Cardboard Gods
"A baseball-loving loner deciphers his complicated childhood through his old box of trading cards. . . . Wilker's book is as nostalgically intoxicating as the gum that sweetened his card-collecting youth. [Grade:] A" --Entertainment Weekly"Unforgettable . . .it summons time and place and nostalgia in a rush of feeling and memory. In Wilker's hands, a pack of baseball cards becomes a Gen-X tarot deck, as if arranging them just so can unlock life's secrets. . . ."--Ted Anthony, Associated PressCardboard Gods is a worthy descendant of (Frederick Exley's) A Fan's Notes in showing that when it comes to sportswriting, what the games mean to its fans is often more interesting than the games themselves."--New York Times Bats Blog "Wilker uses these frayed, sugar-scented relics of pre-Facebook kid culture as a means to understanding just what happened to him and his fractured family during the '70s--and in doing so, he pays tribute to that lost decade's zany awesomeness." --AOL's Asylum.com “Wilker connects baseball cards to more pop culture references than a season ofFamily Guy—everything from Louis L’Amour westerns to Jack Kerouac to Elvis Costello . . . You’ll love this book.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune“I couldn’t put it down . . . In much the same way Doris Kearns Goodwin’sWait Till Next Yearis as much about growing up in the 1950s as her being a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Wilker, too, uses baseball as a backdrop in writing about the ’70s.” —The Boston Herald