Perhaps because he's Canadian (so am I, but I'm completely objective here), Kinsella has a superb understanding of the psyche of baseball -- which is truly America's national sport.

It's not all that odd. Alexis de Tocqueville, from France, wrote "Democracy in America" in (1835 and 1840), still the most penetrating and insightful view of the character and core values of American democracy. It took Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw to best understand the English -- no Englishman could write "Pygmalion" upon which "My Fair Lady" is based.

Novelist Bernard Malamud summed it up nicely, "The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology." In about 150 quotes, this book brings that mythology to life.

Kinsella is a master observer of baseball. His "Shoeless Joe" became the classic "Field of Dreams" in 1989, the best film yet about the spirit that motivates boys and men to play, watch, understand and love baseball. This is a story of redemption and faith in the best American tradition, and the film captures the magic of Kinsella's story.

Baseball is not like other sports. It is a game in which each individual player faces the entire opposing team alone, in batting and base running to score points. Think of Canada's ice hockey in similar terms -- requiring a single player to face nine opponents to score a goal. It's tough enough to "kill a penalty" in hockey when a team is one player short; hockey, like most sports, is a team effort.

Baseball reflects the American spirit, a "lone eagle" against the world. Yet, it is also the poetry in action of superb teamwork; from pitching to fielding, from the subtle grace of a curve ball to a double or triple play, it has the grace of a lyrical ballet perfomed on fresh mown grass instead of a dull indoor stage.

In a world of factoids, sound bites and trivia, "Diamonds Forever" collects the best sayings about baseball by players, fans and others. Kinsella's skill is knowing what to include and what to omit, and he offers up the meaning of life as well as the inner qualities of baseball. Like Tocqueville who understood American democracy before Americans could define it, Kinsella offers an outsider's view of the magic that makes baseball the quintessential American sport.

Baseball isn't automatic success. Thomas Boswell wrote, "If you do everything right, you'll still lose 40 percent of your games -- but you'll also end up in the World Series." Ted Williams said much the same, "Baseball is the only field of endeavour where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer."

Tired of being criticized ? Reggie Jackson noted, "Fans don't boo nobodies." It's why, as Humphrey Bogart noted, "A hot dog at the ball park is better than steak at the Ritz." Casey Stengel of the Yankees offered the surest wisdom for a happy life, "The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided."

As broadcaster Bryant Gumbel said, "The other sports are just sports. Baseball is a love." Or look at it philosophically by Dagwood Bumstead (drawn by Chic Young), "Baseball, my son, is the cornerstone of civilization." Perhaps Hall of Fame catcher Roy Campanella expressed it best, "You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you."

True enough. Baseball is a game for those who have the enthusiasm and faith of little boys - - who know everything is possible. It's why only Americans have walked on the moon, it's why the US is what it is today.

Kinsella, like Tocqueville, understands the spirit of baseball. It makes this book eminently worth buying. Beg, buy or borrow it, read it, think about it and remember the best of its quotes for a perceptive insight into America and her game.

As for the title of this review, it was originally said by sports writer Red Smith. It's like America itself, as expressed by pitcher Satchel Paige, "Ain't no man can avoid being born average, but there ain't no man got to be common."

Now . . . . . as an afterthought - - - why doesn't some public spirited American do the same for Canada and hockey ?

when I started to read this book I read the whole thing in one sitting.

This book has short stories from a real reserve near two real towns (Wetaskiwin and Hobbema) in Alberta, Canada. The characters are amazingly funny and real. The way he writes this book it is like he spent 20 years of his life living with Native Americans! I wouldn't want to get stuck on this reserve! A must-read book! It is sooo goood that money is no object! A book to laugh at and to lift your spirits! I haven't read one of his books (and I've read all but two) that I haven't loved

Kinsella mixes prose and dialect to plunge the reader into the world of the misunderstood Canadian aboriginee. Full of fun and shenannigans but with a poignant message attached. Short, easy to read stories. I've read then all at least a dozen times

There are some great slice of life vignettes in this book. "The Job" was my favorite story.

If you don't laugh out loud at least once in each of these stories, there's something wrong with you. Deeply felt and very wise, these stories still manage to be sidesplittingly funny. Kinsella is possessed of a unique and very readable style, and fills his work to bursting with amazing people and amazing adventures. He's a true original.

Kinsella paints a somewhat bleak yet very warming image of reservation life. It's hard not to feel personally connected to the main characters, in part because of the slightly naive writing style of Silas Ermineskin, the young Native American writer through whom these stories are told.

The subjects of the stories are very real people, with very real problems and emotions: love, jealousy, poverty, shame, friendship. The secluded community they live in accents these emotions, and the distrust from whites and their relative poverty sometimes adds a bittersweet taste to the stories. But there is humour and happiness, too, when Frank Fence-post dreams up another one of his stories, or Big Etta comes into view.

I picked up this book after reading Shoeless Joe and The Iowa Baseball confederacy. I was surprized at how different in tone and style these stories are; Kinsella could be two writers for producing such dissimilar works. What they have in common is a kind of magic, the big and little wishes and dreams that everybody subconsciously has. I thouroughly recommend these stories to anyone with a taste for personal feeling over action.

This tender story, graced with W.P. Kinsella's understated humor and compassion, is written through the eyes of a young boy. I don't really want to use the clique of 'coming-of-age', but I suppose it is in fact such a story. The author is brilliant in that he brings to us a simple tale of a boy and his family that speaks to the tenderest of hearts. The story left me with an unforgettable feeling that has touched me forever. It's the kind of book, I'd like to read once a year. W.P. Kinsella is one of Canada's treasures and I thank him for his story.

