Alou is one of the best baseball autobiographies of recent years because it offers the story of race and baseball not from a non-American perspective, but from someone who got to know the United States very well as both a resident and a subject of its foreign policy, as both insider and outsider.
The most extraordinary thing about Amiable is that it was ever rescued from hiding. As the novel’s scrupulous and publicity-savvy editors suggest, “the discovery of an unpublished and previously unknown manuscript by a major modern writer is a rare occurrence.”
Most scholarly professionals, linguists and non-linguists alike, suffer from the occasional (or not so occasional) feeling that what they do is meaningless, having no direct, positive impact on their fellow man. The overall message of Baugh’s book will inspire them otherwise.
A book like this intensifies a sense of black community for its readers by being racial, yet universal. It is almost a totem.
Never Caught is a fascinating, absorbing account of slavery and freedom in the early days of our nation and is especially accessible for the non-specialist, non-academic reader.
