GET LIT: Win a copy of The Eastern Stars

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GET LIT: Win a copy of The Eastern Stars

POSTED: Monday, April 5, 2010, 6:56 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

Riverhead, 288 pp., $25.95, April 15

Book Quarterly Trivia Week continues with yet another baseball book to get you through Opening Day. We're giving away a copy of Mark Kurlansky's The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de MacorÃs. Here's what City Paper's editor in chief/baseball fan in chief, Brian Howard, had to say about it:

No author has ever been more at home writing about fish than Mark Kurlansky (Cod, Salt). Not that the skill comes in handy in a book ostensibly about the transformative effects of baseball on tiny San Pedro de MacorÃs (aka "The Cradle of Shortstops"). The book's examination of Dominican history — from pre-colonial through the bloody Trujillo dictatorship to the present — is enlightening. But the baseball sections of The Eastern Stars — particularly those driven by reportage — are composed with what could graciously be described as an elementary understanding of the game. (That the book's appendix of San Pedro major leaguers is riddled with errors further torpedoes its bona fides.) Kurlansky doesn't seem to know what kind of book he wanted to write — a history, a sociological tract, a bio — and ultimately fails to deliver on the promise of the subtitle. He concludes with the lure of MLB money, which is just the starting point for this discussion.

To win a copy, answer the following trivia question:

As Mark Kurlansky explained in Salt: A World History, where does the idiom "red herring" come from?

E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net. There's still time to answer our Harry the K trivia question; or check back tomorrow for more BQTW giveaways.

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