I can’t say I had foreseen a book coming which employed such a weird and very specific collision of my personal interests, but I dare say it worked.

There’s a popular argument that you can relate almost anything to Greek myth and Classical history if you work at it, and that’s part of the schtick here. But what’s important is that the comparisons actually do get there.

And it’s a delightful mashup, especially for anyone who loves both baseball and classical history, though I would argue that this would also work for someone who is an enthusiast of one or the other.

I was particularly taken with the “Yankees suck” portion of the personal narrative, not because of the Yankees suck of it all (although they do), but because it was such a vibrantly well-drawn and humorously accurate portrait of the childhood Red Sox fan.

The author hits mostly on major baseball history that if you follow the sport at all you’re already very familiar with, but I always love hearing individual writers’ versions of and thoughts on these events as long as they have something original and interesting to say, which Sheppard absolutely does.