Shoeless Joe and Nostalgia Shoeless Joe Jackson was banned from baseball by Judge Landis and the fight to have him reinstated still rages on. W. P. Kindness, author of New York Times Best Selling Novel, Shoeless Joe, expresses his feelings about a time in history when baseball was heart-pounding and thrilling to go and watch Joseph Jefferson Jackson play ball. In Canella’s heartwarming story he displays many types of rhetorical devices such as, nostalgia; a desire to return in thought or fact to a former time.

Ray Kindness, the main character was told, “If you build it, he will come” because of this voice inside, he sets out to build a baseball field in his corn field. Struggling to do so he reminisces about the past with his father and how great the time was hearing about how Shoeless Joe, effortlessly makes a triple play or outstanding outfield catches. “Somewhere in the course of the eighties of the twentieth century, history took a turn in another direction .. . A sliding back of events set in, an unfolding of inverted meaning”, represents the change and decline Major League Baseball endured during Shoeless Joes, J.

D. Clinger’s and all the other underdogs careers at that time. (Baudelaire 1994) Kindness goes in depth with his passion about the masculine sport of baseball. He displays his thoughts with the rhetorical device, nostalgia. He shows us how baseball use to be, the true meaning of baseball was greatly expressed in this uplifting, Jaw dropping novel. “God knows I gave my best in baseball at all times and no man on earth can truthfully Judge me otherwise. “-Shoeless Joe. Works Cited Baudelaire, Jean. ‘Reversion of History,’