Tim Wendel is well known to baseball fans for his award-winning writing in Baseball Weekly. In Castro's Curveball, he crafts a delightful blend of history, romance, and baseball into a stunning novel of love, dreams, betrayal, and redemption. In 1947, catcher Billy Bryan breaks up a political protest at his Cuban winter league game by asking a skinny student revolutionary named Fidel Castro to throw him a couple of pitches. To Billy's surprise, the kid has good stuff: a decent fastball and an unhittable curve. Soon, Billy is in the middle of a strange tangle of people-including revolutionaries, mobsters, major league scouts, and a beguiling photographer-whose interests in the young Castro go far beyond his pitching abilities. L.J. Ganser's sizzling narration of this utterly unique tale captures all the glamour and turmoil of 1940s Cuba. Wendel skillfully mixes his pitches in a story that keeps listeners guessing until the final at-bat.
