Duke Fakir’s life determination radiates throughout I’ll Be There: My Life With The Four Tops. From arriving early in high school, hustling up the group’s first uniforms, managing the group’s funds, and now preserving the group’s legacy.
Walk the Blue Line is a pro-police book, reminding us of the humanity of the police officer. The people who do this work, the book suggests, are not any different from the rest of us. The stories are often gripping, violent, and poignant.
Whereas most sportswriters focused on Kaepernick and the celebrity professional athletes that followed his lead, in The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World,Dave Zirin instead mostly features the high school and college athletes and coaches that drew inspiration from Kaepernick.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s remarkable and often tragic life is one that could have been scripted by Shakespeare. John A. Farrell has a great deal to work with and handles it well. He is respectful but not fawning. And those who love political history and complex characters will learn a lot from and enjoy Ted Kennedy: A Life.
The Spillane biography is a good book, if only to remind us of how important Mickey Spillane was to American Letters and American popular culture. Now, if only someone would write a solid biography of Frank Yerby.
Howard Bryant, a senior writer at ESPN, has examined baseball’s tangled racial history in books such as Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston and The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. Like these books, Rickey combines impressive journalistic legwork, clear narrative writing, and sensitive analysis of the unique burdens endured by Black athletes.
Telling the story of bald eagles in America is like telling the environmental history of our nation. Jack E. Davis tells it well in The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird, skimping on no details.
Favorites of the Gods is a solid collection of short fiction from Louisiana’s Creoles of color written during the most chaotic and perilous decades of the nineteenth century. This collection gives contemporary readers access to these short stories for the first time in English.
To Irwin F. Gellman, Nixon deserved higher marks for the operation and substance of his campaign. He sees Kennedy as more expedient as well as superficially more attractive. However, somehow, this volume does not capture the excitement of a very close contest nor how each candidate tried to increase his support.
Rise of the Black Quarterback is a fascinating book, with tales of hope and heartbreak, and men determined to give it their all to achieve their dream and, for many years, not being given a fair chance even to try.
