by Jim Lehrer (Random House)
Veteran newsman Jim Lehrer considers loss in his newest novel, the story of a young baseball player called upon to serve his country during World War II.
Like many young men of the era, Johnny Wrigley had to put his life on hold. A promising young athlete, he is sent off to the Pacific to use his newly-learned skills, courtesy Uncle Sam: flame-thrower operator. But before he goes, he and his compatriots make a stop in Wichita where a young and very naive Johnny makes the acquaintance of a young women he hopes will change his life.
Physically, he is relatively unscathed, but mentally Johnny returns from the war a changed man, as does everyone who has served in combat. Can he pick up where he left and fulfill his dream to be a major leaguer? Can he reunite with the girl of his dreams? If there’s anything we learn from books like this — indeed, from life — it is that things don’t always work out the way we plan. But it’s what we do after we realize that that makes the difference in whether we consider our time successful or not.
Lehrer, who was a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals as a boy, does a good job depicting minor league baseball at the time; you can almost smell the flanel and sweat. You can feel the hope and desperation as these young men — who have based their entire futures on their abilities on the ballfield — find out that perhaps there are things more important that a game.
Oh Johnny is a bit on the skimpy side, and it rushes to its conclusion and it seems there should be more on what he went through overseas and how PTSS affected the young man. But Lehrer is a notoriously prodigious writer. Maybe he was anxious to get to his next project.
is available on Amazon.com,
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