I am the target audience for this book.
[x] Similarly aged male as the author
[x] Baseball obsessed as a kid
[x] Baseball card collector
[x] Reads books

However, I don't think you need to be a (former) card collector and baseball fan to appreciate this story. I'd read a lot of Wilker's Cardboard Gods blog over the years and was excited to see it in book form. [If you haven't seen his blog and are a baseball fan then you need to look at it while you're still online.]

In the first few chapters of this book I was disappointed that it wasn't all about baseball, but was instead about this kid growing up. But it really grew quickly on me as a wonderfully written story about this kid growing up.

Equal parts "That 70's Show" and "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy," author Josh Wilker tells the story of his childhood using his baseball card collection from the 1970s. I loved the concept. And anyone who has ever collected baseball cards would likely buy this one after thumbing through the pages, because there in all their psychedelic, full-color glory, he writes about Reggie Jackson, Carl Yastrzemski, Carmen Fanzone, Bake McBride, and just about anyone else in between. The cards he writes about from his collection span his formative years of 1975-1981.

Some of the stories are funny and others are sad. Some of the stories are endearing and others are quite crude. A very honest look at life as an adolescent growing up in 1970s USA.

A truly fantastic book. What at first appears to be a man recollecting about his baseball cards and offering anecdotes about them soon turns into a story about what happens when the pillars of life erode around you, when certainty wavers and eventually when the pillars you build for yourself i.e. the love of Baseball Cards, The Cardboard Gods themselves erode. It's a story of growth and growing up and the eventual re-discovery and rebuilding of that man made pillar. And most of all it's beautifully written.

An interesting take on a memoir: the author tells his life story through baseball cards. Each "chapter" begins with a baseball card and will give information about the card/team/player(s), but will also include an anecdote about the author's life. For instance, one chapter starts with the Rick and Paul Reuschel, brothers who pitched for the Cubs. That chapter is about the author's relationship with his brother. You don't need to know a lot about baseball to understand this book. In all, I enjoyed it, but it wasn't the best thing I've ever read.

I saw myself in this book in so many places that it was kind of spooky at times. Josh's feelings on baseball, baseball cards and growing up really resonated with me and brought back memories that I haven't recalled in many years. Like Josh, my obsession with baseball cards met an inevitable conclusion, but my love for the game continues even if it will never again reach that fevered pitch of youth where I would live and die by how my Astros did that night. I thought this book would be gimmicky with the baseball cards theme being forced and feeling contrived, but Wilker did a great job of tying each card into the story of his life in a way that sent my mind back to my collection time and time again. I cried when Josh surprisingly said that his childhood was happy, and my heart soared when his Red Sox finally won the World Series and he got to celebrate with his brother. I never have the desire to reach out to an author and personally tell him how his story impacted me, but I found myself wanting to do that with Cardboard Gods, probably because in many ways his story is my story.

I read this book, like many others, after following Mr. Wilker's blog for several years. Those who are familiar with his website will find the "chapters" very familiar, but I was impressed that he was able to create an engaging and intimate story from what seemed to be at first glance a collection of his blog posts. As a serious baseball fan, spending time with each of the cards was valuable in and of itself, but toward the end of the book I found myself just glancing over the cards so I could keep reading the story. Well done.

I should preface my review that I was a blogger alongside the author at baseballtoaster.com and I'm mentioned in the acknowledgments for the book. However, I bought the book myself.

When I tried to describe what Cardboard Gods was about to some friends, I had a hard time. It's a book that is not just read for pleasure, but it also takes you back in time in a way that even a history book can't do.

Cardboard Gods is, in a nutshell, one man's way of piecing together a narrative about his life (especially his childhood) using baseball cards. But that really doesn't do the book justice. The baseball cards are not just pictures of players from over 30 years ago. Instead, they are launching points to get the reader involved with the life of the author.

Wilker expertly weaves together the two threads about his life (growing up most of his life in Vermont with his mother and her boyfriend while his father lived in New York) and the baseball cards and players of the late 1970s.

For a book of a little over 240 pages, there is so much to learn. Even for someone who had a pretty good idea how Josh Wilker's story would come out, I was captivated by the story. It is a unique contribution to baseball literature. It is a valuable contribution to literature all together.

I'll admit this book reeled me in with a fun, if gimmicky premise: aimless writer revisits a turbulent childhood through the lens of his old baseball card collection, one card -- one memory -- at a time. You can't go wrong with a pitch like that. So, yeah, I expected this book to be enjoyable. I did not expect it to be one of the best baseball books I've ever read. For starters, Josh Wilker's childhood was not like most -- he grew up in a three-parent household with hippy-dippy, free-spirited philosophical underpinnings but very down-to-earth real-life consequences. The bond he shared with his older brother and their shared love of baseball (together, the book's holy trinity) get them through -- but it's a treacherous and poignant journey, and he writes about it surprisingly powerfully. The humor is always present -- Wilker is a humorist at heart. But he's not just a humorist -- I would draw a comparison here to Steve Almond, who also writes about real heavy shit with a dashingly clever pen. But there is real pathos here, real loneliness, real confusion and anger and betrayal, and Wilker is a good enough writer to face these challenges head-on. If you pick this book up with breezy beach reading in mind, you might not always get what you bargained for, but what you will get is so much more than that. I was really taken aback by Cardboard Gods, in the best way. Highly recommended.

Attended a reading/book signing today.

For a biography about a guy whose 20s were spent pretty much not going anywhere, this is a really neat story. His life, told within the frame of different baseball cards he collected as a kid.