Rating: 
Summary: "Iowa Baseball Confederacy" is the an excellent read.
Review: "Iowa Baseball" is an excellent book. From front to back it reads superbly. I couldn't put it down. Kinsella has found a way to tie baseball to life that fantasy becomes reality. Baseball plays such a key role yet it only plays a minor role. This book is a must for baseball and fantasy fans alike.
Rating:
Summary: Really captures the magic of America's favorite pastime
Review: A must-have for all true baseball fans. Kinsella's originality and vision reminds us why baseball is so loved.
Rating: 
Summary: The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
Review: A strange mix of timeslip romance and baseball, that didn't quite light me up the way I might have hoped. A friendly-enough fella, Gideon Clarke, is determined to prove that a phantom baseball league--The Iowa Baseball Confederacy--not only existed, but hosted the mighty Chicago Cubs back on July 4th, 1908, in the forgotten town of Big Inning. No one believes him, research proves nothing (and obssessive research leads to mockery from his academic peers), yet still Gideon can do nothing less than dedicate his life to proving the League existed. Finally, a crack in time allows him, along with his chum Stan, who always wanted a shot at the Big League, to visit the seemingly erased version of Big Inning, circa 1908, and experience the mythical game first-hand. This involves leaving their respective behind (uh, behind, as in behind in the future)...but then Gideon has never had that solid a bond with his soulmate, Sunny, the ultimate ethereal girl, who hides her past and tends to disappear for ages with no guilt or explanation, and Stan's wife, Gloria, is sick of hearing Stan's baseball dreams anyway. In the latter half of the novel, Kinsella depicts perhaps the strangest baseball contest that ever did or didn't get played--and the result is a somewhat confusing mishmash of symbol, metaphor, romance, time distortion, and tragedy. All having something to do with the unresolved fate of an Indian named Drifting Away, who manipulates the game for his own ends. A famous historical figure drops in, by balloon, to watch the game, and a statue of an angel comes to life and starts doing odd things. Incessant rain does not stop the game, but does threaten a flood. President Theodore Roosevelt drops by when the game stretches into hundreds of extra innings, and lightning strikes at least twice. I'm not sure what to make of the whole enchilada; the meaning of it all escapes me, and though the time-disruption concepts are fun, Kinsella's style seems too wooden to give it emotional resonance; his prose kept me at a distance, and lacks uber-oomph. Then we get a fairly depressing ending, albeit with a neat bow tied around all the time-crack related loose ends. Interesting, but kind of a letdown, despite some nifty ideas.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent novel, what else would you expect from Kinsella?
Review: After reading "Shoeless Joe" my craving for W.P. Kinsella needed to be taken care of. When I picked up "The Iowa Baseball Confederacies" I did not expect to read it entirely in one day. But Kinsella has that kind of effect on a reader. He intertwines fiction with fact, reality with fantasy. He develops characters so well that you feel their pain when things don't go their way, and you share in their joy when things do. The story of Gideon Clarke and his obsession is a page turner for anyone who enjoys fantasy novels, and a healthy knowledge of baseball wouldn't hurt early. His use of the greatest double play tandem in baseball history, Tinkers-Evers-Chance, lets the reader associate reality with Kinsella's fantasy world. The story of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy and their 40 day baseball game versus the eventual World Champion Cubs of 1908 is a book I strongly reccommend
Rating:
Summary: Excellent novel, what else would you expect from Kinsella?
Review: After reading "Shoeless Joe" my craving for W.P. Kinsella needed to be taken care of. When I picked up "The Iowa Baseball Confederacies" I did not expect to read it entirely in one day. But Kinsella has that kind of effect on a reader. He intertwines fiction with fact, reality with fantasy. He develops characters so well that you feel their pain when things don't go their way, and you share in their joy when things do. The story of Gideon Clarke and his obsession is a page turner for anyone who enjoys fantasy novels, and a healthy knowledge of baseball wouldn't hurt early. His use of the greatest double play tandem in baseball history, Tinkers-Evers-Chance, lets the reader associate reality with Kinsella's fantasy world. The story of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy and their 40 day baseball game versus the eventual World Champion Cubs of 1908 is a book I strongly reccommend
Rating:
Summary: Didn't please me as much as I had hoped
Review: After reading the summary on the back of this book in the bookstore, I thought I would find it really interesting, considering I love baseball and I am always open to fantasy elements in stories. I enjoyed the premise of it: a man trying to prove that an epic game really did take place so long ago. However, when the man actually travels back in time to be at that game, I started to lose interest in the story. I don't think I can really pin down what I found wrong with it; I suppose I just would have written it a different way, that's all.
Rating: 
Summary: What a bore
Review: As an avid baseball fan, I was anxious to read Kinsella's novel. What a mistake. I normally finish every book I start. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy is an exception. I got to page 125 and put the book down, never to be picked back up again. For those of you who enjoyed it I am glad for you. This book would never be on my must read list. One star for this book was too many for me.
Rating: 
Summary: Magic irrealism
Review: Be sure you like baseball before you read this book: you should be able to stomach a phrase like "Baseball is the only thing white man has done right". Interresting in its treatment of the larger themes: obsession, love; but a bit of a railroaded story. Elements seem to have been thrown together haphazardly, without much concern for continuity in the novel. Read it if you really love baseball, but if you don't, Shoeless Joe is far, far better.
