A Chance to Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City
*Starred Review* We’re all familiar with the rags-to-riches lives of famous celebrities who overcame poverty-drugs-abuse to become household names. Schuppe, a Pulitzer Prize winner, explores the far more frequent rags-to-rags scenario, focusing on a few people involved in the life of Rodney Mason of Newark, New Jersey. Mason was, at times, a high-school baseball star, gang member, dope dealer, and all-around badass. But after he was shot in a dispute over a woman and confined to a wheelchair, he decided to try to help kids avoid the gang life by getting them interested in baseball. Against all odds and surmounting crushing obstacles, he did just that. In addition to telling Mason’s story, Schuppe examines the lives of the kids Mason tries to help. One has virtually no place to live. Dad’s in prison, Mom is often ineffectual, so he moves from cousin to sister to grandma and back again, changing schools each time. Keep pressing on? Pass on the easy money available on the street? Kids do it, but, as Schuppe points out, it is so damn hard. That’s the takeaway here. There is poverty defined by an absence of money, but the real poverty may be the absence of opportunity. Yes, it may be peculiar to describe a book that looks unflinchingly at urban poverty as wonderful, but in the sense that this account will open eyes and maybe a few minds, wonderful just might apply. --Wes Lukowsky