Books published by Paul Dry Books, Inc

An Interview with Evander Lomke and Martin Rowe 1. Why did you want to write about cricket AND baseball, rather than just one of the sports?EL: That's an excellent question. This book began as an exchange between ourselves. We didn't have any immediate family member or close friend to share our respective enthusiasms, and just naturally began to note some of the similarities and differences between baseball and cricket as each of us came to know more about the other game. 1996 in New York, especially for pent-up Yankees fans deprived for years of a truly good team, was a magical season. By lucky coincidence, I took Martin to his first baseball game, which was a late-season Fan Appreciation Day at Yankee Stadium. What amazed me was how quickly Martin picked up virtually every aspect of the action. Though all this seemed an act of intuition, in fact Martin was not only already steeped in the similar game of cricket he knew something of rounders--an even closer antecedent of baseball. As we started on this book many years later, we wanted to convey our respective enthusiasms to each other first, and by extension to all fans of "the other" first-cousin sport.MR: This is Martin. I was tired of the snobbery from the cricket fans and willful ignorance from the Yanks. These are two great games, and they need to get to know each other better. 2. Cricket seems such a long game with lots of arcane rules. Why should it appeal to Americans?MR: Well, as the former head of USA Cricket said, Americans can follow a golf tournament over four days, and four rounds, why shouldn't they be able to follow a cricket game, which can last over five days? Actually, the shortest form of the game of cricket--Twenty20--we note in the book, is very similar in length to a baseball game: four hours, lots of music, dugouts, big hits, and timeouts.EL: Once baseball fans come to understand how intense cricket can be, and how it's played year round, and can be seen all over the Internet, the baseball off-season will be no more. Fans will be able to drive their partners crazy year-round. 3. What did you learn about each sport that surprised you?EL: I was amazed by what I would call the parallel worlds or even universes of baseball and cricket. Watching YouTube clips of cricket games, whether from the 1940s or the 1970s or more recent eras, one sees incredible similarities in everything from the styles of play reflecting generational attitudes to the actual look of the players themselves. In the 1940s and 1950s, it's all business in cricket. Watch any clip of The Greatest Generation's heroes or even something like the recently unearthed Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. The game was faster and there was much less posing for the cameras. Both games went through a crisis over money in the 1970s, and players in both games now make the kind of money that far exceeds the imagination of earlier generations. The parallels are eerie.MR: I guess I wasn't that surprised by much in baseball. Except it surprised me to think just how much failure governs batting in baseball. To miss two-thirds of the time and still be considered a great tells me just how hard that ball is to hit. I think cricket lovers would do well to remember that. 4. Who is your favorite player in the other game--and why?EL: This is Evander. It's got to be Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff. He's what's known as an all-rounder, which means he can bowl (pitch) and hit equally well. It's a rare combination in cricket, and even rarer in baseball outside of the high-school level. Babe Ruth was the ultimate all-rounder (if the term had existed here). There have been others--great pitchers who could hit well, for example, but none to the point of making a transition to a regular-field position as Ruth did. The all-rounder is akin to a figure like Shakespeare himself, who was a great actor as well as script writer. Flintoff was a big guy for the big occasion: In some ways, he almost parallels Mickey Mantle--with his charisma and injuries.MR: For me, Martin, it has to be Mariano Rivera, the legendary closer for the Yankees. Utterly cool and professional. To be so in command of your talent that the opposition knows in its heart that the ball game is lost when he jogs on to the field is something rare. And he seems a really nice guy as well, which helps. 5. You write about the similar notions of "timing" and "time" in cricket and baseball. Please explain.MR: Timing was my idea. Both baseball and cricket revel in notions of nostalgia--a mythic time when their games were purer, or when we were younger, and time didn't seem to matter. They both ask us to remember moments out of time--like Bobby Thomson's famous "Shot Heard Round the World" in the play-off game for the 1951 pennant. They depend on players being able to bring the bat through the line of the ball at exactly the right time. They both go on a long time, and both have streaks that expand the notion of time--such as Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak or Cal Ripken Jr.'s run of consecutive games.EL: They're also not so clock-dependent, unlike basketball, football, or soccer. So there's something timeless about both games--befitting their role in at least the English and American psyches as summer games. But, as we said, both games are now very international, so we expect the eternal verities ascribed to baseball and cricket will change.

Stephan Wackwitz's family "never spoke about the fact that the scene of their childhood and the site of the century's greatest crime were separated by nothing more than a longish walk and barely a decade." With insight and wit, Wackwitz breaks this silence in 'An Invisible Country', a learned meditation on twentieth-century German history as viewed through the prism of one family's story. Writing of his grandfather (born in 1893), his father (1922), and himself (1952), Wackwitz places himself in the historical and emotional landscape of the 'invisible country' surrounding Anhalt in Upper Silesia, a town ten kilometres from Auschwitz, and the site of his grandfather's Lutheran pastorate from 1921 to 1933.

"The charming Hotel Kid is as luxurious as the lobby in a five-star hotel." --The San Francisco Chronicle

Crosby's portrait of her Down-syndrome son deepens our understanding of what it means to be human

A soul-seeking collection spanning 30 years of writing.

These stories, ten in all, take place in Ireland, New York City and Washington, D.C., and Virginia, Texas, and Colorado. The characters represent the various stages of man - from boyhood and youth to the first precincts of old age. John Lionel, who appeared in four stories collected in Julian Mazor's earlier volume, Washington and Baltimore, appears here in four more, chronicling his growing up in Washington. With a finely tuned ear for speech, the author conveys a vivid sense of place and of the spirit of the times. As he portrays a young boy in trouble, an adolescent in love (mired in self-doubt and imminent heartbreak), a Texas high-school football player, a man on the verge of marriage and one on the verge of divorce, a middle-aged writer struggling to understand his life, and an older man in the sorrowful and complicated throes of marriage to a younger woman, Mazor writes with compassion, irony, and humor, and with a clear-eyed affection for each of these individuals. In his telling, their stories become w

After 50 years of reading Homer, Eva Brann brings the Odyssey and the Iliad back to life.