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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | J GRAPHIC PAI | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | J GRAPHIC 921 PAIGE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | J 921 PAIGE | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Baseball Hall of Famer Leroy "Satchel" Paige (1905? ? 1982) changed the face of the game in a career that spanned five decades.& Much has been written about this larger-than-life pitcher, but when it comes to Paige, fact does not easily separate from fiction.& He made a point of writing his own history'and then re-writing it.& A tall, lanky fireballer, he was arguably the Negro League?'s hardest thrower, most entertaining storyteller and greatest gate attraction. Now the Center for Cartoon Studies turns a graphic novelist?'s eye to Paige?'s story.& Told from the point of view of a sharecropper, this compelling narrative follows Paige from game to game as he travels throughout the segregated South.& In stark prose and powerful graphics, author and artist share the story of a sports hero, role model, consummate showman, and era-defining American. &
Author Notes
James Sturm's graphic novel The Golem's Mighty Swing was named "Best Comic 2001" by Time Magazine. In 2004, his Marvel Comics graphic novel Unstable Molecules won the prestegious Eisner Award. James' writings and illustrations have appeared in scores of national and regional publications, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Onion, The New York Times, The LA Weekly and on the cover of the The New Yorker. James is the co-founder and director of The Center for Cartoon Studies, America's premiere cartooning school, located in White River Junction, VT.
Rich Tommaso has been writing and drawing original comics and graphic novels for over ten years. He has worked for such publishers as Fantagraphics Books, Top Shelf Productions, Dark Horse Comics, Chronicle Books, and Alternative Comics. He has received accolades from many magazines and trade papers, including Publisher's Weekly, Spin Magazine (which did a full page spread about his debut graphic novel, Clover Honey), Wizard Magazine, The CBG, and The Comics Journal. Rich lives in Vermont.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Delivering far more than a conventional biography or baseball book, this graphic novel reveals the sport as an agent of hope in the Jim Crow South. Sturm (cofounder and director of the Center for Cartoon Studies, which partnered with Hyperion for this title) and Tommaso create a fictional African-American sharecropper who turns to Negro League baseball to support his family ("I'll be makin' more money than her daddy and my daddy put together. Ain't braggin' if it's true"). The narrator hits a pitch off of Satchel Paige, but his career is cut short by injury and he returns to sharecropping. When he sends his son to school rather than have him work the fields, two white land-owning brothers mercilessly beat the boy; the book's only full-spread art eschews the traditional square and rectangular panels used everywhere else and, devastatingly, shows father and son the next day, laboring in an endless field of cotton. The story culminates with Paige's team coming to play against the all-white hometown favorites: the final score is less important than the chance to see Paige make quick work of the opposing batters. The narrative and duotone art are largely understated, with stark exceptions: among them, a lynching victim hanging from a tree and an epithet, directed at Paige, which roars across the infield. By emphasizing Paige's influence and mythos rather than focusing on details about his life or career, Sturm and Tommaso offer a powerful and unique testimony to his legacy. Ages 10-up. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Sturm, a 2004 Eisner Award winner (with Guy Davis) for Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules and the author of The Golem's Mighty Swing (2001), returns to baseball in this graphic novel about fictional Emmet Wilson, a black farmer whose moment of glory as a player in the Negro Leagues came when he scored a run off the great pitcher Satchel Paige. Shortly after that, an injury ends Wilson's career and forces him to return to the life of a farmer. Strum focuses on Wilson's plight in the racist South of the 1940s, but also shows how his brief encounter with the legendary Paige an iconic force against Jim Crow laws provided lifelong inspiration. Tommaso's black-and-white artwork brings out the stark times and emotions with strong, powerful lines, but also grandly evokes Paige's quiet patience and his electrifying dynamism on the mound. This visually powerful, suspenseful, even profound story makes an excellent choice for readers interested in baseball or in the history of race relations. An appended section fills in more about the times and provides a springboard for discussion.--Karp, Jesse Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
NO more tragic or romantic institution emerged from the Jim Crow era of American life than the Negro Leagues. African-Americans were banished from the majors in 1884, and a few seasons later from the minors as well, under a "gentleman's agreement" between white owners and players. None would return until Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers some 60 years later. Black baseball players scrambled to make a living any way they could. In 1920, Rube Foster, star pitcher, manager and owner of the Chicago American Giants, banded eight leading black teams from around the Midwest into the Negro National League, and a legend was born. Over the next 40 years, and through three more segregated major leagues - a second Negro National League, the Eastern Colored League and the Negro American League - African-Americans invented a whole new brand of baseball on the outskirts of town, one that was usually faster, tougher, more merciless than the game played in the white leagues. When black players, led by. the likes of Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, Willie Mays, Roy Campanella, Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson and Roberto Clemente, were finally allowed into the white game, the intelligence and ferocity of their play frequently overwhelmed the opposition. "We are the ship; all else the sea" was how Rube Foster described his new league, and Kadir Nelson takes the phrase for the title of his riveting picturebook introduction to the Negro Leagues. It was a ship always on the verge of foundering. Players made little money and barnstormed constantly between league contests, sometimes logging as many as three or four games in a day. They traveled everywhere jammed into well-worn buses or private cars, often arriving in a town after many hours on the road only to find that there was no place, in the segregated America of their time, to get a room, have a meal, use the