Rating:
Summary: book was real whack
Review: Did you like "Field of Dreams"? C'mon, admit it. So it was corny: "Is this heaven?" "No, it's Iowa." So it starred Kevin Costner - but at the time "Water World" was still years away. C'mon, admit it, it got to you. It made you want to drive across the country to go to Fenway. It made you wish you lived in a big, rambling farmhouse complete with an all-star team of ghosts. It made you pine for those days you played catch with your dad, especially if those days never existed, especially if your old man was a bumbling drunk, or, hell!, you never even had an old man. Well, the movie was based on another Kinsella novel, "Shoeless Joe," and if you strip away the Hollywood from the film, you get an idea of what "The Iowa Baseball Confederacy" is like: tangled family mysteries unraveled by baseball gap in the space-time continuum... In "The Iowa Baseball Confederacy," Gideon Clark possesses the memory of a baseball league - the Iowa Baseball Confederacy - that no one else has ever heard of, that appears in no written record. Clark remembers boxscores, he remembers batting averages, players' names, umpires, the founders of the league. And he remembers that, in 1908, the Chicago Cubs were to visit Big Inning, Iowa, to play the assembled Iowa Baseball Confederacy all-stars. Clark's knowledge of the league was passed on to him by his father at the time of his death, being struck by a line-drive foul ball at Milwaukee's County Stadium. Clark is obsessed by his knowledge of the Confederacy and the outcome of the game played with the Cubs. He relentlessly searches for records of the league, until one warm, moonlit night on the anniversary of the game, he is magically transported to Big Inning, 1908, to the eve of the game... The story really begins churning from there. It involves a 300-year old Indian, a farmer's daughter, a flood, and the ballgame, which lasts 2614 innings. Kinsella is the United States' foremost practitioner of magical realism. (Especially odd, given that he's Canadian.) He transforms the details of everyday, mid-American life into a mythic and magical experience. Naturally, baseball sits at the center of Kinsella's national myth. What other early American institution has remained as constant to us as the game of baseball? What other common American element has so much history, tradition, myth, and magic? So baseball novels are hard to write. They end up sounding cornball. But Kinsella is a helluva writer. He wisely avoids trying to recite a realistic baseball story (what could be more fantastic and corny than a real baseball story?), and instead exaggerates, plays, tinkers, and explodes baseball like some deranged dad building a surreal model train world in his basement out of paper mache. Sure it's goofy. Sure it's sentimental. Sure it doesn't make a whole lot of damn sense when all's said and done. But it's a nifty read, and a quick one, too.
Rating:
Summary: book was real whack
Review: Did you like "Field of Dreams"? C'mon, admit it. So it was corny: "Is this heaven?" "No, it's Iowa." So it starred Kevin Costner - but at the time "Water World" was still years away. C'mon, admit it, it got to you. It made you want to drive across the country to go to Fenway. It made you wish you lived in a big, rambling farmhouse complete with an all-star team of ghosts. It made you pine for those days you played catch with your dad, especially if those days never existed, especially if your old man was a bumbling drunk, or, hell!, you never even had an old man. Well, the movie was based on another Kinsella novel, "Shoeless Joe," and if you strip away the Hollywood from the film, you get an idea of what "The Iowa Baseball Confederacy" is like: tangled family mysteries unraveled by baseball gap in the space-time continuum... In "The Iowa Baseball Confederacy," Gideon Clark possesses the memory of a baseball league - the Iowa Baseball Confederacy - that no one else has ever heard of, that appears in no written record. Clark remembers boxscores, he remembers batting averages, players' names, umpires, the founders of the league. And he remembers that, in 1908, the Chicago Cubs were to visit Big Inning, Iowa, to play the assembled Iowa Baseball Confederacy all-stars. Clark's knowledge of the league was passed on to him by his father at the time of his death, being struck by a line-drive foul ball at Milwaukee's County Stadium. Clark is obsessed by his knowledge of the Confederacy and the outcome of the game played with the Cubs. He relentlessly searches for records of the league, until one warm, moonlit night on the anniversary of the game, he is magically transported to Big Inning, 1908, to the eve of the game... The story really begins churning from there. It involves a 300-year old Indian, a farmer's daughter, a flood, and the ballgame, which lasts 2614 innings. Kinsella is the United States' foremost practitioner of magical realism. (Especially odd, given that he's Canadian.) He transforms the details of everyday, mid-American life into a mythic and magical experience. Naturally, baseball sits at the center of Kinsella's national myth. What other early American institution has remained as constant to us as the game of baseball? What other common American element has so much history, tradition, myth, and magic? So baseball novels are hard to write. They end up sounding cornball. But Kinsella is a helluva writer. He wisely avoids trying to recite a realistic baseball story (what could be more fantastic and corny than a real baseball story?), and instead exaggerates, plays, tinkers, and explodes baseball like some deranged dad building a surreal model train world in his basement out of paper mache. Sure it's goofy. Sure it's sentimental. Sure it doesn't make a whole lot of damn sense when all's said and done. But it's a nifty read, and a quick one, too.
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