In baseball and beyond, 1997 has been the year of Jackie Robinson, the 50th anniversary of his obliteration of the game's color line, and a time to reflect on a marvelous man whose heroism and decency cut far beyond the foul lines. Arnold Rampersad, a Princeton professor who's edited the poetry of Langston Hughes and the essays of Richard Wright, and collaborated with tennis great Arthur Ashe on his powerful memoir Days of Grace, steps up to the plate here with the first truly comprehensive Robinson biography. It's an important accomplishment, ripe with historical and social insight without losing sight of the human being at its core. Thoroughly researched--Rachel Robinson gave the author access to her husband's personal papers--and filled with fascinating new detail, the book, like its subject, consistently takes the extra base, thrilling with its overall skill, depth, and perspective.


From Library Journal
Rampersad (literature, Princeton; coauthor, with Arthur Ashe, of Days of Grace, LJ 6/15/93) presents a penetrating characterization and thorough analysis of Jackie Robinson, the first black to play major league baseball. Drawing on personal letters, interviews, research projects, archival materials from the Jackie Robinson Foundation, and input from Robinson's widow, Rachel, he reveals Robinson as a boy, man, athlete, husband, father, pioneer, community leader, businessman, and Civil Rights activist. "Jackie underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim," the author writes. Though well researched, with some vintage photographs, the book lacks standard footnotes and bibliographical references. Still, this work supplements recent biographies by Maury Allen (Great Time Coming, LJ 11/15/94) and Rachel Robinson (Jackie Robinson, LJ 11/1/96). Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.?Edward G. McCormack, Univ. of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast, Long BeachCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New Yorker, Roger Angell
This considerable book arrives just in time to save the man from his own legend: despite certain limitations, it is a sports story for adults.... Professor Rampersad never suggests that the accident of history which pushed this professional athlete into the forefront to national attention was particularly cruel or ironic, but his tone throughout the book remains so distantly calm and studious as to make us wonder whether he may not be concealing a judgement or a reservation about his subject.


The New York Times, Richard Bernstein
... Jackie Robinson: A Biography is a workmanlike book, admiring but not worshipful. It avoids the temptation to rhapsodize over a figure whose life reads almost like a religious allegory, so full is it of redemptive power.... Rampersad unobtrusively lays out the facts, including the facts of Robinson's edgy and sometimes irritating combativeness, allowing us to make out the meaning of the story on our own.


From AudioFile
In the mood for baseball? Let Jackie Robinson's memorable biography start the season. Rampersad, who also wrote Arthur Ashe's biography, Days of Grace, presents an insightful portrait. He follows Robinson from his early life and success as a college athlete to the Negro Baseball Leagues and his breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Exploring relationships with people who influenced Robinson, like Dodgers owner Branch Rickey and Martin Luther King, Jr., this biography gives an approachable historical context for listeners. Levar Burton's voice reflects a sense of awe. His obvious admiration of Robinson keeps him from effectively presenting the nuances of some of Rampersad's observations. The audio format makes the biography appeal to audiences who might not otherwise get around to reading the book--but admirers of Robinson should seek out Rampersad's full text. R.F.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line 50 years ago, and the anniversary celebrations have been numerous. Professional baseball acknowledged his contribution to the game and society in a series of moving early-season ceremonies and by permanently retiring his uniform number. There has also been a clutch of new books about Robinson timed for the anniversary year, including memoirs by family members. Princeton English professor Rampersad, the author of a two-volume life of Langston Hughes, adds to that list with what is certain to become the definitive Robinson biography. Through exhaustive research and dozens of interviews with family members, teammates, business associates, and friends, Rampersad vividly re-creates the life of a man who may have had history thrust upon him by circumstance but who also understood the magnitude of his burden. Those who are at all familiar with Robinson know the bare bones of his story: his postwar signing by legendary Brooklyn Dodger general manager Branch Rickey, the racist atmosphere he was forced to endure as baseball's first black player, his on-field success, and his subsequent career as a businessman and civil rights leader. It's all here but presented in greater detail and with more commentary by those who were present or nearby observers. We also learn much that is new about Robinson's earlier life, including his childhood spent in Pasadena, California, where he developed his extraordinary athletic skills as well as his intolerance for segregationist Jim Crow laws. Rampersad is an evenhanded biographer, and he brings an objectivity to his subject that only enhances Robinson's place in history. We close this remarkable book realizing again that while any number of others, under different circumstances, might have been the first African American to break baseball's color line, few would have been able to carry it off with Robinson's integrity and courage. An essential purchase for public libraries. Wes Lukowsky


