Volume 44, Number 15 · October 9, 1997
'Poet of Resentment'
By John Gregory Dunne
OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
Jackie Robinson
by Arnold Rampersad
Knopf, 512 pp., $27.50
Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait
by Rachel Robinson
Abrams, 240 pp., $29.95
Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy
by Jules Tygiel
Oxford University Press, 413 pp., $14.95 (paper)
I Never Had It Made
by Jackie Robinson
Ecco Press, 275 pp., $24.00
The Jackie Robinson Reader: Perspectives of an American Hero
edited by Jules Tygiel
NAL-Dutton, 278 pp., $23.95 (paper)
Breaking the Line
a television documentary broadcast on ESPN, February 28, 1997
In the preface of his ghostwritten autobiography, I Never Had It Made, published in 1972 two days after he died at the age of fifty-three, enfeebled by diabetes and nearly blind, Jackie Robinson wrote, 'Money is America's God, and business people can dig black power if it coincides with green power.' Twenty-five years after his death, fifty years after he broke major league baseball's color bar against black players in 1947, honored in this anniversary year of that event from one end of the country to the other, his Brooklyn Dodger uniform number 42 retired by order of the baseball commissioner's office, never to be issued to another major leaguer (the twelve players currently wearing it—many black, in honor of Robinson—may keep it until the end of their careers), Jackie Robinson has been embraced by green power.
Review, 5542 words
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