May 22, 2012 As professional baseball’s only starting knuckleballer, R.A. Dickey, the New York Mets pitcher, is no stranger to the nation’s sports pages, but this spring he’s showing up on the book pages, too, thanks to his new memoir, Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball (written with New York Daily News sportswriter Wayne Coffey). The new book is being covered by the likes of Time magazine, CBS News, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Forbes, and The New York Times, where he gave a thrilling shout-out to Chapter 16. (Believe us, a huge red-velvet cake will be coming his way when he’s back home in Nashville.)
The literary attention is not so surprising, actually—at least not to anyone who has followed Dickey’s career in the majors. Reporters love to point out that Dickey is a lifelong reader who was an Academic All-American as an English major at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. “Dickey, 36, is far more literary than most pro athletes, and more than even most of the college-educated reporters who write about him,” noted The New York Times when the book deal was announced last year. But it’s one thing to be a passionate reader and quite another thing to be an insightful and moving writer. With Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball, R.A. Dickey proves he’s both.
To read excerpts from Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball, click here and here. To read Chapter 16‘s review of the book, click here. For more updates on Tennessee authors, please visit Chapter 16’s News & Notes page, here.
