Beginning with the exquisite charm of listening in on Bowering as a youthful sports reporter in his home town of Oliver in 1948, "the greatest year in human history," moving through the brash hubris of his career as a star playerreporter in the Kosmic League of the 1970s, to staring down the bittersweet foul line of the Twilight League of the twentyfirst century, Baseball Love is a book about Bowering''s life in love and the game, played with a consummate craft and skill into the paradise of what we can only ever imagine to be real, and leavened at all times by the conscious and playfully ironic chatter of the infield.
Its provenance uncertain, the diamond in the ballparkwhere no cars are allowed to drive, where time stands still unless there's an out and where one adheres to the rules governing behaviour in the yardis the quintessential North American vision of paradise: a walled garden in the midst of the dark satanic mills of blind industrial progress and the chaos of the everyday in the exploited wilderness that surrounds it.