A biographical look at a pivotal period in the racial history of baseball.
Dawkins presents a dual biography of two desegregation heroes.
In this new entry in Routledge’s Historical Americans series, the author tells the life stories of Sam Lacy and Wendell Smith, from their childhoods and early years through their careers as baseball journalists for Black-owned ventures (Lacy for Baltimore’s Afro-American and Smith for the Pittsburgh Courier) to the very different ends of their lives. Smith only lived until his 50s and died in 1972 (Chicago mayor Richard Daley paid his respects: “We have lost a great citizen, who was interested in the city and most of all the city’s children”), whereas Lacy lived into his 90s and eventually moved to writing for the white-majority-owned Chicago American. As Dawkins notes, however, they shared the same journalistic mission: “To reason, ridicule, and report to owners and the commissioner that Black ballplayers deserved to compete on Major League Baseball teams.” The author fleshes out the tense racial politics of the 1930s and ’40s in densely documented pages (the book has extensive notes and a bibliography) and fills his narrative with many notable personalities of the period, from Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the adamantly pro-segregation baseball commissioner, to his successor, former United States senator A.B. Chandler, who ended the unofficial ban on Blacks playing professional ball. And, of course, the narrative returns frequently to the iconic figure of Jackie Robinson, who was often caught up in the intricacies of standing against the institutional racism of the sport he loved. Robinson is by far the book’s most three-dimensional character, but Dawkins also excels at bringing his two main subjects to life, skillfully distilling the bite and acerbity of their writings and capturing their voices (when a manager said of a former Negro League pitcher, “Johnny’s not ready yet,” Lacy responded, “Certainly he can’t get ready riding the bench”). Much like its subjects, the book strikes a fine balance between baseball and civil rights.
A biographical look at a pivotal period in the racial history of baseball.Pub Date: July 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781032255668
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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