Opening Day:
The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season
By Jonathan Eig
GV865 .R6 E35 2007
New Book Island, 2nd floor
Now I understand that baseball may be a sore subject (at least the Packers are doing well, right?), but the rest of the country is still paying attention to America’s Pastime. Instead of focusing on the current season and the collapse of our beloved teams, let’s take a trip back in time sixty years ago to Opening Day, 1947. That was the groundbreaking year in which Jackie Robinson entered the major leagues and opened the doors for other African-Americans to join the professional baseball ranks. Eig, a senior writer for the Wall Street Journal, details what it was like in the 1940s, in the middle of the civil rights movement, to handle the stress of being the first to break the color barrier. The author also wrote Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, which is available in the McNaughton Collection.
