Review by Choice Review
For decades, racial discrimination deferred the dreams of African American baseball ballplayers, who could only play in relative obscurity in the Negro leagues. Hogan (history, Union County College) nicely chronicles that history from before the Civil War to the 1950s. This is not a book for those well versed in this subject, because others have covered this same ground. Among them, many are contributors to the present volume: Jules Tygiel, Leslie Heaphy, Neil Lanctot, Michael Lomax, James Overmyer, Robert Peterson, and Robert Ruck. The book was commissioned by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and therein lies its strengths and weakness. It is a beautiful book, well researched and nicely written with dozens of photos and sidebars on selected players. But it reads like the coffee-table book it is really intended to be. The writing seems detached, which is unfortunate, because a book about baseball's greatest tragedy should leave one with a deeper sense of loss, regret, and even anger. Those interested in reading more about this subject should seek out the authors mentioned above. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Large collections serving lower-/upper-division undergraduates, researchers, and general readers. C. J. Lamb College of Charleston
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Histories of baseball's Negro Leagues abound, beginning with Robert Peterson's 1970 classic, Only the Ball Was White, but few offer the scope of this volume, which explores the entire spectrum of African American baseball. In July 2000, major-league baseball granted $250,000 to the Hall of Fame for a comprehensive history of African American involvement in the game from 1860 to 1960. The result, a cooperative work by teams of historians and baseball experts, was an 800-page manuscript entitled Out of the Shadows. This book is a distillation of that work. Hogan himself was a part of the research team and is an expert on the Negro Leagues. There are a number of player profiles and photos from the 1920s, '30s, and '40s as well as an examination of the entrepreneurial business climate that kept the leagues going even as it exploited the players. It's interesting to note that, of the hundreds of all-star games played in the off-season between teams of the top black players versus the best of the major leagues', the black teams won more than 60 percent of the time. Along with on-the-field reportage, Hogan also provides valuable historical context, placing the Negro Leagues in the socioeconomic fabric of the time. This is an important, informative, and entertaining contribution to sports history. --Wes Lukowsky Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
This comprehensive history is published in association with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum to coincide with special events to honor 2006 inductees from the Negro Leagues and earlier black baseball teams. With contributions from experts, the book sets this crucial part of baseball's story in its cultural context and profiles the great teams and the legendary players. An appendix offers new statistical analysis of major players. For all collections. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
