Serious sports novels often fall through the literary cracks simply because of the arena they play in. Michael Shaara earned his battle stripes--and a Pulitzer Prize--for The Killer Angels, a fictional resurrection of the Battle of Gettysburg, as serious a subject as a writer can confront. Yet, it's no more profound, in the end, than the personal dilemmas protagonist Billy Chapel faces in this, Shaara's final novel, found stashed in a desk after his death and published posthumously.

A certain Hall of Famer, Chapel is a major-league anomaly, a contemporary throwback to another sporting era. He's pitched 17 stellar seasons for the same club, and his love of the game has remained paramount; neither money nor fame has been his motivation. But on the single day this story takes place, he finds himself in crisis. At the crossroads of his life, his career, and his future, he must make the hard choices that will define the direction of the rest of his life. It's the end of the season, his team's out of contention, there's a rumor he may have been traded, and the woman he can't fully acknowledge that he loves announces she's leaving him. It is, as he tells himself, "Time to grow up, Daydreamer." Still, he dreams, but he also acts. As Billy takes the mound for his final start of the year--and maybe forever--we enter his stream of consciousness, and rush with him over the sometimes treacherous rapids of what has preceded this moment, and what may come. Amazingly, though his mind seems to wander through time, his concentration is fierce. Pitch by pitch, inning by inning, he remains focused, honoring his job and his legacy as he pitches a masterpiece of mythic proportion, ultimately leaving the field more a man than when he took it. Using baseball to sound the depths of human experience, Shaara delivers a masterpiece, as well. --Jeff Silverman


From Publishers Weekly
Reading this posthumously published baseball novel is best compared to watching a gifted young player whose promise slowly fades with every strikeout and weak groundball, despite occasional flashes of potential. Shaara, who won a Pulitzer in 1975 for The Killer Angels , died just after the book was finished, and one feels he might have liked to give it a rewrite. Just before the last game of the season, star pitcher Billy Chapel, a veteran of 17 years in the major leagues, discovers that his team plans to trade him. Moreover, he learns that his New York editor/girlfriend has inexplicably ended their romance--leaving him adrift and the reader more than a little indifferent. The love affair, seen in flashbacks (notably a scene in which they achieve congress in a small airplane), must compete with an unhealthy number of baseball cliches and a series of featureless characters; even Billy, whose thoughts we share, seems a blank. The book does come to life, fittingly enough, as Chapel takes the mound for his final and greatest game. Shaara succeeds in conveying the extraordinary physical and psychological demands of the professional game as well as the dizzying pleasures of its triumphs. But even the account of Chapel's greatest victory is marred by a trite ending. While flawed, however, this is a noteworthy attempt to capture the simultaneous loss of a life's love and a life's obsession. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Pulitzer Prize-winner Shaara's final work (he died in 1988) is about a baseball player's final work. Billy Chapel, a great pitcher, is going to be traded after 17 years of service. He plans to end his career with this game, rather than accept this betrayal by his team's new owners. We follow him pitch by pitch through his perfect game, and memory by memory through his imperfect life. Cushioned by a children's game, he has never quite grown up, never taken the ultimate risk of trusting a relationship; the woman he loves is equally frightened of commitment. They come together now, when Billy has to go home, with no home to go to. As much a psychological novel as a baseball tale, this is a good choice for popular fiction collections.- Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Billy Chapel, a seventeen-year veteran with Hall-of-Fame stats, pitches the final game of his career. Shaara, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE KILLER ANGELS, switches between the present and the past to reveal the path that Chapel took to reach this point in his life. Overall, Jason Culp does a good job with this program. He seems at his best during Jeffrey Shaara's poignant introduction, which explains his late father's love of baseball. And he does a good job with the narrative part of the story and the voices of the supporting characters. But it's when he speaks in Chapel's voice that he seems a bit flat, not giving Chapel the distinctive voice that he deserves. P.B.J. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


Review
"Moving, beautiful . . . If Hemingway had written a baseball novel, he might have written For Love of the Game."
--Los Angeles Times

"A delightful and lyrical story about a great athlete's momentous last game . . . A fairy tale for adults about love and loneliness and finally growing up."
--USA Today

"An endearing, timeless novel that can be enjoyed by both serious readers and baseball lovers for generations to come."
--The Orlando Sentinel

"ONE OF THE BEST BASEBALL NOVELS I'VE EVER READ."
--San Diego Union-Tribune


Review
"Moving, beautiful . . . If Hemingway had written a baseball novel, he might have written For Love of the Game."
--Los Angeles Times

