Even if this book had been utter crap, I would have felt duty bound to recommend it, just so that more people would read about the remarkable Satchel Paige.
Lucky for me, Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend
How could you not love a book about a character as colorful as Satchel Paige? Larry Tye certainly had his work cut out for him… Satchel was the stuff of legends and there wasn’t a lot of newspaper coverage about him at the time. Separating the truth from Satchel’s carefully cultivated mystique couldn’t have been an easy task. Tye does an admirable job of it. Where he thinks that Satchel might have been telling tall tales, he lets you know. And when he can find decent evidence to back up certain claims, he lets you know that as well. And when the truth is somewhere in between? He lays it all out and lets you decide for yourself.
If I had one critical thing to say about Tye’s writing it would be that it’s not always as cohesive as it could be. He arranges things roughly chronologically, but skips around a bit when he wants to group similar stories. The OCD part of my brain found this slightly jarring, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from enjoying what I was reading.
This is an important book to read if only to come to terms with the racist skeletons in our country’s closet. Satchel was a hell of a person and a hell of a ball player. It’s a real shame that most people have no idea who he was. He toiled in obscurity on various negro league teams, not making it to the majors until he was 42 years old. An age at which most ball players have long since retired. At the age of 58, he played his last game in the majors. He pitched three scoreless innings.
If you like baseball, biographies, remarkable stories, racial histories or some combination of all four, then this book is definitely for you.
HI!! thank you for de-lurking! it’s nice to “meet” you — and thank you for the book recommendation, i think this is something both my husband and i would like to read. 🙂