Say it ain't so....

 Yesterday, the Canadian writer W.P. Kinsella passed into his own field of dreams.  A lot of people may have never heard of him but his novel Shoeless Joe went on to become the film Field of Dreams, with which many are familiar.  As often is the case, the book was better than the film, although the film wasn't awful, just a touch on the "schmaltzy" side and personally I think it was Kevin Costner's best movie next to his Bull Durham.

Shoeless Joe, with its reference to the infamous "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, is in my opinion one of the best baseball books ever written along with Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, and The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover. But one doesn't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy any of these books, although some knowledge of the 1919 scandal would help put things into a Shoeless Joe perspective.  The film Eight Men Out (1988) would be a good starting point to acquire a little background on the true story of the Black Sox scandal (but, of course, with a few fictitious items added for the sake of the film).

So, WP, wherever your field of dreams is now, R.I.P. there.