We listened to this book several years ago on a road trip where we intended to stop at a favorite place for lunch and missed it by two hours, because we were so lost in this book. On the return trip, we were able to stop at the place we liked, but then we forgot to get gas, because we had gotten into the car and started to listen to the book again. There was a question of whether we were going to run out of gas, because we liked this book so much.
This is one of Robert B. Parker's standalone books, the story of a man who is hired to be Jackie Robinson's bodyguard when he first begins to play major league baseball. As in all Parker books, the words are accompanied by a sense of decency and honor. There is a code that Parker invokes on how to live life. Part of the recipe is humor. Part is loyalty to your friends and to yourself.
In audiobooks, the reader is always key. Here you have the actor, Robert Forster, who plainly and effectively tells the story. Often I think readers get caught up in the idea that they have to create distinct character voices; Forster sometimes added subtle differences to the different characters, but he pretty much left that alone. He let the story speak for itself.
Parker's love of baseball comes through loud and clear in this book. It's tricky to take a historical figure and plop him in the middle of a fictional story. There were times when I wondered about the effectiveness of actually placing Jackie Robinson in this book. Parker doesn't talk about specific games or other events that happened in Robinson's life. It's one of those books where it's about the bigger issues of the time. You have to let any specifics go. Most of the time that worked for me.
We were on a road trip earlier this summer and were short a book and listened to this one again, this time with no eternal happenstance, just the feeling that there's something about hearing a very experienced actor read a veteran writer's work that remains very satisfying.
