The Last At-Bat of Shoeless Joe

Great Story of Baseball and Life. In this tale the author picks up on a hometown hero who died just as the author was beginning to play baseball himself, but whom he never heard of until many years later. The author uses a combination of real and fiction to paint a stunning portrait of a man, a place, a time, and a sport. I read this book on Major League Baseball's Opening Weekend 2019, and this fall at the World Series will be the century mark of the infamous Black Sox scandal that saw “Shoeless” Joe Jackson banned from the sport he loved for the rest of his life. The story picks up in the final year of Joe's real life, when he is living in relative anonymity many years after the scandal and indeed after years of depression and war that largely allowed Joe to fade into history. But here we find a young boy with a talent for baseball stuck in the morass of textile mill life in the post-War period in the South. The villain, played by son of a carpetbagger who resents the life he has been dealt and has dreams of returning to both baseball and the North, is written superbly. This book is so richly textured that it resembles some of the complex fabrics coming out of the region at the time, with some scenes reminiscent of the sweeping shots used in some major movies now. Simply an outstanding book about a truly phenomenal man, and one that left this reader in tears. If you're a fan of baseball at all, read this book - it is at least as good as any baseball movie ever, including Field of Dreams. If you want to have a better idea of what life was like in Jim Crowe South, read this book - it has a great depiction of that too. If you just want a solid story of hope, forgiveness, and love - of people, life, and the game - read this book. You won't be disappointed.