Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball - Hardcover

"Much has been written about Jackie Robinson and much has been written about Branch Rickey. But, thanks to the legendary Roger Kahn, we are granted front-row access to the inner workings of a fascinating--and historic--relationship. Like its author, Rickey & Robinson is a treasure." --Jeff Pearlman, bestselling author of Showtime and The Bad Guys Won "Roger Kahn's classic, The Boys of Summer, changed my life--that and Catcher in the Rye were the two books that made me dream of becoming a writer. Now, Roger returns to the Brooklyn Dodgers to breathe new life into the two familiar men who changed baseball and, in their own way, America. I thought I knew everything there was to know about Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson but, not surprisingly, I'm still learning from Roger Kahn." --Joe Posnanski, bestselling author of The Soul of Baseball and The Machine, national columnist for NBC Sports "Branch Rickey signed me in 1946, a few months after his historical signing of Jackie Robinson. Jackie and I were teammates with the Dodgers for nine wonderful seasons, including the 1955 World Championship season later memorialized in Roger Kahn's masterpiece, The Boys of Summer. But Mr. Rickey's and Jackie's baseball accomplishments pale in comparison to the cultural impact they had on America, an impact that reverberates to this day. Roger knew both men well. Read his words and you will, too." --Carl Erskine, Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, 1948-1959 "If you think you know the full Branch Rickey-Jackie Robinson story, you don't. And you won't until you read Roger Kahn's Rickey & Robinson, which tells the tale in new, vivid, unvarnished ways. This, at last, is the definitive account." --Will Leitch, author of Are We Winning?, senior writer for Sports On Earth and founder of Deadspin "Kahn's offering stands apart with its wealth of personal information and observations that the veteran sportswriter must have kept in his notebooks for decades." --The Boston Globe

In Rickey & Robinson, legendary sportswriter Roger Kahn at last reveals the true, unsanitized account of the integration of baseball, a story that for decades has relied on inaccurate, second-hand reports. This story contains exclusive reporting and personal reminiscences that no other writer can produce, including revelatory material he'd buried in his notebooks in the 40s and 50s, back when sportswriters were still known to "protect" players and baseball executives. That starts, first and foremost, with an in-depth examination of the two men chiefly responsible for making integration happen: Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson. Considering Robinson's exalted place in American culture (as evidenced by the remarkable success of the recent biopic), the book's eye-opening revelations are sure to generate controversy as well as conversation. No other sportswriter working today carries Kahn's authority when writing about this period in baseball history, and the publication of this book, Kahn's last, is a true literary event. In Rickey & Robinson, Kahn separates fact from myth to present a truthful portrait of baseball and its participants at a critical juncture in American history.