Wrigleyworld : a season in baseball's best neighborhood /

Wrigleyville is the popular name for Lake View, the neighborhood where the Chicago Cubs have played baseball at storied Wrigley Field for almost 100 years. But readers won't learn much about Lake View or the Cubs in this tedious, smug account of how Kaduk, only four years out of college, quit a sportswriting job at the Kansas City Star-resenting the "dues-paying tactics" of covering prep sports-and moved to Wrigleyville for the 2005 season. Kaduk's focus is on "what it means to be a twenty-something baseball fan" in "one of the top party spots in the nation." To bolster this arguable assertion, he attends 62 of the Cubs' 81 home games, providing game-by-game descriptions of where he drinks, the kind and number of the drinks he has, the drunks he drinks with and hackneyed sportswriting ("a three-run dinger to left"). While Kaduk sneers at the "privileged" yuppies who live in the neighborhood, his stories reveal nothing beyond the fact that hanging out near Wrigley Field "provides a college lifestyle for as long as anyone wants to live it," making his choice of what he claims "countless others had surely dreamed of doing" instead of working ("It really isn't for me") rather juvenile. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved