Shoeless Joe: The Inspiration for FIELD OF DREAMS

I saw "Field of Dreams" the year it came out, and read "Shoeless Joe" several months later. I was in high school at the time, deep into my obsession with baseball books (the Mets were having an off-year). I pounded through W.P. Kinsella's novel in days, then moved on to "The Iowa Baseball Confederacy", which freaked me out a little, and I never read Kinsella again.Flash forward 13 years. I chanced to see "Field of Dreams" on TV (the TBS "Dinner and a Movie" version) while marooned in a hotel during a business trip -- it was that, or watch Monica Lewinsky's "Mr. Personality". I hadn't seen the movie in a few years, and was struck by how passionate it was about the 1960s. The film's Kinsellas are hippie-era college protestors, and the script is drenched with '60s radical authors (the film's Terrence Mann) and a very lively debate about book burning.None of that's from the book.The novel's central idea is the same -- an Iowa farmer hears "a voice" (a PA announcer, not a dreamy whisper voiced by "Himself", as the film's credits have us believe), plows under his corn and builds a baseball diamond from the Earth. The diamond remains derelict until Shoeless Joe Jackson and the rest of the disgraced 1919 World Series-fixing Chicago Black Sox come to play ball. Add to the mix a small-town doctor whose major league career lasted 5 minutes, and a famously reclusive writer lured out of his shell by a love for the game.But then also add into that mix an identical twin who's a carnival barker for circus freaks, and a senile farmer whose life is built around the lie that he once played baseball for the Tinker-to-Evers-Chance era Chicago Cubs... here's the stuff not incorporated into the screenplay. Neither are Kinsella or his wife '60s revolutionaries; they're just dreamers in their 20s.It's Kinsella (the author)'s writing style that grates, more than anything else. Try as I might, I could never warm up to Kinsella (the character)'s penchant to think in dreamy Earth metaphors, or to speak in poetic paragraphs. His wife is described almost entirely by her bedroom habits. "Shoeless Joe" is as much about family as about baseball, but by the time the identical twin brother shows up (and there are still 50 pages to go), I found myself flipping ahead to hurry up and get to the point."Field of Dreams" is an excellent movie, with a focused message and lively dialogue. "Shoeless Joe" I will call an acquired taste, because you'll need to make a mental adjustment to the writing style, which is more syrupy than "literary".One historical sidebar: Kinsella convinces J.D. Salinger to go to a Twins-Red Sox game at Fenway Park. He describes the game in convincing detail -- who played, who homered, who pitched for Boston (Mike Torrez, who after 1978 also became a mythological figure, whose ghost will one day populate a baseball movie filmed in the year 2050). And it's all fake! No game like this was ever played in 1979, the year Kinsella sets the novel. This has no signficance to anything but I was impressed by the effort. We never learn how that game ends -- Kinsella slams his head into a concrete beam, and spends the final innings in the infirmary. "Shoeless Joe" may be a spiritual fantasy, but I'm quite certain that this is the one scene in the book based on actual fact!

This is the novel on which the very popular film “Field of Dreams” was based and like that film it is chock full of Americana including baseball, farm life, small towns, J.D. Salinger, and road trips. It’s also brimming with baseball lore, trivia, batting averages, anecdotes, and personalities like the eponymous Shoeless Joe Jackson who, after the farmer Ray Kinsella builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield when he is promised by a mysterious baseball announcer voice that “if you build it, he will come”, returns, along with his teammates, the notorious Black Sox, who were banned from the game after accepting money from gamblers to throw the World Series in 1919. It was his dream to play the game he loved again after being banned from the major leagues, Ray believes, and the field of dreams is where his dream comes true at last.As do the dreams of several others. Ray’s father, who played only briefly in the minor leagues but worshipped the game fervently throughout his life, also comes, as do Moonlight Graham, another character from the early years of the game who only played one inning in the majors and never got a chance to go to bat, and J.D. Salinger who, according to this novel, harbored a dearly held aspiration as a youth to play professional ball at the Polo Grounds. For all of them Ray’s baseball diamond isn’t Iowa, it’s heaven.Canadian author W.P. Kinsella has thumbed through his Baseball Encyclopedia with intense concentration and it’s pretty admirable the way he spins an enchanting tale out of the facts and personalities he’s found there. The allegorical possibilities of baseball are stretched, gloriously, deliriously, to their limit and beyond, as immortal baseball gods return to earth to play their game, which is really the religious rites of their faith, on a cornfield that has been lovingly converted to a baseball diamond. In the meantime Ray needs to figure out a way to keep up with his mortgage payments so his family can stay on the farm because if he can’t there’s a greedy developer eyeing his baseball diamond as the last puzzle piece in a large tract being assembled for development.Grounding the nostalgic, mythical healing property of baseball in the team which has become a byword for dishonesty and corruption is questionable but the book does rise to a sort of poetic euphoria with it’s lyrical evocations of a past that never was. When J.D. Salinger expresses this sentiment, one which was forcefully and eloquently expressed by James Earl Jones in the film where he plays the author Terence Mann (Salinger threatened to sue the filmmakers if they used his name), “America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers” you realize that this novel is steamrolling history, or at least erasing it, to rebuild the American past according to a collective dream logic, made up of carefully chosen components which activate a nostalgic yearning then satisfy that yearning in the same manner that a psychic conflict is resolved through a dream.

I'm really torn about this book. There are long stretches where the story is swinging and the plot is moving and the author lyricism is all banging and it's a really interesting and enjoyable read. But there are also long stretches where the story is slow and clunky and the prose is not good. Also there is some hefty racism. Good in places but questionable in a lot more.

Decided to read this book more out of curiosity than anything else watched the film years ago, the book is extremely well written and the characters are portrayed beautifully,the book has a warmth to it

Paperback book of the story that was made into "Field of dreams" - Crease down the front cover but i wasn't too bothered about that- Rest of the book is perfect and have started reading it.If you haven't seen the film - where have you been !!

I did not like it at all

Shoeless Joe is a book about Life, Dreams and BaseballThis book was made into the film " A Field Of Dreams"The book differs very slightly from the film and gives the reader a more in depth insight into life's of the people portrayed and of the Dreams and HopesWorth a read