Choosing Up Sides - Softcover

Ritter, John H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 075694094X ISBN 13: 9780756940942

Publisher: PERFECTION LEARNING CORP, 2000

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13-year-old Luke Bledsoe is a left-hander in a right-handed world. Moved from town to town, he's spent his life feeling like an outsider. Then, by chance, he steps on a baseball field and discovers he can pitch. But Luke's father, Reverend Bledsoe, believes that the left side is the side of Satan, and the baseball field is the Devil's playground. Luke has spent his whole life trying to please his father. Will he choose to give up the game he's come to love -- or turn his back on his family?

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Review

"No ordinary baseball book, this is a rare first novel".

-- Kirkus Reviews, pointer review

From the Author

The seeds of inspiration for Choosing Up Sides...
Choosing Up Sides, set in 1921, Southern Ohio, is the story of Luke, a left-handed preacher's boy, who is forced by his family's religious beliefs to go through life right-handed.

Luke's family holds the notion--which many people believed in those days--that the left hand was the hand of the Devil. But when the boys in Luke's town find out that he has the potential to be a great baseball pitcher--but only with his left arm--this obedient boy has to decide what to do.

Many people wonder if I wrote the story because I'm left-handed or if this event ever happened to me. Actually, I'm predominately right-handed, though if I were to have a baseball card, it would read, "Bats left, throws right."

The roots of the story, however, come from my childhood, back in the 1960s, during the great Civil Rights Movement. I remember watching the marchers on TV and seeing the fire hoses being turned on them, seeing the bull dogs being turned loose on them, and hearing about several Civil Rights marchers who were kidnapped and murdered. And as a ten-year-old boy, I could not comprehend the reasons for this hatred or this prejudice.

About the same time, my fifth grade teacher listed some Latin root words on the board and asked the class to guess their meanings. One of those words was "sinister." We all guessed that it meant evil and diabolical and all the things we could think of that had to do with being sinister. But she said, "No. 'Sinister' is the Latin word for 'left hand.'"

She went on to explain that throughout the ages left-handers were thought to be demon-possessed and were even burned at the stake as witches.

Again, I could not understand the origins of this bias, but I did know one thing. In the baseball world, left-handers are revered. As a left-handed pull hitter, I knew that lefties were highly valued on any team. So, among other things, I used this novel as a way to examine the power of discrimination, its origins, and the damage it can do, by placing Luke in between these two very different worlds and watching what all the characters decide to do.

I'm not sure whether I've "hit the mark," but so far all of the reviews have been generous (see the Kirkus "pointer" review above, for example). Choosing Up Sides has also been nominated by the American Library Association as a Best Book for Young Adults and was named to the 1998 "Blue Ribbon" List by The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, for which I am very grateful.

I do have to say that I get a lot of interesting feedback about the ending of the book. Some people ask me why I chose that ending. All I can say is that the more you understand allegory, particularly Biblical allegory, the more it will make sense to you.

Thank you, everyone, for your interest. I certainly appreciate it.

Sincerely, John H. Ritter.

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