When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!: Inspiration and Wisdom From One of Baseball's Greatest Heroes

Hall of Fame philosopher Yogi Berra's When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It! is another volume of musings and malaprops, and the advice implicit in the title is sound indeed. Just listen: "Throughout life you come to serious forks in the road--decisions," Yogi tells us. "Which path do you choose? Sometimes it's tough. People are always afraid of making the wrong choice." Not Yogi, who explains that tragedy lies in paralysis, not bad choices or regrets, and offers personal examples from on and off the field to prop up his profundity.

Like its predecessor, The Yogi Book, Fork is essentially a collection of Yogi's well-traveled observations from out of left field, but it's much more than just déjà vu all over again. Instead of explaining, as he has before, what prompted a particular Yogi-ism or what he was really trying to say, Yogi does his best to go deep. The charm is that Yogi's so guileless, he makes it work--there's sagacity in his simplicity. Each Yogi-ism gets its own short chapter in which Yogi riffs off the phrase to dispense a bit of homespun wisdom and inspiration. "It gets late early out there"--we get old before we're ready, but here's how to cope with it. "If you can't imitate him, don't copy him"--we all need to be true to ourselves. With Yogi's latest career as a successful author, not only ain't it over for him, there's happily no end in sight. --Jeff Silverman