The Heroes Have Gone: Personal Essays on Sport, Popular Culture, and the American West, Review

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The Heroes Have Gone: Personal Essays on Sport, Popular Culture, and the American West, ReviewThis book is now among my favorites. I heartily recommend it to anyone who is old enough to appreciate looking backward and trying to fit together the pieces of one's life. On one level, it is just an amazingly interesting book: it covers a wide range of topics and always pulls me in to the author's own absorption in whatever he turns to next. On deeper levels, though, I think maybe it's a masterpiece. One doesn't tend to realize how much philosophy and intellectual rigor is there, hiding under the surface of these essays, until the entire work begins to take shape in the mind and heart of the reader. It's continually touching and often very moving to follow this writer's journey-- looking back over his life and trying to make sense of the little moments and the emotions. I think that's what we all come to, at some point in our lives, if we live long enough and are honest with ourselves. I especially admire the way that he uses objects--things--as a way into his memories and emotions. This develops into a creative way of opening his memories, but it also makes his stories memorable to me, as well, because I can picture that old baseball glove or his newspaper clippings. I have similar objects that hold mysterious keys to my childhood, too. But this writer is relentless in confronting not only his memories but his mistaken memories, and in treating both as revelatory, he attempts to understand the essence of what memory IS, of what a place IS to the heart, of how we build our identities over time out of what happened and what didn't happen. The cumulative effect makes this book one of the most enlightening, as well as fascinating, reads that I could ever want. I noticed that Amazon.com asked, "Are you over 13?" before it allowed me to write this review, and I think that's probably an especially good idea in regard to this book, because I suspect that readers younger than 40 or 50 may simply "not get" its profundity. Even so, I think it ought to be a fascinating experience for any reader interested in narratives and the art of writing a memoir.The Heroes Have Gone: Personal Essays on Sport, Popular Culture, and the American West, OverviewThe Heroes Have Gone shows off Jim W. Corder's consummate skills as a memoirist, essayist, and cultural critic. The subjects are wide-ranging: West Texas, World War II, Las Vegas, TCU football—and baseball. While scandals of steroids, Congressional hearings, perjury charges, illegal betting, wildly-inflated contracts (and egos) and generally naughty behavior tarnish the image of today's athletes, Corder remembers the sports heroes of his own Depression-era childhood: he writes of Gehrig, of Gheringer—and of his own older brother, who played on the sandlots of dustbowl West Texas. Though nostalgic, Corder is never naive: the heroic image of the American warrior-athlete—much like the wild-west cowboy—has forever been a dream. And when we've believed in it, tried to live own lives by its measure, we have inevitably failed: the dream became our collective nightmare. Witty, often humorous, always poignant, Corder drives this point home: the heroes have gone. Indeed, they never were.

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