18 years ago today my father, David Lewis Barron, lost his fight with cancer. To be honest I don't remember him reading a lot, he did own a copy of Eddie Rickenbacker's autobiography, no surprise there, Rickenbacker founded Eastern Airlines, my dad worked for EAL for over 26 years. But the reason I picked the book for today is the his favorite sport was baseball, he could have been a great ball player but when he had his tryout with the Boston Red Sox he was told he was fast but too small, at the time baseball apparently had a height requirment, who knew? Dad was 5'8". In 1946 he led the state of New Hampshire in batting partically thanks to my grandfathers baseball pitching machine. So, for my dad, a book I haven't read but I love the movie and with many thanks to wikipedia.
Shoeless Joe is a magic realist novel by W. P. Kinsella. It became much better known because of its film adaptation, Field of Dreams.
Ray Kinsella lives and farms in Iowa where he grows corn with his wife Annie and their five-year-old daughter Karin. Kinsella is obsessed with the beauty and history of American baseball, specifically the plight of his hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and the Black Sox Scandal of the 1919 World Series. When he hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field in the midst of his corn crop in order to give his hero a chance at redemption, he blindly follows instructions. The field becomes a conduit to the spirits of baseball legends. Soon, Kinsella is off on a cross-country trip to ease the pain of another hero, the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, as part of a journey the Philadelphia Inquirer called "not so much about baseball as it's about dreams, magic, life, and what is quintessentially American."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoeless_Joe_(novel)
No comments:
Post a Comment