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. ( )

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. ( )

Good book. Not the easiest to get through. A mite dry and plodding but loaded with great info on the Negro Leagues.
Purchased my copy in Cooperstown at the Museum bookstore. ( )

I didn't particularly like this book because it was overwhelmed with detail. It was not organized in a way that I found interesting. I'm not a baseball purist and perhaps the detail appeals to most people who would read this book, but not me. It's unfortunate that so many teams were named Giants, too, because that blurred things quite a bit for me. ( )

Baseball has a lot of history behind it, and as a relatively new fan of the game I'm reminded every time I pick up a book about just how much I don't know about it.

This book was helpful in filling in some of the gaps for an era and a league for which a lot of people could probably use some gaps filled. While general baseball coverage will introduce most casual fans to the headliners of the Negro Leagues, this book goes beyond biographies of the top stars to the more nuts-and-bolts mechanics of the leagues they played in and how they operated parallel to the segregated major and minor leagues. It's as much a story about black businesses and black communities as about black baseball.

Because it is trying to cover so much ground, it does jump around quite a bit and as some others have mentioned the tone is a bit boostery. Because I had an advance reader's copy the pictures and statistical indexes were not complete. However, it looks like the finished version will be a useful introduction to a story that every baseball fan should be introduced to. ( )