"Traditionally, it's viewed as a female occupation, to strip away the layers and examine the experience of relationships with a partner, with children, within one's own interior emotional life. Here comes a strong, real male voice, exploring the terrifying territory of growing older–in a marriage, in a family, in one's body. Ethelbert Miller writes with naked honesty and courage about what it is to be a man no longer young. Youth may have left him. Passion has not."
–Joyce Maynard, author of At Home in the World
"The 5th Inning is a poetic meditation as much as a memoir. Ethelbert brings his poet's eye to the game of baseball and transforms it into a metaphor for a life that knows strikes, groundouts, and errors as well as the beauty of a ball sailing straight across homeplate."
–Josephine Reed, WPFW
"Ethelbert Miller brings an accomplished poet's stunning language to this important memoir, and no one writes more eloquently about the lives–the triumphs and dilemmas–of black American men than he does."
–Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage, on Fathering Words