From Publishers Weekly
A prodigal ballplayer with a passion for physics and higher math and an aging physicist once infatuated with baseball energize Miller's fourth novel, a quirky romp through the mysteries of life, love and science. Benny Rhodes is a disaffected MIT physics professor who, after the death of his colleague and close friend, the brilliant mathematician Arthur Hodges, indulges his wanderlust and ends up living in a trailer park in Needles, Calif., accompanied by "extraordinarily fecund" Becky, with whom he fell in love during an Oklahoma layover. Meanwhile, Henry Spencer, a young paratrooper with only a hazy knowledge of his past, looks to be a rising baseball star-despite his lack of "Organized Ball" experience-and happens also to be an untrained mathematical genius. Henry makes the roster of the Oakland A's, and he settles in with his girlfriend, Ramona, the spunky waitress he met during spring training. But Henry splits midseason when he gets an invitation to visit Needles sent by one of the trailer park's baseball fans, and an unsettling synergy reveals itself as Henry, Benny, Becky and the rest of the oddball characters sit on the edge of the desert-might Henry be Arthur reincarnated? Miller balances his unpredictable plotting with some charming writing on baseball, physics and other mysterious forces, including sweet romantic chapters about the coupling of the characters. The result is a funny, unconventional meditation on the twists and turns of fate from an engaging, thought-provoking writer.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Description
ou may think Field of Dreams meets Cocoon, or perhaps The Natural meets Love Story, some may even say that it's Ball Four clashing with Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. John A. Miller's Coyote Moon is all of these and more. In a gone-to-seed trailer park on the edge of the Mojave Desert, quantam physics runs headlong into reincarnation as the park's highly eccentric residents sit around in the evenings drinking home-brewed beer and asking themselves: Can a young, previously un-heard of rookie baseball player be the latest in a line of reincarnated spirits leading back to Sir Isaac Newton? And in the clubhouse of the Oakland Athletics, the mysterious athlete in question, Henry Spencer, a young North Carolinian with nothing more than a high school education and a fuzzy memory, tries to reconcile Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle with the somewhat less intellectual world of baseball. Coyote Moon, John A. Miller's eagerly awaited fourth novel, will have you laughing with delight and wondering to the very end just who the young Henry Spencer really is, and what, exactly, links him to the most unusual trailer park in Needles, California.
