The Youngest Hero by Jerry Jenkins.
Warner Books, 2002.
$22.95 — 376 pp.

Elgin Woodell is 10 years old when he travels with his mother, Miriam, from Hattiesburg, Miss., to a new life in Chicago. Miriam is fleeing a marriage that has collapsed; her husband, though extremely talented in baseball, lacks the capacity to make his dream of playing big-league ball come true, giving himself instead to alcohol and wasted opportunities.

Elgin inherits his father’s talent — by the time he is 11, big and strong, he is playing ball like a high schooler — but he steers away from his father’s darkness and lack of desire. Elgin reads about baseball, plays baseball and stickball, which is called fastpitch, in the streets of Chicago, tries out for various city league teams, and sets up a baseball pitching machine in the basement that fires golf balls at him, allowing him to devise a ferocious swing.

Meanwhile, Elgin’s father has killed a man while driving drunk and goes to prison for life, where he soon learns that he is dying as a result of his drinking. Elgin comes to terms with his father and his failures even as he continues to climb as a teenager into big league baseball. Miriam encourages her son, tries to keep him from the way of thinking that ruined his father, and discovers a man through Elgin whom she will eventually marry.

Although Jerry Jenkins’ novel, The Youngest Hero, has as the improbable heart of its plot Elgin Woodell playing professional baseball at age 14, this straightforward story should appeal to adults and teens alike in its enthusiasm for the game of baseball, its examination of heroism, and its depiction of a young man who is fortunate to have both incredible talent and an incredible drive to realize that talent.

The Youngest Hero does move slowly at times — Elgin’s battles with the pitching machine in the basement are somewhat overdone — yet what I found particularly stirring about this novel is its study of what constitutes success. Edison once said that success was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, and Elgin seems a prime example of the truth of this adage. Jenkins does a fine job showing us Elgin’s struggles — his extreme ability, his difficulty playing at times because his talent so exceeds the other players of his own age, his determination to keep improving his skills.

My one quarrel with The Youngest Hero is that the ending seems a little too neatly predictable. Elgin does run into some roadblocks on his quest to become one of baseball’s greatest hitters, yet we never sense that he will not succeed, that there is a possibility of failure. Elgin’s father did fail to fulfill his potential by living wildly and neglecting his talent, but what of the people who do try, who throw themselves wholeheartedly into their ambitions, and yet who still in the end fall short of their goals? What becomes of such people? How does a true champion — a champion of the heart and nerve — react to final defeat? We all know because we have seen such champions, have dreamed dreams ourselves and perhaps sweated and bled in striving to bring those dreams to fruition, yet novels about broken dreams and how people live after they realize those dreams are broken are rare.

Don’t get me wrong. The Youngest Hero would make great summer reading for a young person you may know, especially if that person happens to love baseball. And in regard to a novel about noble failure with its more complicated emotions, who knows? Maybe Jerry Jenkins, who has also given us the Left Behind novels as well as Hometown Legend, will decide to turn his considerable talents to such a proposition.

One More For The Road by Ray Bradbury.
William Morrow & Co., 2002.
$19.95 — 304 pp.

One of my favorite all-time writers is Ray Bradbury. I’m not a science fiction fan, but Bradbury doesn’t really write what most people call science fiction. He writes all sorts of different stories that bear the particular Bradbury mark — enthusiasm, eccentric people, a style that combines the short paragraphs of a newspaper with the use of exclamation points that we might find in National Enquirer.

Yet Bradbury’s latest book, One More For The Road, like several of his other stories and books published in the last decade, show a writer whose powers are vastly weakened, whose story plots are thin, whose writing seems falsely exuberant. I still read him with some pleasure, looking for familiar signposts in the Bradbury landscape — high praise to dead writers, husbands and wives who quarrel and make-up, young boys at the circus for the first time — but I wonder what a new reader would make of such weak fare. Would someone reading these stories wish to go back and read the earlier Bradbury titles? I think not, and that is unfortunate, for Bradbury should be read, especially by the young who are so much in need of hope and bounding joy in this our often joyless age.

So steer your teens toward Bradbury this summer, especially the young men, but start with the oldies — I Sing The Body Electric!, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles — and let the old whet the appetite for the new.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)