Castro's Curveball

"Engrossing...Wendel's characters are complex and passionate. The unfolding of their lives is fascinating."

"Irresistible...Castro's Curveball has all the excitement of a tie-breaking home run."

"In a touch of iconoclastic ingenuity, Wendel builds on evidence of the youthful Fidel Castro's athletic prowess and pitching ability to construct an outstanding sports novel that also closely observes Cuban society and politics...Wendel's knowledge of baseball--the jargon, the players--enlivens the novel with some of the best game-action sequences in fiction...his portrait of Cuba is multifaceted and intriguing."

"Wendel's lustrous prose and imaginative storytelling paint a vivid portrait of a life not just lived, but inhaled against a backdrop of a nation mad for baseball and not far from political and social upheaval."

Amazingly, the author has managed to interest yours truly, a sportsaphobe, not only in his characters, but in the game. Narrator [Gardner]...keeps the plot moving without a hitch.

"Sportswriter Wendel uses the rumors of Castro's flirtation with a baseball career to produce a beguiling mix of thriller and love story...Wendel makes the most of his premise while soaking plenty of atmosphere out of his prerevolutionary Havana setting. He gets the baseball right, too, capturing the Bull Durham-like camaraderie of has-beens and wanna-bes struggling to keep their dreams alive--and stay out of the way of those whose dreams are bigger and much more dangerous."

"A superbly crafted meditation on heroism, duty, and the irony derived from recognizing everyone's imperfections but your own."