Playing With the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken Dreams

by Gary Moore Narrated by Toby Moore

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Booklist

Gene Moore, from tiny Sesser, Illinois, was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers at age 15 in 1940. After Pearl Harbor, the Dodgers arranged for him to be a member of a traveling U.S. Navy baseball team to entertain troops in the European theater. Eventually, the team was assigned stateside to guard a select group of German prisoners in Louisiana. The Germans had been captured when their submarine, the U-505 (now a featured attraction at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry), experienced mechanical problems in the vicinity of Allied warships. The story of the relationship that developed between the prisoners and their guards is a fascinating one. Because the Allies captured key code-breaking information with the sub, the existence of the prisoners was kept secret. Author Moore, son of Gene, also tells the heartbreaking story of how his father tried to recapture his major-league dream after the war but did not succeed. A moving profile of one, nearly unknown member of the Greatest Generation. Wes Lukowsky Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Library Journal

In his first book, Moore (president, Covenant Air & Water, LLC) writes of his late father, Gene Moore, a small-town boy who was said to have prodigious baseball talent and who was scouted by the Brooklyn Dodgers when he was still a teenager. Then Pearl Harbor intervened, and everything changed. Moore joined the navy and ultimately assumed a new role: as a guard for the German sailors caught from the captured and highly prized U-505 submarine (the submarine is now one of the most visited holdings of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry). To pass the time, Moore taught these men how to play baseball and in the process learned a new role as a teacher. Owing to war injury and the passage of time, his talents may have faded (he did get a second look from the Pittsburgh Pirate organization after the war). This is a very touching book about new roles and second chances. The author has used fictionalized dialog to move the story along and increase readability. Both history (especially war) and baseball buffs will enjoy this work, which is recommended for larger collections.
—Paul Kaplan

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169201130
Publisher:	Oasis Audio
Publication date:	04/01/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

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