The first-time novelist, however, has surprises up his sleeve, and the vividly described sporting matches set up a series of betrayals and double crosses which test the camaraderie of the Union soldiers, calling their commitment to the war effort into question. Dyja has a gifted understanding of the powerlessness one faces in combat. War in this novel is not tragic merely because it kills and maims good men; it is dispiriting because it robs them of their identities. He handles the multiple points of view of his Brooklyn protagonists superbly, differentiating them by class, social standing, and ethnicity, and aptly shows how the war frays their senses of themselves. Commanders become followers, Irish racists hide amongst black gravediggers, and staunch abolitionists measure their belief in liberty against their gut instincts concerning the corruptibility of human nature. If the sectional crisis of the first half of the 19th century was settled on the fields of battle, the class struggle of the second half was forged in the streets of Brooklyn--making Dyja's company all the more fascinating for the way they illustrate the transition. Although the novel's climax abandons historical materialism for genre convention, the tense mixture of espionage, betrayal, and vivid battle scenes in Play for a Kingdom should please discriminating fans of Civil War fiction. --John M. Anderson From Library Journal As this first novel opens, the 20 remaining men of Company L, 14th Brooklyn regiment, have only 18 days remaining in their three-year enlistments. As they are pulling out, they discover a field, unscathed by war, on which they begin to play baseball.

Suddenly, a group of Confederate soldiers emerges from the surrounding woods, holding rifles but declaring a truce. And so the Union and Confederate soldiers who have met before and who will meet again on Civil War battlefields begin a series of baseball games. Dyja effectively juxtaposes the horror and chaos of war with the familiar routine of the game. He explores the theme of war and games as natural activities of man, as battles of pride and place, and as testing grounds of moral and physical honor. Dyja writes that "a ball field was a world within the world," and so too a baseball game is a world within a war. An engrossing story, told within the context of actual events. Recommended for most libraries.  Harcourt Brace 0-15-100267-3 / 9780151002672
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