Lawrence D. Hogan

Shades of Glory is a very fine history tracing the arc of "Negro League" baseball from its beginning through it glory days through its inevitable and sadly ironic end once the white leagues were integrated. I still prefer Robert Peterson's groundbreaking 1970 history 'Only the Ball Was White', but this book also tells the history reasonably well. It includes many photos, brief bios of individuals players, and great stories. The book also covers the economics of the Negro Leagues, which is almost as interesting as the baseball.

Others have commented that the book "jumped around". This may be explained by the fact that this book is the distillation of a much larger 800-page history written by teams of historians and sportswriters.… (más)

I must confess that I never finished this book. It was so poorly put together, that I couldn't finish it. From the first page, I thought I had jumped into the book in the middle somewhere. I turned it over to my husband (an avid baseball fan), thinking perhaps it was my lack of understanding of the game that was creating problems, but he had a rough time with it too. The subject matter is excellent, and I can only hope that the final publication of the book took care of the continuity problems that I encountered.… (más)