Book Review: Knocking on Heaven's Door

"At the end of the day, Knocking on Heaven's Door gives us the rarest of sport literature: the true baseball story...that tells us the truth about the game without sugar-coating its unpleasantries or removing its warts--while somehow still managing to make us love it all the more."

Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, baseball has had

more than its share of apologists to proclaim the game's virtues and unique

qualities-how the game lends itself to narrative, how it's a meritocracy that

rewards hard work and perseverance, or how it acts as a conduit to the American KNOCKINC ON Dream. What baseball literature needs in HEAVEN'S the present day and age is more writers DOOR MUTYOOBBOW to tell the whole story-and Marty Dobrow's Knocking on Heaven's Door does just that. The book gives us six stories-any one of which is worthy of its own book-and provides a layered look at minor league dreams in the first decade of the twentieth century. While this quest is familiar to readers of sport literature, the depth of Dobrow's approach and the deft qualities of his prose will reward any and all readers.

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