Baseball and the mystic. Kinsella does a great job of satisfied the baseball addict's need for a good story with the game or its players as the focus. I loved "Shoeless Joe" but was surprised to find these short stories almost as enjoyable. Some of the language is strong but I recommended it to my adolescent son, none the less,and he fell in love in it. Such fun to read. It helped pass those long night between the end of the World Series and the start of Spring training

The first story in this book, "The Baseball Wolf," is the greatest short story i've ever read. The descriptions, the humor, and the creativity (the main character's name is "Denny's" after the restaurant) make this story perfection. I've read it over and over and I'm continually marvelled by its ingenuity. Read this story and close the book with a wonderful warmth in your belly.

This is one of the best books, I have EVER read. My favorite, "Searching For January", in which Reberto Clemente paddles ashore, 25 years after his "fatal" plane crash which for him happened only days ago, and discusses with a tourist, returning to the Pittspurgh Pirates, almost made my dad, who remembered Clemente fondly from his youth, cry when I read it to him. This is one beutiful collection of stories. Don't miss it.

What a choice for a manager ----the Chicago Cubs could finally win a championship, but then it would be the end of the world! Who said God is fair? Many other gems in this collection, including the dedication of a minor leaguer with an unhappy wife. Read everything you can by Kinsella. Earl Finkler

Kinsella is short stories. Period. I started reading this book as an average teenager who hated baseball, sports and those who played them. I come away from it, my opinions about "jocks" shaken. If you do read it, look for the themes of desolation, failure, dreams, and a "grief cycle" which is really Kinsella's Theory of Life. Extradonairy....beyond description.

This book was not only enjoyable, but touching. The stories that Kinsella pens in this wonderful collection will change the way you look at the world. Baseball is is more than just a pastime, it is an American legacy. This book brings the romance and passion of the devoted heart of a culture to a vibrant vitality of existence, and will capture the reader in it's embrace. The traditionalists will love the story about astro-turf, and the tenacious Cub fan will love the prophetic story about armageddon. I dearly loved this collection.

My first Kinsella read. While the syntax takes a little getting used to I found that it was a quick, easy read. Usually I'm a slow reader but this took me no time in getting through. The characters are great. I've now just started THE FENCEPOST CHRONICLES also by Kinsella.

Everybody's used to sad insightful writing. Rarely do we find graceful funny twists on life's injustices. These short stories present a native view of a changing world that makes you remember home.
We are all familiar with the immigrant's stories; now, here are the natives, human, funny and enduring. As one who has lived on "the res", and heard the laughter of my family down the halls, I am thankful for these writings. As a baseball fan, I am unsurprised that these are given to us by the same man who presented Shoeless Joe to our hungry hearts.

This book remains on my top-ten reading list, due to Kinsella's hard hitting expression of life's many ironies, foibles and realities. Each fiction story is compelling and fast-moving; adeptly using humor, grief and affection to hit you with one of life's bitter-sweet truths. Each story has a couple lines near the end that quite subtly imply a moral to "tell it like it is." The easily-read stories have a few common characters to help with each different setting. This is Kinsella's best package of short stories -- which deserves to be reprinted. At least for this middle-aged guy, 'Dance Me Outside' is an excellent read.

Kinsella has a quality that is hard to describe, but can best be understood by reading his literature. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy is quite a remarkable book. It wraps you up in the magic of the game, and the mystical quality that Kinsella dusts every corner of the story with including the unusual religious characters, historical figures and humorous twists and turns. I truly enjoyed this book. I found it an easy and enjoyable read, and the plot interesting enough to capture my heart and inspire me as a reader.

I first picked this up off the bookstore shelf because of that Kevin Costner movie that came out in 1989, but I knew Kinsella for his writing ability before that. What made me buy the book was the back cover's description of a baseball game that lasts over 2,000 innings and the protagonist's insistence that it really did happen.

I wasn't disappointed, although I have to say that this novel doesn't offer the simple wish fulfillment of Shoeless Joe or the movie based on that novel. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy spends the first hundred or so pages describing how Gideon Clarke's father wrote a Master's thesis in History about a baseball league that noone else remembers, how the thesis was rejected and ruined his father's life, and how he (Gideon) inherited this "knowledge" of a non-existent league and this obsession upon his father's death.

Gideon seems to be following the same fruitless path of trying to prove the existence of the mythical Iowa Baseball Confederacy, when the (un)expected happens: he's taken back to 1908 to see the events occur that have so far only existed in his and his father's memory.

And then things get strange, in a bizarre and wonderful way: As the game stretches on, the flood waters rise higher, statues become animated, all manner of nature comes to life, love blooms, and the ballpark is repeatedly visited by Drifting Away, the Native American whose destiny is tied up with this small town in Iowa.

While the plot of the novel resembled Darryl Brock's If I Never Get Back, or T. Coraghessan Boyle's short story, "The Hector Quesadilla Story," The Iowa Baseball Confederacy reminded me of nothing so much as the Magic Realism fiction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Indeed, at times, I felt like was reading a shorter version of Marquez' A Hundred Years of Solitude, only this time placed in the turn of the century American Midwest.

I did say that this book is not about wish fulfillment like Kinsella's more famous Shoeless Joe, but I didn't consider this a weakness. The fantastic does occur in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, but only with the caveat that fantasy doesn't always help one's reality. Kinsella does entertain the reader with all kinds of strange imaginings, but Gideon is still searching for fulfillment in the same ways that the rest of us do. Some may be disappointed with bittersweet quality of this book, but that same quality only makes the novel true to life. In spite of all the bizarre twists and turns of plot.

And by the way, the game descriptions are wonderful reminders that baseball truly hasn't changed that much over the years.

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