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Monday, 03 September 2012 00:00 |
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Dirty Rice: A Season in the Evangeline League Reviewed on Acadiana LifeStyle.com
 Dirty Rice: A Season in the Evangeline League was reviewed by Melissa G. Teutsch in Acadiana LifeStyle on August 31, 2012. The review, in its entirety, is reprinted below.
DIRTY RICE
By Gerald Duff
UL Press $20
Baseball fans that remember the Evangeline League will be flooded with memories reading this historical fiction novel. Begun in 1935 the league included, among other cities, the New Iberia Cardinals, Lafayette White Sox, Opelousas Indians, and the Rayne Rice Birds. The Birds recruited Gemar Batiste who quickly became the team's star player. Only problem was Gemar was different, an Alabama-Coushatta Indian, who was asked to play the stereotypical Indian and even, asked to cheat. That went against the grain for him as he saw the diamond as a sacred place of honor named in honor of Longfellow's heroine.
This is a warm and humorous story with all the flavor of non-fiction.
To read the review online, click here. |
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Friday, 03 August 2012 00:00 |
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Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory Reviewed on Chapter16
 Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory was reviewed by Ralph Bowden on August 2, 2012, on Chapter16. Mr. Bowden writes:
The Impoverishment of Truth
Gerald Duff's memoir explains the nourishment and necessity of lies
Gerald Duff grew up in East Texas, in both the Gulf Coast petrochemical strip and the logged-out piney woods north of there. As he describes the area, it was hardly a hotbed of literary stimulation in the years during and after World War II. Nor was Duff's family exceptional or especially nurturing of his talents. But wherever his gifts for reading and writing came from, they were clear to Duff from an early age; he knew what he was suited for. Except for the two years he spent struggling in an electrical-engineering curriculum, he pursued literature at every opportunity through college, graduate work at prestigious schools, and faculty appointments, including stints at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and Rhodes College in Memphis. His memoir, Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory, takes him from his unlikely origins through a career as both an academic and a writer of poetry, short stories, and novels.
This is a likeable story, full of ordinary people in all their variety: relatives, most of them born, unlike Duff himself, with no genetic advantages; unsuitable girlfriends; a schizophrenic first wife; a second too driven to be a wife; a third and current wife who suits the role in every way; two successful children; and lots of colleagues, professors, and other academics, with various bees in their bonnets. Duff reveals how he borrowed from their lives and used many of their traits in his fiction.
Duff's description of his six years at Vanderbilt focuses on its tensions, traditions, and prejudices, sparing no one—neither the imported Ivy League chairman who hired him nor the older members of the department who resented the new chairman and everyone he hired. "I did not belong at Vanderbilt," Duff finally realized. Too low-born to make the expected social grade, he did nothing to improve his standing, drifting "into friendship with the closet homosexuals in the department and the one Jew." Perhaps unsurprisingly, Duff's time at Vanderbilt ended in disaster: the loss of his job, his marriage, and his children and all of it topped off by bankruptcy.
Eight years at prestigious Kenyon College in Ohio were a great improvement: "The English Department was the largest and best at the college, attracting the best students who, for the most part, read what they were assigned, wrote well, and considered themselves to be where they belonged," he writes. During these years, he managed to reclaim his children, but Duff's second wife insisted they move to a big city, where she could pursue her own ambitions. Soon after he landed a deanship at Rhodes (then called Southwestern at Memphis) the marriage failed anyway. As a dean, he soon learned the value of dissembling: "The lie is the coin of the realm in higher education management." His new position allowed plenty of time to write, however, and Memphis provided much grist for the writer's mill.
Throughout the book, Duff develops a theme of creative and spontaneous lying. Manipulating the truth saved him from many a childhood switching, maintained his image among his peers, allowing him to succeed as a dean. "Sometimes a lie is the best friend you can have," he writes. "I spent a lifetime depending on what not telling the truth will do to get me by."
To read the review online, click here. |
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Sunday, 08 July 2012 09:10 |
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Dirty Rice: A Season in the Evangeline League Reviewed on Tangilena.com
 Dirty Rice: A Season in the Evangeline League was reviewed by Greg Guirard, noted nature photographer and author, on Tangilena.com, July 6, 2012. The review, in its entirety, is reprinted below.
Check out Dirty Rice – A Season in the Evangeline League by Texas novelist Gerald Duff
By Greg Guirard
You want to read a really good book? A book that will take you back to the days before computers, even before television? Back to a time when every town in South Louisiana, like every town in America, had a baseball team, and when baseball was one of the relatively few forms of public entertainment we had?
Then get yourself a copy of "Dirty Rice – A Season in the Evangeline League" by Texas novelist Gerald Duff, published by UL Lafayette.
Whether the title of this book is a reference to a dish commonly prepared by Cajuns or to a bunch of small-town baseball players (the Rayne Rice Birds, in this case) trying to throw the championship series, the story rings true to life as it was played in those days.
After reading "Dirty Rice" I was ready to believe that Gemar Batiste, the Native American star pitcher from East Texas, really existed, that he played for the Rice Birds in 1935, and that he single-handedly tried to thwart the plans of certain real-life individuals to make a killing by buying off several of Gemar's teammates. In fact, I would be disappointed to learn that it never happened.
I'm also ready to believe that the author himself played in the Evangeline League, so accurate and authentic is his stance and his delivery. Born in 1937, I lived through the twilight of small-town baseball, and I clearly remember watching as the Catahoula Dirt Movers beat every other team in their league repeatedly, beat every opponent thrown against them with the sad exception of early television, the force that took it all away from us forever.
There is nostalgia of the best sort in this book, as well as humor, love, sadness and a generous serving of Native American philosophy. I'm not crazy about baseball, but I found myself reading "Dirty Rice" slowly, sometimes limiting myself to one league game per night, all the way through the championship series, so as not to finish too quickly. It is a time worth reliving, in spite of the Great Depression and the coming world war, and "Dirty Rice" is a story worth reading, at least once.
You can get a copy at area book stores or directly from the UL Press – www.ulpress.org.
Greg Guirard is a noted nature photographer and author.
To read the review online, click here. |
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