Greenville, South Carolina. Jimmy Roberts is the best hitter in this little mill town, and maybe in the whole Textile Baseball League. He’s got major league potential, and then some. But to get there, he’ll need a miracle. Or maybe the help of a local drunk and liquor store owner … who just happens to go by the name of “Shoeless Joe.”
I love baseball and this book did not disappoint!
Shoeless Joe befriends a young man named Jimmy Roberts who desparately needs and asks for help.
Jimmy loves baseball and though he was tossed from his team and job, decides to ask Shoeless for some help. Shoeless knows what it feels to be tossed.
He was accused of being involved in the Black Sox baseball scandal in 1919.
This is a wonderfully detailed novel and I was caught up in the many ways Shoeless coached and taught.
It is a story to shed some light on the true facts of this wonderful man and ball player from South Carolina.
An interesting read for anybody who enjoys baseball!
What’s more American than baseball and Mom’s Apple Pie?
Shoeless Joe Jackson was a baseball legend, who got tied up in the Black Sox’s World Series scandal/loss of 1919. But was he involved? He set records at that series. The book is about after that time, when Joe goes back to his home town and in his early 60’s is running a liquor store and decides to help some of the local kids out. And man, how he turned their team around by teaching them the basics of baseball.
The author learns that Joe Jackson had lived and died in his hometown so he set out to write a book about him, guilty or not. Interestingly enough a screen play came out first than a book. A lot of research went into this book, while a work of fiction many of the events do reflect history.
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.