If nothing else, Jonah Keri’s Up, Up, and Away taught me that the French term for knuckleball is “balle papillon”—literally, butterfly ball. That alone was worth the cost of admission.
Of course, that is not the only thing of value in Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos (the longest title ever?) by a long shot. What Keri succeeds in doing in the book is distilling the 36-year history of the first Canadian franchise into roughly 400 pages of highly readable and enjoyable narrative.