie" by Roger Ebert (Ebert, 1)
So I am going to start reading right away! Let me know what you think in the comments!

The book is available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, leather bound (!), and audiobook editions ranging from $2.50 to $50.00. It is also available at your local library or from these other fine retailers.

Don't have the book yet? Here are some reviews and excerpts to get you started!

Reviews:

The New York Times: Bang the Drum Slowly (Charles Poore)
The Henry Wiggen Blog: Book Review: Bang the Drum Slowly
Roger Ebert: Bang the Drum Slowly (Film)

Excerpts:

Google Books

Previous Viva el Libros Books:

i. The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, Edward Achorn: Intro; Recap

More From Viva El Birdos