REVIEW Christian Sheppard — The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball (BOOK)
If you had told me an author had successfully mixed sports, Homer’s Odyssey analogies, and life advice into a single, impressive volume, I would have laughed you out of the building. But these days, some of the most seemingly inauspicious concoctions have led to some of the most impactful and interesting additions in the fields of writing, filmmaking, other forms of media, and other forms of entertainment. Christian Sheppard, in this way, is no exception.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: https://www.christiansheppard.com/
Wrigley Field is the analogical ground for Sheppard’s self-help book to really take off, using fundamentally recognizable American landmarks, concepts, and references to ground more esoteric, intellectually exclusive, and oft-maligned concepts related to self-improvement, and self-help. It really is a brilliant juxtaposition, marrying Homer with sports concepts. Then top that off with tying both to the pursuit of existential self-determination, in bell-clear, eloquent prose that never feels flinty, removed, or like it’s talking down to any target audience. Part of this is because the American landmarks Sheppard cites for reference, specifically Wrigley Field, do hold a similar holiness as the themes and characters in Homer’s Odyssey.
“…folk use the old park to mark their lives’ important moments,” he states, at the beginning of The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball: Lessons for Life from Homer’s ODYSSEY to the World Series. “People make the pilgrimage from all over the country to see a game at Wrigley just once in their lifetime after years of cheering for the Cubs on TV. In a season, you’ll see marriage proposals. When the park is open for tours, wedding parties wait to have their pictures taken. White bridal gowns look stunning against the vintage green seats and scoreboard…Most movingly, I witnessed a local soldier returned from Iraq, where a roadside bomb had robbed him of both legs and an arm…The veneration of generations has sanctified Wrigley Field as a place that is, well, sacred. But it emanates an odd sort of holiness. Best memories and imaginings, the famous field of dreams is also filled with boos and booze. If the ballpark is in some way a sacred place, it is always also unapologetically profane. I may be the only one to wonder aloud how what is, after all, only a game works for me better than any religion, but I do not feel alone.”
He also writes about how this ties to the birth of his daughter. To when a stranger asked him a single, pivotal question: ‘How are you going to raise her?’ On this, Sheppard writes: “What am I going to tell my daughter about heaven, hell, God, the devil, birth, rebirth, karma, nirvana, sin, salvation, eternal damnation, right, wrong, ethics — in other words, what am I going to teach her about how to live?… Though the question had been posed with cool nonchalance, it had been seriously put. It was the question that made me stop.
BUY THE BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/ANCIENT-WISDOM-BASEBALL-Lessons-ODYSSEY/dp/B0DHHK19S6
How to live is an ancient question, one that haunts human civilization’s beginnings. Its earliest formulation may be the riddle of the sphinx…(It)…teaches that a human is a being for whom life is a question, for whom life — from childhood through maturity to old age, from beginning to middle to end — is a riddle. ‘How are you going to raise her?’ is another way of asking the sphinx’s riddle. ‘How to live?’…”
Brilliantly, Sheppard’s response was his determination to raise his daughter a Cubs fan. That was his individual, deterministic solving of the riddle. In essence, self-determination fundamentally being a balance of one’s own calculations for one’s self, in tandem with their environment. By using accessible analogies, Sheppard is able to guide the reader in a manner that makes some of the most simple, yet obscure life lessons wholly visible…
Colin Jordan
