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Summary
Summary
"Wild...Romantic...Unconventional...A triumph of hope." THE BOSTON GLOBE The voice of a baseball announcer tells the Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella: "If you build it, he will come." "He" is Shoeless Joe Jackson, Ray's hero. "It" is a baseball stadium which Ray carves out of his cornfield. Like the movie FIELD OF DREAMS that was made from this novel, SHOELESS JOE is about baseball. But it's also about love and the power of dreams to make people come alive.... From the Paperback edition.
Author Notes
William Patrick Kinsella was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on May 25, 1935. He received a bachelor of arts degree in creative writing at the University of Victoria in 1974 and a master of fine arts degree in English at the University of Iowa in 1978. Before becoming a full-time author, he was a professor of English at the University of Calgary.
During his lifetime, he wrote approximately 30 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His first collection of baseball stories, Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, was published in 1980. In 1982, Kinsella expanded the stories into the novel Shoeless Joe, which was adapted into the 1989 movie Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner and Ray Liotta. Shoeless Joe won the Canadian Authors Association Prize, the Alberta Achievement Award, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship.
His other novels included The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt, The Alligator Report, The Miss Hobbema Pageant, Magic Time, If Wishes Were Horses, Butterfly Winter, and Russian Dolls. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1993. He received the Order of British Columbia in 2005 and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. He died of a doctor-assisted death on September 16, 2016 at the age of 81.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Booklist Review
Kinsella's lighthearted fantasy pairs reclusive author J. D. Salinger with an Iowa baseball fanatic who has built an authentic baseball field on his farm property for Shoeless Joe Jackson and other baseball immortals. (Mr 15 82 Adult)
Kirkus Review
Young, struggling Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella hears a disembodied order to build, among his corn, a baseball field in which the dead and ghostly can redeem themselves--and, though too poor to meet his mortgage payments, Ray is deeply in love with the nectarous myth of baseball: he builds the field. So, sure enough, Shoeless Joe Jackson of 1919 Black-Sox-scandal infamy (""Say it ain't so, Joe!"") appears as a ghost, eventually bringing his dead teammates with him; and together they play night-games under a single stalk of lights while Ray and his wife and daughter (who can all see them) raptly watch from jerry-built outfield bleachers. Furthermore, Ray then hears a summons to ""ease his pain""--and he somehow knows that this refers to writer J. D. Salinger! Thus, Ray drives to New Hampshire for Salinger, abducting the hermit novelist: they head back West, stopping along the way in Minnesota to talk with the ghost of ""Moonlight"" Graham, a 1906 New York Giants player-turned-small-town-doctor; and then Ray brings Salinger home to Iowa so that he too, like Ray, can be a sort of Dorothy, with baseball a benevolent, ghostly, neverending Oz. A sweet, imaginative fantasy--but, unfortunately, one doesn't need to know this first novel's publishing history to recognize it as a short-story that's been fatally overextended. The Peter-Pan-ish theme wears thin, drifting from goodheartedness into simplemindedness; the Salinger-kidnap idea starts as a nice fillip, then becomes a distracting loose end; the only plot-hook--the efforts of agri-businessmen to take Ray's farm and destroy his ballfield--isn't anchored securely. So finally, though winning in its messy, sentimental love-of-baseball and studded with limpid, lovely scenes, the narrative here doesn't hang together as a novel. And Kinsella registers instead as a promising story-writer, with rich potential, perhaps, in the vein of a gentler, more sweet-natured Max Apple. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| I. Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa | p. 1 |
| II. They Tore Down the Polo Grounds in 1964 | p. 21 |
| III. The Life and Times of Moonlight Graham | p. 103 |
| IV. The Oldest Living Chicago Cub | p. 155 |
| V. The Rapture of J. D. Salinger | p. 257 |
