The Theater of the Impossible

About the Book

Mark Twain called baseball "the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteeth-century". This book searches the concrete actions typical of baseball games for the meaning of what they represent. For example, the struggles in a game of individuals against a group of enemies organized to put them out represent the struggles of Americans to succeed in a fiercely competitive capitalistic economy. But baseball combines characteristics of both Christian Protestantism and industrial capitalism. So a home run represents a sudden, unexpected success and at the same time a home run embodies in a game a sudden impossible miraculous redemption. We are a people who worship not just what is possible in life but what is impossible and baseball is our national theater.

About the Author

Daniel McNeill teaches Latin in Skaneateles, New York. He is a member of the silent generation that was young during the fifties and early sixties and that failed to find its voice within the cold-war mental and political fixations of the time. He has read widely, studied at six universities, traveled, married, raised two daughters, learned seven foreign languages and written one book.