The Natural (1952) by Bernard Malamud read by Ken Howard (1986).
Traveling across the country by train to try out for a professional baseball team, a young man with a great pitching arm comes across a seductive woman and disaster ensues. A long fifteen years later at an age when most ballplayers are washed up, he’s back up to form and hired by a professional baseball team. Will something derail his dreams again?
My Review: Story - Good. Reading Performance - Good.
Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) was an award-winning American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Fixer. He wrote eight novels and had four collections of short stories. They rate between 3.6-4.2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. The Natural was made into a movie starring Robert Redford. It’s a good movie but the ending is different.
Ken Howard (1944-2016) was an actor who performed in over 100 different TV, movie, and theater productions from 1969 until 2015. He was also the president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) beginning in 2009. I remember watching him in the late 70’s playing a high school basketball coach in the series White Shadow. We talked about it at school sometimes. When The Terminator came out in 1984, Ken Howard played the first cop that gets wacked by the Terminator. My brother and I exclaimed, “hey it’s the guy from White Shadow”. Only now, 4 decades later while writing this post and looking up The Terminator to check my facts, did I learn that someone else played that role. Memory can be an effective deceiver. But I digress.
Now if you’re ready for a good baseball yarn, here is The Natural.
Enjoy!
