When You Can't Come Back - Hardcover

Dravecky, Dave; Dravecky, Jan; Gire, Ken

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0310585600 ISBN 13: 9780310585602

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1992

Synopsis

The former all-star pitcher chronicles his painful struggle with cancer, his heroic return to baseball, and the eventual loss of his arm to the disease

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

In 1989, major-league pitcher Dravecky--who struggled back from surgery on his cancerous left arm only to break the arm ruinously while pitching--learned a bitter lesson about comebacks. It's too bad he didn't heed it instead of writing this awkward missive. Dravecky has come back to the writing table, though, with a sequel to his 1990 Comeback, which was a far more affecting memoir with its focus on his baseball career and dramatic medical ups and downs. Dravecky's wife has coauthored this update on the family saga (she and Dave contribute alternating passages), which finds the couple suffering the torments of Job, she falling into a major clinical depression and he finally losing the arm to amputation. One can only sympathize with the Draveckys' difficulties, but the tone here is so long-suffering and so self-involved (it's no anomaly that a passage in which the couple goes to the White House and meets Bush contains no impression whatsoever of the President) that only close friends are likely to find much of interest. The problem is compounded by the Draveckys' born-again philosophy that permeates the narrative, since on the page the authors' wrestlings with God lack fresh insight (``God doesn't promise us a life full of mountaintop experiences. There will be valleys to go through too,'' Dave points out): Do we really need Dave's commentary on how Field of Dreams is for him a metaphor for returning to God? Only when the agony's so raw that it seeps through the clich‚s does the book come alive--as in Dave's admission that, finally, he doesn't understand why he has suffered so; or in his description of the pain he's felt in his phantom amputated limb. The Draveckys' sincerity shines through even this orgy of soul-beating, which says a lot for them. (Eight pages of b&w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

Dravecky was an outstanding baseball pitcher for the San Francisco Giants when life threw him a curve ball. As recounted in his previous book, Comeback ( LJ 5/1/90), he was diagnosed with cancer at the height of his pitching career. Dravecky recovered and briefly returned to Major League ball in 1989. Soon, however, cancer claimed his pitching arm, and ultimately his arm and shoulder were removed. His account shares the struggles he and his wife Jan experience as they deal with cancer and its power to reshape their lives. The Draveckys, both devout Christians, write of their worry, pain, depression, faith, and joy. Life demands much of its participants, and there is a message in this book for all.
- Lois F. Roets, Drake Univ., Des Moines
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0310585600
• ISBN 13: 9780310585602
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 199