From Kirkus Reviews
Avoiding the sentimentality surrounding the 50th anniversary of Robinson's major-league debut, Rampersad compellingly projects his life against the backdrop of the persons and institutions that affected him and that he, in turn, helped to change. Jack Roosevelt Robinson's early life in Georgia and California was more or less defined by racial segregation. Tracing Robinson's journey through college, military service in WW II, professional baseball, marriage, fatherhood, and his later careers in business and public service, Rampersad (author of a two-volume biography of Langston Hughes) demonstrates how Robinson's determination was often both his greatest strength and his Achilles' heel. Nowhere was this more obvious than during his brilliant baseball career, where his combativeness occasionally put him at odds with fans, opponents, and even teammates. Robinson's transition from baseball to ``private'' life in 1957 was smooth--the game had left him modestly wealthy and socially well connected. However, he did encounter difficulties during these years. Quick to take to the stump for a cause or a friend, Robinson sometimes clashed with other civil rights and political leaders, including Malcolm X, whose appeals for black separatism frustrated the integrationist pioneer. During the tumult of the '60s, Robinson became estranged from his eldest son, Jackie Jr., who after being wounded in Vietnam, later fell into a cycle of crime and drug dependency. (Jackie eventually recovered and was reconciled with his father, only to die in a motor accident in 1971.) After Robinson's death in 1972, President Richard Nixon, a longtime friend and admirer, hailed him for having ``brought a new human dimension not only to the game of baseball but to every area of American life.'' A former opponent, Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, spoke another kind of truth, about Robinson, both as a ballplayer and as an idealist : ``He could beat you in a lot of ways.'' Somewhat languidly paced but nevertheless gripping, this oustanding biography is in every way worthy of its esteemed subject. (24 pages photos, not seen) (First printing of 200,000; Book-of-the-Month Club selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

Arnold Rampersad follows the pivotal baseball player's life.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The extraordinary life of Jackie Robinson is illuminated as never before in this full-scale biography by Arnold Rampersad, who was chosen by Jack's widow, Rachel, to tell her husband's story, and was given unprecedented access to his private papers. We are brought closer than we have ever been to the great ballplayer, a man of courage and quality who became a pivotal figure in the areas of race and civil rights. We follow Robinson through World War II, when, in the first wave of racial integration in the armed forces, he was commissioned as an officer, then court-martialed after refusing to move to the back of a bus. After he plays in the Negro National League, we watch the opening of an all-American drama as, late in 1945, Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers recognized Jack as the right player to break baseball's color barrier - and the game was forever changed. Jack's never-before-published letters open up his relationship with his family, especially his wife, Rachel, whom he married just as his perilous venture of integrating baseball began. Her memories are a major resource of the narrative as we learn about the severe harassment Robinson endured from teammates and opponents alike; about death threats and exclusion; about joy and remarkable success. We follow his blazing career: 1947, Rookie of the Year; 1949, Most Valuable Player; six pennants in ten seasons, and in 1962, induction into the Hall of Fame. But sports were merely one aspect of his life. We see his business ventures, his leading role in the community, his early support of Martin Luther King Jr., his commitment to the civil rights movement at a crucial stage in its evolution; his controversial associations with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Humphrey, Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, and Malcolm X.

FROM THE CRITICS

Charles Taylor

There's a moment in the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize when Harry Belafonte describes Muhammad Ali as "terribly, terribly delicious." The way Belafonte savors those words before letting them out -- drop by drop -- tells you that he loves the beauty and glamour of Ali even more than he does Ali the boxer or Ali the proud black man.

That sensuous appreciation of beauty is exactly what's missing from Arnold Rampersad's biography of Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson will probably come to be officially accepted as the definitive story of the man who broke baseball's color line in 1947 when he was called up by the Brooklyn Dodgers, thus becoming the first African-American to play modern major league ball. If it were only a matter of thoroughness and scrupulousness, there's no reason why the book shouldn't be the official Robinson bio. Like a conscientious student, Rampersad, who has written books on Arthur Ashe and Langston Hughes and is a professor of literature at Princeton, has done all the research. We get a vivid portrait of the opportunities and tensions afforded by Robinson's Pasadena boyhood, and an even more vivid portrait of the straitjacketing that Robinson's stature as role model and barrier breaker imposed upon him (like Elvis in the Army, he was denied the right to complain, lest it look like he was seeking "special treatment"). Rampersad's chapters on Robinson's post-retirement political activities may be among the most complex yet lucid accountings we have of how black Americans seeking to improve their position found themselves tossed back and forth between the political left and right.

