The Progress of the Seasons: Forty Years of Baseball in Our Town

From Publishers Weekly
Higgins grew up in Boston, and in this history of the Red Sox, he weaves the events of his life into the hometown backdrop of athletic non-achievement at the shrine of Fenway Park. "At times Higgins appears mired in a lengthy newspaper column on Sox fans' frustrations; however, his obvious love, zeal and attachment to the subject enable him to tell his tale with style," said PW. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
To appreciate this book fully, it would probably help to know the Red Sox or to have visited Boston's Fenway Park. But the universality of baseball, its reflection of the cycles of life, and its stability amid change are themes presented by Higgins (a Boston criminal lawyer and veteran novelist of such works as The Friends of Eddie Coyle) in a storytelling mode similar to Thorton Wilder's Our Town. Higgins begins his baseball meditation with attending a game in Fenway in 1946 with his father and grandfather and closes with watching games today in the company of his son. Higgins plays with variations of John Pesky's assessment of baseball as a simple game that is hard to play. As love songs to Fenway Park go, this compares favorably with essays by Donald Hall (in his Fathers Playing Catch with Sons: Essays on Sport, Mostly Baseball, LJ 12/84) and John Updike (in Assorted Prose , Knopf, 1960). Good reading for adults.- Thomas J. Reigstad, SUNY Coll., BuffaloCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
In this affecting memoir, with prose as sharp as a line-drive single, Higgins shows how his love of baseball is matched only by his love of his father and grandfather, men who introduced him to the game forty years earlier. Ian Esmo reads with care, maintaining a steady pace even when baseball stats intrude on the narrative. However, his voice lacks warmth, which would have added to Higgins's touching story. P.B.J. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


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In this affecting memoir, with prose as sharp as a line-drive single, Higgins shows how his love of baseball is matched only by his love of his father and grandfather, men who introduced him to the game forty years earlier. Ian Esmo reads with care, maintaining a steady pace even when baseball stats intrude on the narrative. However, his voice lacks warmth, which would have added to Higgins�s touching story. P.B.J. �AudioFile, Portland, Maine


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