Additional information
by Charles River (Author)
*Includes pictures
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
"I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me... All I ask is that you respect me as a human being." - Jackie Robinson
In his introduction to The Jackie Robinson Reader, sports historian Jules Tygiel succinctly observed, "Extraordinary lives often reveal ordinary truths. Jackie Robinson was born in 1919 and died in 1972. He crammed into these brief fifty-three years a legacy of accomplishment, acclaim, controversy, and influence matched by few Americans. He was, even before his historic baseball breakthrough, an athlete of legendary proportions. He won fame and adulation as the first African-American to play in the major leagues in the twentieth century, launching an athletic revolution that transformed American sports. He garnered baseball's highest honors: Rookie of the Year, Most Valuable Player, and first-ballot election to the Hall of Fame. More significantly, Robinson became a symbol of racial integration and a prominent leader in the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet Jackie Robinson's half century among us illuminates not just the contours of an exceptional life, but much about the broader African-American experience of those years."
Tygiel is, of course, correct in his assessment of Robinson's life, and any biography of the baseball legend will share with its readers some of the amazing stories of his life, beginning with his difficult birth in Cairo, Georgia, following him across the country to California, and then north to Montreal and south to Florida. Along the way, readers learn of a man once consumed by rage who learned, through time and practice, as well as the influence of several important mentors, to rein in his anger and use it to change the world. Though born in a sharecropper's cabin, he corresponded with presidents. Growing up in the shadow of an Olympian older brother, he found his own place in the sun, and, more importantly, he ¬¬¬¬¬smoothed the journey to success for countless others. His name has gone down not in just one but in two pantheons of history, both on and off the baseball field as a noble fighter for equal rights.
Jackie Robinson: The Life and Legacy of the Star Who Broke Major League Baseball's Color Barrier profiles how Jackie became one of the most important athletes in history. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Jackie Robinson like never before.
