“A riveting story of baseball, pop culture, nostalgia, masculinity, and so much more, Mark Di Ionno’s Gods of Wood and Stone is pure heat from a veteran at the top of his game.”

 

NO MAJOR SPOILERS

This is the story of two men, separated by upbringing and occupation, but similar in so many other ways. They live in different worlds, but will come together briefly on a Sunday afternoon in Cooperstown New York, where their lives will suddenly come violently together for a brief instant, and it was inevitable that it should happen.

Joe Grudeck is a retired baseball player who was a catcher for the Boston Red Sox. He was one of the great ones, and he has been elected to the baseball hall of fame. In fact, he will be the only inductee on that day. He is single, with only one surviving parent, his mother.

Horace Mueller was born and raised on farms in Cooperstown. Like Joe he is a big man, but he had a wife and a son, and is barely scraping by. He teaches about the old america, and he follows it up by being a blacksmith for the farm museum
In Cooperstown, the Hall of Fame gets almost all the attention and the funding, and Horace wants to change that, but as funds keep dropping at the Museum, as his marriage slowly comes apart, and as even his son is becoming a very good baseball player and has little time for the museum or the old ways of life, Horace’s frustrations will explode on Induction day.

What he doesn’t know is that Joe Grudeck is not a happy person either, even though wealthy and popular, he wonders himself about the actions he took earlier in his life that can’t leave his conscience, and he wonders about where his life is headed.

An interesting look at two different ways of life, the book is interesting, though at times a little slow, but still worthy of a read.

 

Reviewed by:

Richard Franco

Added 6th October 2018

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Richard Franco