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Title: Jackie Robinson: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad ISBN: 0-345-42655-X Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.73 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: This book cooks!
Comment: I wasn't a huge baseball fan when I started this book, but I'd heard of Jackie Robinson. I used to think I knew who he was. Well, you don't anything until you read this book! The comforting text inches over every exciting aspect of Jackie Robinson's life. It was written using information that Jackie Robinson's wife provided for the first time. The topics range from rising above racism to sharing personal family experiences. If you love baseball, this book is absolutely for you. However, if you're not really into sports (like me), then you'll still adore this true-life story that seems almost unreal.
Rating: 5
Summary: Brings the Legend who was Jackie Robinson to life.
Comment: In his excellent biography of Brooklyn Dodgers infielder Jackie Robinson, author Arnold Rampersad has painted with a crisp and lively narrative an objective, balanced , and candid portrait of a legend. Here is seen the complex, driven man that was Jackie Robinson, "warts" and all. He was the proud and fiercely determined African American athlete, extraordinarily gifted in at least four sports; a sometimes overly sensitive man who despised racism always fought against it, even in the pre-Civil Rights era of the 1930s and 1940s, and even at the risk of conviction by military court-martial. He used an unconquerable will and ambition to became a football, baseball, basketball and track star at Pasadena Junior College; one of the greatest football running backs in UCLA history, and ultimately, under the guidance of legendary Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey, the first African American professional baseball player of the modern era. Rampersad traces Robinson's struggle against racism during his early Dodger years; it is a poignant and compelling story.
The book also shows the more human side of Robinson: a quiet and sensitive man, and a political activist whose fight for racial equality was consistent throughout his life; a wonderfully loving husband but sometimes distant father; and a businessman of tremendous integrity. At Rampersad's hands, Jackie Robinson is a genuinely heroic and admirable person. This is a book which allows the reader to really get to know its subject. It is one of the finest biographies I've read in many years. Highly recommended!
Rating: 5
Summary: Terrific Read
Comment: This biography does an outstanding job of giving an overview of Robinson's life and times, from his early, awnry but talented years in Pasadena, through UCLA, then the military, and then the Brooklyn Dodgers and beyond. It paints a picture of a strong willed gentleman with enormous pride, dedicated to his family, and dedicated to the idea of racial integration and equality. The influences of his mother on his early, somewhat (understandably) confrontational character, that allowed him to ultimately be the individual who paired with Branch Rickey to integrate "America's Pastime" are clearly laid out.
Some reviewers have faulted the author for not being more interpretive of Robinson's politics - specifically, that he was a Nixon supporter in 1960 and a Rockefeller supporter in 1968 (while also being a strong supporter of Civil Rights, active in almost every civil rights organization) and Humphrey supporter as well. I think the book lays out all the facts for the reader to see for themselves. Robinson's coming of age - in an era when a Dixiecrat from a Jim Crow state (LBJ) led the passage of the Civil Rights Act - was a time of a shifting political landscape that didn't settle out until near his death (he also broke badly with Nixon later in Nixon's career). The Republican party's mantra of self-reliance, and Robinson's determination to succeed in business in the same way he did in sports, made his attraction to the party not a big leap; the alienation of this country's African American establishment from big business was not a pre-ordained fact in the time Robinson lived.
Finally, Robinson's own family struggles were also a reflection of the confusing and troubling times in which he lived.
Robinson died too young for us all. This is a great book and I would highly recommend it..
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Title: I Never Had It Made : An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson by Jackie Robinson, Alfred Duckett ISBN: 0060555971 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Story of Jackie Robinson: Bravest Man in Baseball (Dell Yearling Biography) by Margaret Davidson ISBN: 0440400198 Publisher: Yearling Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1988 List Price(USD): $4.50 |
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Title: Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy by Jules Tygiel ISBN: 0195106202 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball (Turning Points in History) by Scott Simon ISBN: 047126153X Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 30 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn ISBN: 0060956348 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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