![]() ![]() Dad had been a minor league catcher in his youth, and one thing that Ray and his dad could bond over was baseball and the raw deal that Shoeless Joe received for his involvement in the scam. This story’s narrator, Ray Kinsella (yes, the same last name as the author of this novel) loves baseball and learned to love it from his late father. ![]() “Shoeless Joe” refers to Joe Jackson, one of baseball’s great players who, along with his Chicago White Sox teammates, was suspended permanently from baseball due to his involvement in fixing the 1919 World Series. ![]() Instead, we have to slog through the tale of Ray’s journey to gather up his disciples while also fighting evil corporate America (destroyer of all dreams) while also healing his family while also inspiring J.D. Unfortunately, those parts of the book do not take up the bulk of the story. The parts of the story that interested me involved the baseball field and the players from the past who were resurrected when main character Ray Kinsella built it in his cornfield. Shoeless Joe, the basis for the 1989 Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams, is a decent-ish fantasy swathed in backward looking heteronormative tropes where a beleaguered white messiah-figure brings redemption to all around him. ![]() Here’s one of those rare (for me) cases of the movie being better than the book. ![]()
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