The Heroes Have Gone: Personal Essays on Sport, Popular Culture, and the American West,

The Heroes Have Gone shows off Jim W. Corder’s consummate skills as a memoirist, essayist, and cultural critic. The subjects are wide-ranging: West Texas, World War II, Las Vegas, TCU football—and baseball. While scandals of steroids, Congressional hearings, perjury charges, illegal betting, wildly-inflated contracts (and egos) and generally naughty behavior tarnish the image of today’s athletes, Corder remembers the sports heroes of his own Depression-era childhood: he writes of Gehrig, of Gheringer—and of his own older brother, who played on the sandlots of dustbowl West Texas. Though nostalgic, Corder is never naive: the heroic image of the American warrior-athlete—much like the wild-west cowboy—has forever been a dream. And when we’ve believed in it, tried to live own lives by its measure, we have inevitably failed: the dream became our collective nightmare. Witty, often humorous, always poignant, Corder drives this point home: the heroes have gone. Indeed, they never were.