Walk Like a Duck, a Season of Little League Baseball in Italy

The Staranzano Ducks are a northern Italian baseball team in a country that is a palimpsest for history, the kind of place baseball, a game of instant historicity, sinks its hooks into a people for whom history is a quotidian backdrop. Walk Like a Duck chronicles one season of Italian baseball, yet, written in diary form by a US expatriate living in Izola, Slovenia, just across the border from Trieste, the book is steeped in culture and history, ranging from hilariously mocking to fascinatingly informative. “It’s a children’s book,” says the author, a novelist, “a book advocating for the children who play the game and the adults whose love of the game prevents the tragedy of adulthood from taking root.”