Batting Against Castro

Makes a nice name for a book, but Batting Against Castro's title story — an improbable yarn about an American ballplayer in 1951 Cuba who finds himself hitting against, yes, the revolutionary leader — doesn't quite swing it. Luckily, it's the solitary letdown. The rest of Jim Shepard's stories are so good that it's hard to pick the best, though ''Atomic Tourism'' (an eerie fable of post-apocalyptic sightseers) and ''Mars Attacks'' (in which a man reveals his family's tragedy within descriptions of the sci-fi trading cards he collected as a boy) are among those that linger longest in the imagination. If there is a unifying theme throughout, it's that all the characters discover that they are powerless in the face of suffering. A