Customer Reviews

Double Play

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I loved this book. In fact I gave a copy to each of my family last Christmas. I know very little about baseball. I had heard of Jackie Robinson, of course, but did not know Robert B Parker's work at all. That has changed.

Parker takes the iconic Jackie Robinson and delivers an honourable, courageous, very private man with no illusions about his role, the society that reviles and admires him, fans, baseball or his place in history. Even within the world of baseball he stands apart yet he remains as much or more of a hero than ever.

Parker carefully presents a Jackie Robinson once removed from both reader and author. He is isolated from the reader, kept at enough of a distance we never intrude on Jackie Robinson's private thoughts, his conversations with his wife and family or with himself. The man retains the privacy and heroic status to which he is entitled and yet,the reader will feel he has walked awhile with a great man and has been touched by something rare and very special.

This book is deceptively simple like much of Parker's work but it is possibly the best thing he ever wrote.

This is Parker on the stretch, away from his favorite characters, away from his Boston setting, plunged into the past. When he's stretched he's at the top of his form and demonstrates his moves on every page.

Most of all, the Jackie Robinson story is a story about a time and the first third of the book is background. Parker does the postwar period masterfully and the interspersed personal chapters are a nice, innovative touch. They've drawn some criticism, unwarranted in my opinion.

The characters are fresh, the plotting and dialogue as economical as the best Parker, the resolution touching. I read it straight through, disrupting all of my prior plans for the day, and not regretting a moment of it.

A couple of the most recent Spenser books were, to me, short of the mark, as if Parker were a bit tired of the character. And his constant repetition of key phrases said by characters in his three series was more than annoying. ("We'd be fools not to" being the worst. There are others. Parker's publishers/editors fall down on their job here.)

Double Play was like a breath of fresh air. How a reviewer can simply say Burke is a Spenser clone is quite beyond me. He's a *very* different character, a most interesting and subtley complex one.

Robinson is black. Hawk is black. And there any comparison ends. Robinson is a very well developed character, in my estimation, and rings true as the man we came to know in history.

Bringing together both the criminal elements and the extreme racism of those times I thought an excellent tool as well as being true to life. Those who weren't alive back then simply don't understand how much a part of daily life these things were, even though submerged in "good company." (Unfortunately, they're both with us still.)

I was also impressed by Parker's grasp of the effects of war on the Burke character, how he retreated inward emotionally, the building of his need and desire to expand again as a human being.

I'd recommend this one to anyone.

Robert Parker's creative, fictionalized approach to the problems Jackie Robinson faced when integrating baseball makes for fascinating reading. But the other half of his double play, the personalized reminisces of "Bobby," alias him, growing up and loving girls and baseball, is basically self-agrandizement; the interesting historical observations -- and there are some --could be told within the story in Parker's as-always brilliant narrative. The Robinson character is not quite fleshed out (although it is in no way Hawk while the hero, Burke, is much like Spenser, Parker's long-running detective). No, the details in the story didn't happen but they might have. And the danger and tension surrounding Robinson were very real.
You don't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this -- but you will lose little skipping the "Bobby" chapters.

There isn't much to this book. Half of it seems to be
"Bobby" Parker's irrelevant autobiography. Then you get about ten baseball box scores, right out of the newspapers. The rest of it purports to tell how Jackie Robinson broke into baseball, but I couldn't believe a word of it. Did gangsters really have shootouts in the grandstand? Not likely! And if they did, it would have taken twenty more years before the game became integrated. Robinson was required to avoid confrontations, not to hire hitmen to watch his back.

A little too slow moving with few surprises. Quick read. Interesting period piece but I was hoping for a more intimate story about Jackie Robinson.

I have enjoyed Robert Parker's books over the years, especially the the Spencer series, and when I bought this book I was expecting more of the same. The book is actually a wonderful story that weaves fact and fiction in a fabulouse way. The basic plot surrounds Jackie Robinson breaking the baseball color barrier in 1947 (fact), and the man who is hired to be his body gaurd (fiction), a WWII surivor carrying some heavy baggage. Paker develops great characters along with his typical witty dialog, and does a great job of taking you back to that time period when the races were stricly divided.

I didn't realize this was not the typical Spenser P.I. fare and was initially disappointed. My first thought was to pitch the book and count my losses, however, I had nothing new to read. The mingling of fiction and truth of this tale of Jackie Robinson's foray into the white world of baseball and the ground breaking necessary for others to enter this field proved both enlightening and thought provoking. Parker's wonderful characterization of both Robinson and his bodyguard, Burke, as well as the witty dialog, at which Parker excels, are well worth the price of admission. Kudos to you Mr. Parker for not resting on your laurels as so many other authors have done and continuing to provide your readers with the very best offerings.

This gripping page-turner is a genre-jumping amalgam of historical fiction, sports novel and thriller. Hard-edged most of the way, and ultimately very effective, DOUBLE PLAY falters late in the game; it becomes mushy in the odd "Bobby" sections (which for me never really came together) and in the male-bonding passages between the hero (Burke) and Robinson.

Throughout, the prose is lean, the dialogue is superb and the characters are very well drawn. All in all, you won't go wrong if you're looking for a solid summer read that's head and shoulders above a lot of popular fiction.

Double Play introduces a new Parker hero, Joseph Burke, who barely survived a machine gun at Guadalcanal while serving as a Marine in World War II. Back in the states, he doesn't know where he is . . . but he's sure someone's out to get him. After a long physical recovery, his emotional recovery just begins as the story opens.

Burke is a tough guy, and (like Spenser) takes up boxing. But he's better at pounding away and surviving a punch than "floating like a bee" and he soon has to find another line of work. Having scruples makes him a poor enforcer, so he finds himself becoming a body guard. His first job is for a woman who needs to be protected from an abusive boyfriend who's connected . . . and her own bad habits. When that job ends, Burke finds himself in Brooklyn being asked to play the same role for Dodger rookie Jackie Robinson.

The book reminds me of Huckleberry Finn with Jim on the Mississippi in many ways, as Burke finds himself not fitting into either the African-American or the WASP communities as he does his bodyguard work. Burke's awareness of what Jackie Robinson is going through grows, and the reader finds himself taken back to a world that we are hopefully leaving behind as fast as possible where race counted rather than what you did.

Atop of this setting, Mr. Parker overlays gangland vendettas, a love story and his own perspective as a 15 year old on that fateful season in Brooklyn.

For secondary entertainment, you can match up each character in the story to a character from the Spenser books. Although I think Susan would be annoyed to be matched to many of these female characters.

The book has a weakness though that's annoying. It's a little too glib and easy about dealing with the racial hatred of the times. You end up feeling like you are reading about hazing rather than hate.

Any Spenser fan will enjoy seeing the variety of seeing the challenges of doing the right thing from the perspective of pain and numbness rather than from joy and happiness.