bathroom. They slept in their uniforms, bought their bats at a store and played in fields that were little more than roped-off cow pastures. Owners operated on a shoestring. A harried Foster was committed to a mental asylum, where he died in 1930; his league collapsed a year later. Players were left with the bitter realization that they would never compete on a bigger stage. And yet, as was the case with many Jim Crow improvisations, African-Americans transformed a white institution into something of their own - something better. Many Negro League teams were owned by blacks; one owner, a hard-edged numbers king by the name of Gus Greenlee, even built his Pittsburgh Crawfords team its own park, in the middle of the Depression. Black managers and players came up with daring new plays and pitches, they performed at dizzying speed, and they regularly beat white teams - perhaps as much as 60 percent of the time - in the postseason exhibitions they put on. The painter Kadir Nelson has illustrated several award-winning children's books, including some on black history. This is the first book he has both illustrated and written, and it's absolutely gorgeous. He uses the conversational, first-person voice of a fictional, anonymous player. It's a device that generally works well and allows him to include many of the great old tales of the Negro Leagues; he conveys the humor, showmanship. and joy that were an integral part of the game, without soft-soaping how hard it all was. Nelson bolsters his text with an index and endnotes, for the readers who will be drawn by his work to learn more. There is the occasional gaffe. White ballplayers in the 1940s did not make $7,000 a month - more like $7,000 a season - and he goes too easy on the black owners of the Negro League teams who were also running numbers rackets on the side. Tre, such men had limited opportunities in apartheid America, but they were still gangsters, vultures who preyed upon the desperate hopes of their own communities. Nelson's visual narrative is nothing short of magnificent. His paintings include numerous portraits and action scenes, as well as facsimiles of baseball cards, a ticket to the "First Colored World Series" and a beautifully drawn, melancholy sign for a "colored" inn. Particularly enthralling are his full-page portrayals of a white "House of David" ballplayer (from a religious colony in Michigan) with his trademark beard and long hair; an outfielder in an old park during the last days of the black leagues ; a double-page spread of Foster's American Giants stepping down from a Pullman car; and, especially, an early Negro League game played at night. JAMES STURM and Rich Tommaso's "Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow" offers a different approach to the subject, but it's every bit as engrossing. Both veteran writers and illustrators, Sturm and Tommaso tell the first-person story of a (fictional) black ballplayer who has a heady game against the Birmingham Black Barons in his first weeks of Negro League ball - he doubles off the legendary pitcher Satchel Paige - but then must return to the suffocating, racist world of Tuckwilla, Ala, a small cotton town dominated by an arrogant, white planter family. It's a haunting story in which Sturm's text poignantly conveys the quiet bitterness of his hero, and Tommaso's spare, two-tone drawings brilliantly contrast the physical beauty of the old, rural South with the savagery of its social institutions. An abiding air of menace hangs over the story like a gathering storm cloud. The authors refuse to look away from anything, not even lynching, although the material remains suitable - even vital - for most children. Paige himself is as elusive here as he was in real life, but Sturm and Tommaso, along with an excellent introduction by Gerald Early, provide a telling glimpse of this consummate showman, entrepreneur and competitor, who pitched into his mid60s and against all odds managed to rise above both the black gamp and the white one. "Don't look back; something might be gaining on you," Satch liked to say, but both of these books offer an invaluable look into the treasured and sorrowful past. Kevin Baker is the author of the historical novel "Strivers Row." He is currently working on a history of baseball in New York City.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-Satchel Paige, the great pitcher who flourished both in the Negro Leagues and the Major Leagues, gets his own graphic novel. Told in flashback, the story takes place during the Jim Crow days where baseball was a genteel pastime, with the elderly seated under shady grandstands while black players abided the sickening and arbitrary restrictions placed on them. A period piece rather than a biography, the narrative captures the daily action of sporting contests against local racists and Paige's dignity and resilience. Baseball and small-town Southern life are both slow paced, and this title moves slowly too-frames depicting Paige tying his shoelace or pitches that go for balls may seem out of place, but they set the pace and mood for this affecting look into a near forgotten way of life. The stylized art is an absolute gem, resembling Chris Ware's work, with many repeated images and sequential frames that change only slightly across the page. Paige's mystique as a lifelong survivor in the brutal world of early- to mid-20th-century race relations and sport will attract readers. The depiction of what daily life was like during this period is the real subject of this title, and it should be a marvelous discovery for teens.-John Leighton, Brooklyn Public Library, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A bleak tale of failed baseball dreams, smoldering pride and Jim Crow in action. Clinging to the memory of his one at-bat against the great Satchel Paige, which resulted in a run but also a career-ending injury, the bitter narrator does his best to keep his son in school and out of the Alabama cotton fields. Though that battle is lost when the white landowners notice the boy's absence, and he is later found beaten by the side of the road, the father takes his son to see Paige's traveling team humble a white team that includes those same landlords, and then gives him the ball that the pitcher had given him years before: "I hope it reminds him of who he can be." Using only black, white and half-tone, Tommaso illustrates this graphic novel in a spare style that makes every figure from the lanky Paige on down seem isolated, and underscores the economical narrative's plainspoken harshness. Flanked by an introduction and an extensive set of historical notes, the episode imparts as clear a picture of the aggressive style of black baseball as it does of the realities of life in the rural Deep South in Paige's barnstorming heyday. It also rightly presents Paige as hero, showman and symbol. (Graphic fiction. 11-15) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
