Doug Bauer Steps Up to Bat

The Book Case

ABC News

Fiction, Arts, Books, Society & Culture

4.1 • 766 Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2022

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Doug Bauer has written a love story, "The Beckoning World". A man and a woman. A father and son. A love for a more innocent time. A lovely homage to America’s midwest. And a love story about baseball. It’s a simple book really—until it’s not. Boy meets girl. Boy is a promising pitcher. Girl's father says, "You pick: my daughter or baseball." He picks the girl. But then the book veers back to baseball and the protagonist pitcher and his son are barnstorming across America with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Sound implausible? Doug makes it seem perfectly reasonable. The Beckoning World is evocative of the early 20th century, conjures up small town baseball parks (you can almost smell the peanuts), and makes you feel like you know the Babe and Lou. Especially the Babe. And speaking of small towns, this week’s bookstore is Fact and Fiction in Missoula, Montana. Give it all a listen. Books mentioned in this podcast: The Beckoning World by Douglas Bauer The Book of Famous Iowans by Douglas Bauer The Very Air by Douglas Bauer Dexterity by Douglas Bauer Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Sister Noon by Karen Joy Fowler Wild Kingdom by Vijay Seshadri War and Peace By Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch Body Grammar by Jules Ohman Killing Custer by James Welch Penguin Problems Jory John Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin illustrated by Daniel Salmieri Mother Bruce Book Series by Ryan T. Higgins Winter in the Blood by James Welch Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster Once Sentence Journal by Chris La Tray Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This holiday season, surprise everyone on your list with the best gifts.
0:04.3	Tickets to see their favorite artists live.
0:06.5	Choose from thousands of concerts and comedy shows, including Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Matt Matthews, Metallica, Thomas Rett, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Sarah Silverman, and so many more.
0:19.4	Share a memory together or give a gift they'll never forget.
0:22.6	Find the most exciting gift for every fan at LiveNation.com slash gifts. That's livenation.com slash gifts. Welcome to the bookcase. I'm Kate Gibson and excuse the musical interlude.
0:43.3	Welcome. Welcome. See, I came up with a new way. I came up with a new way.
0:50.3	You did a new way for welcome. Yes.
0:52.3	And a musical interlude. My apologies to Joel Gray.
0:56.0	My big apologies to Joel Gray. And I'm Charlie Gibson. This is our two-generation, two-gender.
1:02.8	Look at books, books that Kate and I appreciate and like and want to suggest to you that you might
1:09.6	think about reading them. I want to set the scene a little
1:13.1	bit for today's writer. Doug Bauer is his name. I had a chance to meet him at a reading when he was
1:20.6	reading some of his essays, which I thought were excellent. And so I bought the book, like you do. and I had a chance to meet him. And we talked a
1:31.6	little bit. And he called me up, or actually sent me an email not long ago saying, I've written a
1:36.4	novel. And I'd like you to consider it for your podcast. So I did. I read it. I was sort of
1:42.7	intrigued by the fact that he had written a novel,
1:45.6	because I didn't know he was a novelist as well as an essayist. And I liked it. And let me just
1:51.0	give you a little bit of the background. The first, it starts sort of typically, boy meets girl,
1:56.7	boy falls in love with girl. Boy is an aspiring baseball pitcher.
2:05.1	Girl's father says, give up baseball or give up my daughter, and he chooses the daughter.
2:07.3	Okay, that's pretty typical.
2:15.9	But then it all changes, and father and they, by that time he has a son, a protagonist and son wind up on a barnstorming baseball trip with Babe Ruth
	...

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