You can barely get through a chapter here without one of Rampersad's insights striking you. He notes that Brooklyn may have been the perfect place for baseball's color line to be crossed, since in the years following World War II, the borough's largely Jewish population was ready to identify with the tribulations of American blacks. What eludes Rampersad is contained in a photo, included in the book, of a pack of eager white kids hanging over the Dodgers dugout at Ebbets Field during Jackie's first game, trying to get his autograph. Anyone who'd crossed the color line would have made history. But people don't respond to history-making figures if those figures don't have the charisma to unleash imaginations. The stunning smile Robinson displays on the book's dust jacket tells you more about why people went wild over him than Rampersad's painstaking details and considered analysis. We love people who make history outside of the narrow grounds where history is officially accepted as being made (politics, the military) because they seem more vital, more real than the figures in the history books teachers try to shove down our throats. Leave it to an academic to return Jackie Robinson to those dull, dusty volumes. -- Salon

Roger Angell

In this book, as in his life, Jackie Robinson seizes attention not only by hisheroic self-control during the redneck vilifications and incipient player strikes of that first season but by his quite different demeanor afterward. -- The New Yorker

Publishers Weekly

In capturing the life of trailblazing black majorleaguer Jackie Robinson (1919-1972), Rampersad (coauthor with Arthur Ashe of Days of Grace) has found a subject to match his considerable talents as a biographer. Rampersad is the first biographer to be given complete access to Robinson's papers, and his book is a thoroughly researched, gracefully written and vividly told story of one of the country's most gifted, courageous athletes, not only in integrating professional baseball but also in dealing with his stardom and breaking racial barriers in college football, basketball and track at Pasadena Junior College and at UCLA. Robinson was born in rural Georgia, where his mother's family had owned land since the 1870s. His philandering father abandoned the family, and his mother moved with her children to Pasadena, Calif., in 1920, where Jackie and his brother, Mack, also a world-class athlete, began their athletic careers. Rampersad details the influence of Jackie's mother on his principles; his earnest religious devotion; his chaste courtship of his future wife, Rachel (and her own considerable talents as a mother, nurse and hospital administrator and, eventually, as manager of her husband's real estate firm); his military service; and his dissatisfaction with the conditions of Negro league baseball in the 1930s. The second baseman's relationship with Brooklyn Dodger general manager Branch Rickey, architect of his historic challenge to baseball's racial barrier, is well documented, and most significantly, detailed coverage is given to Robinson's transition from superstar baseball player to businessman and passionate civil rights leader. His unprecedented influence continued in politics as a pioneering black power-broker in the presidential campaigns of Eisenhower, Nixon and Rockefeller. Rampersad also writes of Robinson's baseball prowess, re-creating some of the most exciting pennant races ever. Photos. 200,000 first printing; BOMC selection. (Oct.)

Library Journal

The celebrated biographer of Langston Hughes takes advantage of privileged access to baseball pioneer and legend Robinson's private papers to paint this portrait.

AudioFile - Robin F. Whitten

In the mood for baseball? Let Jackie Robinson's memorable biography start the season. Rampersad, who also wrote Arthur Ashe's biography, Days of Grace, presents an insightful portrait. He follows Robinson from his early life and success as a college athlete to the Negro Baseball Leagues and his breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Exploring relationships with people who influenced Robinson, like Dodgers owner Branch Rickey and Martin Luther King, Jr., this biography gives an approachable historical context for listeners. Levar Burton's voice reflects a sense of awe. His obvious admiration of Robinson keeps him from effectively presenting the nuances of some of Rampersad's observations. The audio format makes the biography appeal to audiences who might not otherwise get around to reading the book but admirers of Robinson should seek out Rampersad's full text. R.F.W. cAudioFile, Portland, Maine Read all 6 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

One of the two or three best sports biographies I have read. Like Robinson himself, this book goes well beyond sports and in the end suggests how people everywhere must live. — Roger Kahn

Riveting as a historic narrative, unflinching in its discussion of American racism in Jackie Robinson's time...a model of its genre. — Joyce Carol Oates

This book towers above the rest...There have been biographies of Robinson before, but none can compare with this one. — Lawrence Ritter