Larry Lester

This is a biography of a black baseball pitcher who was the founder and president of the Negro National League. I was interested in reading about Foster, but this was not the book for me to read about him. For the first time, I did not finish a book that I received as part of the Early Reviewer program. The style of the book made it difficult for me to get interested. Others may find it worthwhile, but I did not. For the part that I read, much of the source material was quoted verbatim. Included is a considerable amount of Foster's writing. Extensive appendices contain various lists, court records, stats.… (mais)

Not a standard biography, but a documentary history like Dean Sullivan’s Early-Middle-Late-Extra Innings series, this portrait of the Negro National League’s founder is not an easy read. While material is presented in an orderly fashion and nicely tied together with clear narrative text, much of it still consists of stilted prose from over a hundred years ago—items transcribed as found in obscure newspapers, court documents, and the other historical source material from which biography is derived.

This approach, while not as easy to read as a pre-digested retelling of a life, has the advantage of showing the man as he was seen by his contemporaries—as a truly great pitcher, who threw seven no-hitters (a number equaled by only Nolan Ryan at the Major League level) and organizational genius who, during a period of intense racial inequality, built and controlled a nation-wide entertainment enterprise through sheer will and perseverance. Lester, editor of the scholarly Negro-Leagues journal Black Ball and CEO of NoirTech Research, has done both us and Foster a service by compiling this material and making possible a fuller understanding of this giant figure in baseball’s development.… (mais)

This book is more collection of newspaper articles of the time, than an actual traditional biography. The author is a SABR researcher and that fact is very clear. The original sources he has come up with are interesting and at parts informative, yet it would have been better had just the most important parts of the sources cited and used in the telling of Foster's story. Instead Lester chose to just lump all the newspaper articles together with out a real narrative. I would have liked to have seen an editor's touch with this book to make it more readable. Lester's own writing, when he did write, was good and the best part of the bio, but all the original sources put into the narrative interupted the flow of the book. Foster is a very interesting and important person in the history of baseball and as that comes through in the book it could have been presented in a much better way.… (mais)

This book likely contains the definitive research on and about Rube Foster. However, it would have greatly benefited from a strong editor and a placement of Foster within his times. it is so specifically focuses upon Foster that the reader, even one familiar with the history of black baseball, has trouble putting Foster in the context of the times - which is ironic given the title of the book. While there was clearly yeoman's work undertaken to piece together Rube Foster's life in baseball through his own words, significantly more summarization and molding into a story was necessary to turn this into a much ore readable, accessible book. Providing more history about early black baseball, the Chicago semi-pro city league scene, and the 1920's Negro National League would have been helpful in placing Foster into the context of his times. Much of the lengthy quotation of his writings (pages on end) would have been better placed within the book's already strong appendices.… (mais)