Customer Reviews

Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues & the Story of African-American Baseball

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Readers should be aware that this book IS NOT "by" Lawrence Hogan, who wrote only two of the seven chapters. The large number of other authors who contributed material and wrote the other chapters of this book have been needlessly slighted.

Shades of Glory is a huge undertaking and I appreciate the effort and detail that went into this book. However, it wasn't organized in a way that was easy for me to read. There was some jumping around in time, and it just all ran together in my mind.

The writing was technically sound but emotionless. I didn't get a sense of excitement or a feel for the lives of these early baseball stars. And EVERY blasted team was named Giants. It got very confusing.

There was some good material about how the development of black baseball followed the history of black people in society as a whole, but all in all I found it less than it could have been.

In some ways, to look at the history of black baseball is to look at the past image of civil rights in the whole of U.S. society.

For this baseball fan, Shades of Glory shows that the history of black baseball is part heartening, seeing that, in the early days, not a vast quantity of racism came from the actual fans of the game. They simply wanted "their" clubs to field competitive teams.

At the same time, also is it disheartening and, unfortunately, not surprising to read of the cementing of the notion that "money is the root of all evil", at least as far as the African-American in 19th century baseball was concerned. And when certain white stars, who seemed to be either outright prejudiced or just plain jealous, threatened to walk away from the game rather than continue to play with their black teammates, owners and league leaders caved, dismissing the African-American players from their teams and then essentially banning them from the leagues altogether.

Author Lawrence D. Hogan has performed a valuable service to fans of the game by compiling this history of one of the most important facets of America's pastime.