The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America - Hardcover

*Starred Review* After spending a few years trying to write a baseball book, sportswriter Posnanski lucked into a story that positively cried out to be told. Buck O'Neil, a Hall of Fame member and Negro League veteran who died last October, was a man who loved the game with a burning passion that never lessened in intensity. During the last year of his life, O'Neil joined Posnanski on a road trip to Kansas City (where Buck played for the Kansas City Monarchs), to New York, and to Minneapolis (for Buck O'Neil Day at the Metronome). Along the way, as O'Neil remembers names and faces from his life on and off the field, we are transported back to a time when baseball was, if not more innocent, at least more like a game and less like a business. There's also an important question lurking behind the anecdotes O'Neil tells and the joie de vivre he embodies: Does baseball today, with its drug abusers and profiteers and self-absorbed celebrities, still have the soul that it did when O'Neil fell in love with the game? For baseball fans, the book is a treasure trove of history, full of names that remind us of an older time--Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks--and stories that make us laugh, even as we wonder if baseball has changed too much ever to feel like it once did. Stirring, moving, and more than a little sad. David Pitt
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