Customer Reviews

The Diamonds of Dixie: Travels Through the Southern Minor Leagues

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I was visiting a friend and picked up a copy of Diamonds of Dixie and began reading it. I ordered my own copy when I got home. The book is based on a trip in 1993. The author returned to the south,where he was born, and being a baseball fan, spent a summer visiting minor league baseball parks and driving through all 13 southern states. By now many of the ballparks are closed, or changed, or have lost their teams. What remains in the book is a wonderfully observed trip, a qualified tribute to the south of the author's birth, and a picture of minor league baseball as it was in the early 90s. As a woman, I was aware of the limited contributions of women as I read the book, though when he does write of them (Jackie Mitchell, a front office person in Chattanooga) he writes with sensitivity and fairness. As a Texan, I was pleased with the book's treatment of my state. The author's personality carries the book: you want to sit down and have a beer with him and ask even more about the people he met and the places he went. The book is still in print and time hasn't diminished the real quality of the book, a comment on the south's diamonds.

Ernest Green's book is a welcome addition to the literature of personal baseball tours. David Lamb's Stolen Seasons: A Journey Through America and Baseball's Minor Leagues (Random House, 1991) created the pattern for this type of book: part travel book and part personal narrative within the context of examining baseball away from the bright lights of the Major Leagues. Green's odyssey takes him over 17,000 miles of the South and Southwest during the summer of 1993. A transplanted southerner, Green has a keen eye for the changes that minor league baseball, baseball parks, and the South itself have undergone since his youth in the 1950s. Green demonstrates an equally keen appreciation for the inticracies of Southern barbeque. Ballpark enthusiasts will be delighted with his focus on existing and vanished playing fields. His account is entertaining reading for anyone interested in either baseball or the Southern United States

Superficial and broad-brushed descriptions of some parks, teams, and individuals in the hisory minor league ball in the South and Southwest. Basic research and presentation on some teams/parks was sorely lacking.

From the start, the tile is confusing--when did west Texas and Kansas become a part of Dixie? Was the purpose of this book to inform and entertain baseball fans, or was it to denounce racial injustices from years past? At any rate, the abundant and over-done social commentary and geographical errors of the author had little to do with expectations of a book titled "The Diamonds of Dixie".

Overall, the writing was shallow with trite and only semi-believable accounts of a journey across the South.

Disappointing.

A neat find for me in a used book store. Well written, interesting for even non-baseball fans. Part travel guide, part sociology study and part baseball lore, past and present. Very enjoyable read.