A lovely, well-written book full of love of baseball, Burgess' home town of Greenville, and of Shoeless Joe Jackson. I loved that he wrote with real knowledge of baseball, but in prose that captured the appeal and romance of the sport.

I also loved that his characters were so well-constructed and fully captured. I feel as if I would know them if they came to church one Sunday.

In talking about an environment, Southern textile mills and mill towns, that's so alien to us today, it can be hard to capture the look and feel of the place. It can be just as hard to capture the sometimes grim reality while still keeping the pleasure and joys of life. Burgess does this beautifully.

Even if you aren't a baseball lover, you'll love this book. You'll love it more if you love baseball.

I was so excited about reading this book because I am a huge baseball fan (Go Cubs!) After the Black Soxs scandal Joe Jackson returns home in shame and refuses to even think about baseball. A 17 year old kid named Jimmy has the talent to go to the big time but he still needs a little help. He goes to talk to Joe at the liquor store Joe owns and asks him to help him. Joe refuses and pretty much throws him out of the store. However, Joe does still watch the teams of the mill league at a distance and watches Jimmy play and decides to help him out. What follows is a story of the love of the game. The author weaves past and present together so well that you feel like you are in this book watching it all take place. I loved this book!

The author did a brilliant job of capturing the time period in this novel. The characters and plot were also well written. This was a great piece of historical fiction!

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4.5 Hearts I had never heard of Shoeless Joe until I watched Field Of Dreams. Whether it was his story or Ray Liotta I will never know but I became a fan of Joe Jackson that very day. Then of course I went and watched Eight Men Out (which had come out before Field Of Dreams) and thought I knew the story. But now I have a different take on what happened.

Some of this is fact and some fiction. Sort of like the Titanic movie. The part of the ship and its passengers were real except Rose and Jack. Will the story of Joe Jackson seems to be real while the story of Jimmy Rogers is fiction.

Jimmy’s story is really good but the parts of Shoeless Joe was what kept me wanting to read this book. Wonderfully written and engrossing. Hope someone sees it and makes it into a movie (hint hint).

Disclaimer:
I received a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

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!

The Last At-Bat of Shoeless Joe by Granville Wyche Burgess is a fictionalized account of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson's life, long after the Black Sox scandal that ruined his legacy. Here's a brief overview of the facts in both the real world and the novel: several members of the Chicago White Sox were paid off by gamblers to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series. Eventually it was determined that eight players on the team were involved in taking this dive, and were subsequently banned for life from professional baseball. While the participation in the fix is unquestioned regarding several of the accused, some of the "Eight Men Out" have a more ambiguous place in its history. Joe Jackson, the greatest natural hitter of all time, played remarkably well in the 1919 World Series, and attempted to maintain his innocence all the way up until his death in 1951. This final point in his life is where Burgess' novel picks up.

In the textile mill country of the Carolinas, Jimmy Roberts is a young man with big league dreams. While he and his mother both work at one of the local mills, Jimmy is the star pitcher for the mill's baseball team. Despite his fairly strong skills, he'll never reach the heights of professional baseball on his own. After comically failing at a local pro ball team tryout, Jimmy decides to petition a local liquor store owner for some baseball advice. Hiding in plain sight, the liquor store owner Jimmy seeks out is none other than "Shoeless" Joe Jackson.

Let's get one thing out of the way early in this review: the dialogue is going to be a bit of a struggle for most readers at first. It's realistic...very realistic as far as 1951 Carolina working-class speech can be. In fact, it's so jam packed with "ain'ts", "bein's" and "what-in-tarnations" that you might even begin to wonder how people understood each other back in those days. Thankfully, I either got used to it or the vernacular may have settled down as the story progressed. The base of the story is fairly barebones, but executed well by using a baseball legend as the glue that holds it together. Shoeless Joe Jackson eventually coaches our protagonist Jimmy, and becomes the manager of a textile mill team that's chasing the textile league championship. Also, he may be chasing some redemption in the eyes of the baseball addicted public. Antagonism comes from the reluctant owner of a local mill and ball team, Howard, who desires nothing more than to sell his factory, get up north and get into "civilized" baseball team ownership. Howard is manipulative throughout, a scummy dink that prides himself as a puppet master stepping over gamblers, employees, and politicians to get his way. He's a complete prick, and the best character in the story. The heroes of the novel and their viewpoints on life come across as a bit cheesy (almost at a Leave it to Beaver level of cheese at times), but this contrast of a pure daddy issue adversary gives the novel some real depth. Intertwined with each of the novel's fictional moments are callbacks to Joe Jackson's life in baseball and the personal tragedy on the outcomes of the Black Sox scandal. Sometimes for the reader, and sometimes for other characters, Jackson’s struggles both pre and post 1919 are carefully dispersed to add emphasis and a kernel of truth to flesh out crucial story circumstances. Yes, the eventual outcome of the story and the characters around Jackson are pure fiction, but this novel is based around a great deal of historical fact. In some ways this gives the story a “true crime novel” edge, allowing the readers to make their own conclusions along with the fictional characters at the story’s climax.

Verdict: The Last At-Bat of Shoeless Joe by Granville Wyche Burgess is an interesting fictional interpretation of the conclusion of one of baseball's most interesting stories. The novelization is realistic, well thought out, but most importantly, it's fair to the legacy of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. While Jackson was never a perfect man, Burgess' novel gives a charming send off to a man and a character that deserves redemption, and possibly deserves to be enshrined in baseball legend at Cooperstown.

A special thanks to Chickadee Prince Books for providing a review copy of "The Last At-Bat of Shoeless Joe" to TehBen.com. All thoughts and opinions expressed within this review are my own.
(Review to be posted to TehBen.com on May 1st, 2019)

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.