The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

The Iowa Baseball Confederacy was about baseball and took place in Iowa, both pros in my world. However, it also involved a lot of magic and science fiction bullshit, which is a definite con.

The story follows a man whose father has passed on a bunch of information about this supposed baseball league that existed and beat the 1908 Chicago Cubs (one of the best baseball teams in history). The problem is that no one but this man and his father believe it exists. The son ends up losing his wife and family, so obsessed is he with proving that the league existed.

Eventually he travels through this wrinkle in time, with his best friend, and they end up in Big Inning, Iowa, in 1908. He's finally able to see "The Game," yet finds that he must show more sacrifice an awful lot in order to do so.

This book was pleasant to read, though there wasn't much character development. I had the impression that it was written for a young adult audience, though I believe that had more to do with the author's ability, and not his intentions.

In summation : I enjoyed reading this book, despite the fact that I normally dislike magic/SciFi and am typically anti non-character driven stories. There are about a million people I would recommend it to, though I think you'd have to be a Cubs fan, or at least a baseball fan, to really enjoy it. show less

If you're not either a fan of magical realism (think Gabriel Garcia Márquez) or a serious old-time baseball head, you may well not like this book. (Fan of one or the other but not necessarily both? Your chances of liking the book improve.)

Protagonist Gideon Clarke, a man with a footloose and wandering wife and a monomania about an amateur baseball league that may or may not have existed and their mythical all-star game against the 1908 Chicago Cubs, comes adrift in time and finds himself transplanted into the time and place where the game really was played, in pouring rain for a Biblical forty days and nights (2,614 innings, for those of you at home keeping score—breaks for meals and darkness allowed).

Who won the game? Did Gideon's show more here-again-gone-again wife come home? What was the Dark Angel's overall batting average? I'll cheat and tell you that last one—the Angel played about .300 ball—but for the rest of it you'll have to read this wondermous fantasy on the Game. show less

I received this book ages ago as a gift, but I hadn't gotten around to reading it until now, which is somewhat surprising since it's baseball and fiction (a dynamite combination for me). I think part of my hesitancy was that it was by the same author who wrote the book Shoeless Joe, upon which Field of Dreams is based. I may be alone in this among baseball fans, but I never cared much for Field of Dreams because to me it was just too much of a head trip. But I have to admit now, having read The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, that it is possible that I just did not enjoy Field of Dreams because of the medium and that perhaps Kinsella's books are not meant to be filmed, because this was a pleasure to read although thoroughly more strange than show more Field of Dreams ever was.

Where to start: this book involves Leonardo Da Vinci, an irritable little person, an Indian who has been waiting centuries for the return of his wife, time travel, a flood of epic proportions, a church that does everything 12 hours earlier/later than the rest of the world does, an angel statue playing as a right fielder, and the complete disappearance of an entire baseball league. Oh, and a baseball game that lasts in excess of 2000 innings. Yeah, like I said, definitely strange. But odd as it might be, the book's message that the pursuit of obsession may be a fruitless one and the road we think we want to travel may in fact be quite different than we imagined comes shining through despite the odd series of events. I think what I enjoyed most was the humor of it and that at no point did the strangeness feel out of place. There isn't much character development here really, which is usually something I insist on, but the plot here is so rich that I will excuse it.

All in all, a wonderful story about myth-making and baseball. My only complaint resides with the ending, which is not clear at all unfortunately. A tip of my cap to Kinsella, as this novel could have completely flown off the handle into "completely ridiculous" territory, and at times very nearly did, but he managed to control it. show less

I'd been meaning to reread this book, one that became one of my favorites of all time when I first read it in a high school, and with the recent death of W.P. Kinsella, this seemed like an opportune time to do so. The story is one that blends baseball, Americana, time travel, magic, and just plain weirdness. The narrator inherits from his father the knowledge that his rural town in Iowa was once home to a team in a local baseball league known as the Iowa Baseball Confederacy before the town was destroyed in a flood. No one else is able to remember anything prior to 1909 . While Gideon Clarke is mocked for obsession, he eventually finds a way to travel back in time with his friend Stan, a minor league baseball player, to observe and join show more in the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Star Team's epic game against the visiting Chicago Cubs in 1908. The game lasts 40 days in a rainfall with a stone angel playing outfield and visits by President Theodore Roosevelt and Leonardo da Vinci. He finds love with a woman named Sarah but also finds that reality is being manipulated by an Indian named Drifting Away and that none of this can last.

So does this book hold up to my fond memories? I say yes! It may not be a brilliant work of literature, but it is a fine book which works on different levels of story and metaphor.
Favorite Passages:

"Baseball is the one single thing the white man has done right." - Drifting Away show less

A 2000 inning long baseball game.....check. Time travel......check. Native American mythology.....check. A slightly odd church that lives life 12 hours offset from the rest of the world....check. Finding the love of your life. Again. Or previously....check Learning that getting what you’ve always wanted doesn’t necessarily solve your problems....priceless? This is just a fantastic book. I finished it last night and I’m ready to re-read it starting today. Kinsella, who wrote “Shoeless Joe,” which was the basis for the movie Field of Dreams, gives us another fantastical story of magic, love, and life wrapped around the mythology of baseball, and once again set in a Midwestern corn field.

What a fun book! Also a bit confusing, however. I really loved all of the baseball + time travel + historical figures (Teddy Roosevelt, Leonardo da Vinci). But some of the other characters, such as Sunny, bothered me, and I didn't get the thing about Sarah getting stuck. The ending kind of lost me. Still, left me feeling pretty happy with it.

An engaging, beautiful story with well-realized characters and incredible writing. I think that Kinsella sometimes hits the magical-realism-button a bit too hard, but this is otherwise one of the better books I've read this summer. Kinsella gets baseball on a level I didn't even know existed (which I really should have expected, but hey). Give it a whirl.