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Start giftingShoeless Joe
Narrator
Grover Gardner
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Length
7 hours 46 minutes
Language
English
Shoeless Joe, the soul-stirring novel on which the movie Field of Dreams is based, is more than just another baseball story.
W. P. Kinsella captures the spiritual dimension that baseball represents for its most determined devotees in this tale on love and the power dreams have to make people come alive.
“Shoeless Joe” was the great Joe Jackson, one of the eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox, who were banned from baseball for throwing the World Series.
One day, while out in his cornfield, Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella hears the voice of a baseball announcer saying, “If you build it, he will come.” “He,” of course, is Ray’s hero, Joe Jackson. “It” is a baseball stadium, which Ray carves out of his cornfield. In doing this, he also inadvertently provides us with an amazing and somewhat nostalgic story on America's perhaps most beloved national pastime, baseball.
W. P. Kinsella (1935-2016) was a Canadian novelist, short-story writer, and poet who won numerous awards for his work, including the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humor. In 1993 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, their highest civilian honor. He is best known for his novel Shoeless Joe, basis for the award-winning motion picture Field of Dreams.
Grover Gardner has recorded more than 650 audiobooks since beginning his career in 1981. He's been named one of the "Best Voices of the Century" as well as a "Golden Voice" by AudioFile magazine. Gardner has garnered over 20 AudioFile Earphones Awards and is the recipient of an Audio Publishers Association Audie Award, as well as a three-time finalist. In 2005, Publishers Weekly deemed him "Audiobook Narrator of the Year."
Gardner has also narrated hundreds of audiobooks under the names Tom Parker and Alexander Adams. Among his many titles are Marcus Sakey's At the City's Edge, as well as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and John Irving's The Cider House Rules. Gardner studied Theater and Art History at Rollins College and received a Master's degree in Acting from George Washington University. He lives in Oregon with his significant other and daughter.
Reviews
“[Grover Gardner’s] unobtrusive reading lets the full color of the words speak for themselves.”
“Wild…romantic…unconventional…A triumph of hope.”
“Not so much about baseball as it is about dreams, magic, life, and what is quintessentially American.”
“A moonlit novel about baseball, dreams, family, the land, and literature.”
“Kinsella plays with both myth and fantasy in his lyrical novel…Kinsella spins baseball as backdrop and metaphor, and, like his predecessors, uses the game to tell us a little something more about who we are and what we need.”
“Grover Gardner…uses a gentle tone for Ray Kinsella, who, despite being close to losing his farm, rarely seems stressed…Gardner fits the first-person approach, helping the listener cheer for Ray to overcome his plight.”
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