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Loading... The End of Baseball: A Novelby Peter Schilling, Jr.
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In Peter Schilling's wonderful novel, the extraordinary baseball season of 1944 comes vividly to life. Bill Veeck, the maverick promoter, returned from Guadalcanal with a leg missing and $500 to his name, has hustled his way into buying the Philadelphia Athletics. Hungry for a pennant, young Veeck jettisons the team's white players and secretly recruits the legendary stars of the Negro Leagues, fielding a club that will go down in baseball annals as one of the greatest ever to play the game. Here are the behind-the-scenes adventures that bring this dream to reality, and a cast of characters only history's pen could create. The End of Baseball is the most rollicking, free-spirited baseball story in years, the unvarnished truth of that incredible season and the men who lived it. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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The End of Baseball tells the story of what might have happened had Veeck purchased the Philadelphia Athletics and subsequently signed an all-black team. It is essentially the story of major league baseball’s racial integration as it could have happened—and might have without Commissioner Landis’s interference.
Taking the point of view of players, owners, managers, and even a prominent heckler, the narrative weaves a path through the world of professional baseball that is for the most part easy and fun to follow. What the book does not do well is make most of its characters likeable, and the number of setbacks and tragedies the characters and their team face may turn off some readers well before the book’s finale.
Readers who aren’t already baseball fans may have trouble with this book. The sheer number of characters is enough to baffle anyone who isn’t familiar with the historical names, and Schilling for some reason placed certain key scenes out of order, so the action is hard to follow at times. Foul language is prevalent, though not gratuitous, and drug and alcohol abuse factors prominently in one character’s storyline.
Set in the early to mid 1940s, this is the story of a nation at war and its desperate search for an escape from the brutal reality of everyday life. It is the story of that nation’s struggle to come to grips with the idea that black athletes deserve not only to be recognized for their abilities but treated with dignity and respect as human beings. Above all, it is the story of America’s grandest game during a period when Americans could not have lived without it. ( )