"A delightful and lyrical story about a great athlete's momentous last game . . . A fairy tale for adults about love and loneliness and finally growing up."
--USA Today

"An endearing, timeless novel that can be enjoyed by both serious readers and baseball lovers for generations to come."
--The Orlando Sentinel

"ONE OF THE BEST BASEBALL NOVELS I'VE EVER READ."
--San Diego Union-Tribune


Book Description
Billy Chapel is a baseball legend, a man who has devoted his life to the game he loves and plays so well. But because of his unsurpassed skill and innocent faith, he has been betrayed. Now it's the final game of the season, and Billy's got one last chance to prove who he is and what he can do, a chance to prove what really matters in this life. A taut, compelling story of one man's coming of age, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME is Michael Shaara's final novel, the classic finish to a brilliantly distinguished literary career.


From the Inside Flap
Billy Chapel is a baseball legend, a man who has devoted his life to the game he loves and plays so well. But because of his unsurpassed skill and innocent faith, he has been betrayed. Now it's the final game of the season, and Billy's got one last chance to prove who he is and what he can do, a chance to prove what really matters in this life. A taut, compelling story of one man's coming of age, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME is Michael Shaara's final novel, the classic finish to a brilliantly distinguished literary career.


From the Back Cover
"Moving, beautiful . . . If Hemingway had written a baseball novel, he might have written For Love of the Game."
--Los Angeles Times

"A delightful and lyrical story about a great athlete's momentous last game . . . A fairy tale for adults about love and loneliness and finally growing up."
--USA Today

"An endearing, timeless novel that can be enjoyed by both serious readers and baseball lovers for generations to come."
--The Orlando Sentinel

"ONE OF THE BEST BASEBALL NOVELS I'VE EVER READ."
--San Diego Union-Tribune


About the Author
In the early 1950s, Michael Shaara published award-winning science fiction stories in the most popular pulp magazines of the day. He later began writing straight fiction and published more than seventy short stories in such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Playboy, and many others. His first novel, The Broken Place, was published in 1968. But it was a simple family vacation to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1966 that gave him the inspiration for his greatest achievement, The Killer Angels.

After seven years of research and rewrite, and then two years of rejections from publishers, The Killer Angels was finally published by Random House, later winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Michael Shaara went on to write two more novels, The Noah Conspiracy and For Love of the Game, which was published posthumously after his untimely death in 1988.

It was Shaara's son Jeff who found the manuscript of For Love of the Game among his father's many works, thus insuring another piece of the Michael Shaara legacy.

ANNOTATION

Billy Chapel is a pitcher who has given his life to the game he loves so well; a man who has retained the endearing qualities of youth; the last of the greatcompetitors in his ranks. Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Shaara calls upon hisintimate knowledge of baseball to create this exciting novel about pride, the fear of aging, and the time when a man's character is defined by the choices he makes.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Billy Chapel is a baseball legend, a man who has devoted his life to the game he loves and plays so well. But because of his unsurpassed skill and innocent faith, he has been betrayed. Now it's the final game of the season, and Billy's got one last chance to prove who he is and what he can do, a chance to prove what really matters in this life. A taut, compelling story of one man's coming of age, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME is Michael Shaara's final novel, the classic finish to a brilliantly distinguished literary career.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Reading this posthumously published baseball novel is best compared to watching a gifted young player whose promise slowly fades with every strikeout and weak groundball, despite occasional flashes of potential. Shaara, who won a Pulitzer in 1975 for The Killer Angels , died just after the book was finished, and one feels he might have liked to give it a rewrite. Just before the last game of the season, star pitcher Billy Chapel, a veteran of 17 years in the major leagues, discovers that his team plans to trade him. Moreover, he learns that his New York editor/girlfriend has inexplicably ended their romance--leaving him adrift and the reader more than a little indifferent. The love affair, seen in flashbacks (notably a scene in which they achieve congress in a small airplane), must compete with an unhealthy number of baseball cliches and a series of featureless characters; even Billy, whose thoughts we share, seems a blank. The book does come to life, fittingly enough, as Chapel takes the mound for his final and greatest game. Shaara succeeds in conveying the extraordinary physical and psychological demands of the professional game as well as the dizzying pleasures of its triumphs. But even the account of Chapel's greatest victory is marred by a trite ending. While flawed, however, this is a noteworthy attempt to capture the simultaneous loss of a life's love and a life's obsession. (May)

Library Journal