Playing with the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, World War II, and the Long Journey Home - Softcover

Moore, Gary W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143113887 ISBN 13: 9780143113881

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2008

Synopsis

Part Tuesdays with Morrie, part Field of Dreams: a true American story of World War II and redemption

Driven by word of mouth and the author?s heroic efforts to tell the world his father?s story, Playing with the Enemy was a surprise hardcover hit for its independent publisher. Gary Moore's book about his father--a baseball phenom whose future in the majors was cut short by World War II and a fateful occurrence during a top secret mission for the U.S. Navy--is a warm-hearted memoir of faded dreams and new hope that is destined for the bestseller lists. Filled with memorable characters from an extraordinary time in our country's history, it is a truly redemptive story that will be read and reread for generations to come.

About this title

About the Author

Gary W. Moore is the author of the critically acclaimed book Playing with the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, World War II, and the Long Journey Home, which won the 2006 Military Writers Society of America Book of the Year. Moore is also a contributing author for Chicken Soup for the Father & Son Soul. He was awarded the prestigious Sam Walton Leadership Award in 1996. He has made appearances on CNN, ABC, and CBS.

In three months, Jim Morris went from being a 35 year-old high school teacher to a major league baseball pitcher. He wrote the foreword to Gary W. Moore’s Playing with the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, World War II, and the Long Journey Home.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In 1940, at just 15 years old, small-town baseball star Gene Moore was signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers, who saw in him the potential to become one of the great catchers of all time. Before that could happen, though, WWII intervened. Gene's story, a surprising paean to the power and humanity of a game, is told here by his son, a first-time author who exhibits the confidence and pacing of a pro. His gripping material certainly helps: after several years overseas in the Navy's touring baseball team, Gene was brought back to Louisiana and assigned to guard secret German POWs, whose U-boat was captured just days before the storming of Normandy. There, Gene teaches his German captives how to play baseball, with a number of unintended and life-altering consequences. When Gene's finally able to return home to Sesser, Ill., he's "on crutches, depressed and embarrassed," holing up in the local bar and prompting one bartender to lament, "he's become one of us, when we were hoping he would make us like him." Gene's journey from promise to despair and back again, set against a long war and an even longer post-war recovery, retains every bit of its vitality and relevance, a 20th-century epic that demonstrates how, sometimes, letting go of a dream is the only way to discover one's great fortune.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0143113887
• ISBN 13: 9780143113881
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 306