Alfred Slote

In some ways, it's just a mild piece of science fiction action, pointed at an audience too young for me. But is too much to ask that it doesn't grossly violate actual science? A map of the space stations shows a gap between two that's the highway to the moon, but that's not how orbits work. The whole cover of the space station opens to let a space ship in, and the air goes away and then it closes and the air goes back. Except that the air would go away because of explosive decompression, and show more then there would be no air; it wouldn't magically come back, and whatever emergency systems would be expensive and limited-use. A hundred million cubic meters of air is not easy to come by in space. The station would have airlocks. Even easy cases where things could have been made realistic were skipped, not for obvious sci-fi, like force fields, but simple misdescriptions of the real world. show less

Jason is dropped from his little league baseball team, and sets out to start a new team, but he needs a coach. He thinks he's found the perfect one in Mack Henry, the old black custodian of an elementary school, when he discovers that Mr. Henry is actually the great Buck McHenry, a star of the Negro Baseball League many years ago. But Mr. Henry denies that he is the great ball player from the past. Eventually, he admits he is Buck, but makes Jason, as well as his two teammates, Kim and Aaron show more (Mr. Henry's grandson) promise never to tell anyone who he really is. The kids make the promise, and then break the promise immediately, and repeatedly.
Mr. Henry seems unusually forgiving of their dishonesty, but (spoiler alert) it turns out he's being a bit dishonest himself. He actually is not Buck McHenry, although he did play a lot of baseball in his younger years. And since it's an elementary age book, everything is happy in the end.
This is a simplistic story about racism and baseball, which it handles pretty well; and about honesty, which it addresses poorly, since neither the dishonesty of the characters, nor others reactions to their dishonesty comes across as believable. show less

I wanted to read Make-Believe Ball Player because I had heard somewhere that it was a cute story, which it indeed turned out to be. It probably took less than an hour to read, so it felt more like a short story than a full book, but it was pretty enjoyable. In fact, I think "cute" is probably the perfect word to describe it. As with a lot of sports stories, it's about a lovable, quirky kid who's turns out to be an unlikely hero. I wouldn't call it memorable, but it was worth the time it took show more to read. show less

Not a great book, but My Trip To Alpha I is simple, perhaps even charming, while still being a real work of science fiction. Slote explores the frightening implications of his premise in a simple style which should be accessible to young readers. The story is just frightening enough—we never worry that things won't work out all right in the end.