ROBERT ELIAS

What a fool I’ve been! Here I (and my publisher) have timed the publication of my new baseball novel perfectly for Opening Day of the new baseball season, yet my book doesn’t say a single thing about steroids!

It’s true that The Deadly Tools of Ignorance is as much about academia, technology, crime policy, San Francisco, and the Church, as it is about baseball. But even so, what could I have been thinking? What a story I could have told about performance-enhancing drugs. Throw together a handful of ballplayers, toss in an MLB Commissioner and a Union head, and mix them all up with a dozen grandstanding politicians, and voila—I could have had readers begging me for more murders in the plot.

In fact, steroids have rocked the baseball establishment. We should take very seriously the health implications of these drugs, and their relationship to our hyper-competitive society and sports world. Even so, these troubles will pass, and baseball will survive—just as it has outlasted all its previous challenges and scandals over the last century and a half.

As the old Giants player and manager, Bill Terry, once said: “Baseball must be a great game to survive the fools who run it.” But baseball’s not just a great game. It’s a reflection of American society, a barometer of American life. Without it, we’d have no way to really see ourselves as a people—warts and all. If anything, we need that mirror now, more than ever.

So, Opening Day will come and the baseball season will begin. And despite the steroids, it will be a time of joy. We’ll all have the same high hopes we always have: for our players, our teams, and our towns.

And, of course, to get ourselves fully into the spirit of the baseball spring--this time of rebirth and optimism--I can’t think of a better strategy than to curl up with a nice, warm (hot off the presses) copy of The Deadly Tools of Ignorance. Okay, so I left out the drugs. But the book does have a rip-roaring gambling scandal, and the Giants and Dodgers (true to form) do try to beat each other’s brains out. One of them, the Giants’ star reliever, is even targeted for murder!

Get your juices flowing for Opening Day!

I want to thank everyone who’s helped me write and publish this book (my first novel), and thus made this a particularly memorable Opening Day for me.



Upcoming Book Events!

I’ll be talking about The Deadly Tools of Ignorance, as well as doing readings and book signings at the following venues in the next few weeks. I would be very happy to see you at one of these events:

Thursday, April 21, 7 pm: M Is for Mystery Bookstore
86 East Third Avenue
San Mateo, CA 94401
www.MforMystery.com
650-401-8077

Wednesday, April 27, 4:30 pm: University of San Francisco
University Center 400, USF
Golden Gate Avenue
San Francisco CA 94117
415-422-6671

Thursday, May 12, 1 pm: Walden Books, Embarcadero
4 Embarcadero Ctr,
San Francisco, CA 94111
415-397-8181

Tuesday, May 17, 7:30 pm: Black Oak Books
1491 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94709
www.BlackOakBooks.com
(510)486-0698

Saturday, June 11, 1:30 pm: Walden Books, W. Portal
255 W Portal Ave,
San Francisco, CA 94127
415-664-7596