Product Description

"If you build it, he will come." Them mysterious words of an Iowa baseball announcer lead Ray Kinsella to carve a baseball diamond in his cornfield in honor of his hero, the baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson. This is a book "not so much about baseball as it is about dreams, magic, life, and what is quintessentially American," said the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47045 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.com Review
W. P. Kinsella plays with both myth and fantasy in his lyrical novel, which was adapted into the enormously popular movie, Field of Dreams. It begins with the magic of a godlike voice in a cornfield, and ends with the magic of a son playing catch with the ghost of his father. In Kinsella's hands, it's all about as simple, and complex, as the object of baseball itself: coming home. Like Ring Lardner and Bernard Malamud before him, Kinsella spins baseball as backdrop and metaphor, and, like his predecessors, uses the game to tell us a little something more about who we are and what we need.

From AudioFile
Baseball conjures long, slow, hot, hazy afternoons or silken summer evenings. John Heard's narration dispels the magic and squanders Kinsella's pensive, evocative prose. D.M.L. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
"W. P. Kinsella plays with both myth and fantasy in his lyrical novel, which was adapted into the enormously popular movie, 'Field of Dreams.' It begins with the magic of a godlike voice in a cornfield, and ends with the magic of a son playing catch with the ghost of his father. In Kinsella's hands, it's all about as simple, and complex, as the object of baseball itself: coming home. Like Ring Lardner and Bernard Malamud before him, Kinsella spins baseball as backdrop and metaphor, and, like his predecessors, uses the game to tell us a little something more about who we are and what we need." -- Review

Customer Reviews

Kinsella gets it right
Baseball is something sacred, especially when shared between fathers and sons. And "Shoeless Joe" is centered around that very thing - a lost son searching for the ghost of his father, chasing dreams and hearing voices in his head.

And of course there is the romance of the game, something that could turn an otherwise normal cornfield in the middle of Iowa into a sacred gathering place for ghosts of the game's past.

And it's a love story between Ray and Annie as well.

It's a beautiful book, one that I've enjoyed many times. Before my dad died, we even made a detour to Iowa to see the cornfield they carved up for the movie "Field of Dreams."

There's a reason baseball inspires so much poetry, literature and art, and Kinsella is one of the best at capturing it. If you love the game and great storytelling, then this book is for you.

-- John Nemo, author of the baseball novel The King's Game

If you read it, a cliche wil vanish
Somewhere along the road the phrase 'if you build it, they will come' has come to signify a sort of brainless reassurance. In fact, the message of the book is that if you build something with a clarity of vision and purity of heart, there will be results worthy of your effort.

Reading this beautiful book about baseball (and make no mistake, it's really about baseball)will liberate you from the power of that cliche. It will also give you a haunting, beautiful model from which to build your own fields.

Lynn Hoffman, author of the novel bang BANG

A Book to Read When You Feel Magic Seeping From Your Life
Imagine listening to Peggy Lee singing "Is That All There Is" and feeling like you need to sleep for a week to escape the inane, predictable world. And then imagine youself feeling inspired by a short but magical novel that seems to say that just about anything is possible. If you're in the doldrums and tempted to become a cynic, read W. P. Kinsella's SHOELESS JOE. Peggy won't sound so convincing after you're finished.

Yes, of course, the plot is slightly different from the movie's, but not by much. A few scenes from the book are omitted for the sake of pacing, and Hollywood made J.D. Salinger into bestselling writer Terence Mann for legal reasons in case the recluse got his shorts all bunched up. But the storyline of FIELD OF DREAMS is quite faithful to the novel. So why read the book, you ask.

First, Kinsella's style is quite poetic. Although it becomes a bit saccharine in spots, it nevertheless has an easy feel to it. The paragraphs flow with a descriptive grace that is a bit magical in itself. There are some very long digressions, but even these are interesting as they slip nicely into Kinsella's tale of baseball as the saving grace of America--and one man in particular: Ray Kinsella.

The best reason to read this book, however, is to have the author's original words, as opposed to the resulting screenplay, sink into your soul so that you can feel the magic of the prose-poetry at a deeper level, where it can take root.

Kinsella manages to do two things in this novel: he speaks of the importance of the simple things in life: a farm, a pitcher of lemonade, a kiss, baseball. Simultaneously, he implies that there is a magic woven into the very fabric of reality, a magic that can happen to anyone. Paradoxically, it is this magic that ultimately makes the simple things accessible to us. Maybe that's why kids can have fun with rocks, sticks, and carboard boxes--kids who also believe in magic and baseball.

So "is that all there is"? No, Peggy. There is a mysterious world in the cornfields of Ray Kinsella's farm, a world that can touch our own if we allow ourselves to once again believe in dreams and possibilities.