Waiting for Teddy Williams
by Howard Frank Mosher
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Description
A vivid portrait of a young man's coming of age in an America that is almost gone, Waiting for Teddy Williams has been hailed by Ernest Hebert as "ranking with Huckleberry Finn in heart, spirit, and insight into the American character." The book begins on the eighth birthday of Ethan "E.A." Allen in the remote village of Kingdom Common, Vermont. Noted for its fervent, if unrequited, devotion to the Boston Red Sox, the village sports a replica of Fenway Park's Green Monster on top of the show more local baseball bat factory. Here, in a region that lags decades behind the rest of New England, E.A. lives with his honky-tonk mother, Gypsy Lee, and the acid-tongued Gran, wheelchair-bound since the Sox's heart-wrenching playoff loss to the Yankees in 1978. Homeschooled, fatherless, and living on the wrong side of the tracks, E.A. is an outcast in his own town. Haunted by a dark mystery in his family's past, he has only one close friend to talk it over with, a statue of his namesake on the village green. Into the world of the Allen family comes a drifter named Teddy, who is determined to do one decent thing in his life by teaching E.A. everything he knows about baseball. As E.A. grows up and learns the secrets of the game, we get to know Kingdom Common and its flinty, colorful people. We also meet the incomparable manager of the Red Sox, the Legendary Spence, "the winningest big-league manager never to win a World Series," and his macaw, Curse of the Bambino. When the Sox's new owner vows to move the team to Hollywood if they lose the Series again, Spence, his pitching corps decimated by injuries, has to take a chance on a young nobody from Vermont. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Tried too hard to be quirky. I just couldn't get into it.
Nice easy read about baseball and small town life.
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Author Information
17+ Works 1,981 Members
Howard Frank Mosher was born in Kingston, New York on June 2, 1942. He received a bachelor's degree from Syracuse University and a master's degree from the University of Vermont. He taught high school English in a region in rural Vermont called the Northeast Kingdom. He wrote several books about the area including North Country: A Personal show more Journey, God's Kingdom, and Points North. Many of his books were adapted into films including Where the Rivers Flow, A Stranger in the Kingdom, Disappearances, and Northern Borders. He died from lung cancer on January 29, 2017 at the age of 74. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2004
- People/Characters
- E. A.; Gypsy Lee Allen; Teddy
- Dedication
- To Phillis
- First words
- Time was, on a summer afternoon in the northern Vermont hamlet of Kingdom Common, when Ethan Allen could walk completely around the rectangular village green and never be out of earshot of the Red Sox game on somebody's radio... (show all).
- Blurbers
- Burns, Ken; Russo, Richard; Bohjalian, Chris; Lee, Bill
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 171
- Popularity
- 190,882
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.62)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 7
- UPCs
- 1
- ASINs
- 3
