Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1975. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Fair. xviii, [2], 363, [1] pages. Illustrations. Occasional footnotes. Tables. Index. DJ has wear, tears, soiling, and chips. DJ has sticker residue on back. The author has been researching baseball since 1944. Holway saw his first Negro League game -- Satchel Paige's Monarchs against Josh Gibson's Grays -- in Washington in 1945. After a stint as a parachute lieutenant in Korea, he wrote his first book in Tokyo in 1954, "Japan Is Big League in Thrills," the first book ever done in English on Japanese baseball. His wrote, "Voices From the Great Black Baseball Leagues," which was a collection of interviews with the then virtually unknown Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard, Bill Foster, Willie Wells, and others. That was followed by "Blackball Stars," "Black Diamonds," "Josh Gibson," and "Josh and Satch." In 2001 his monumental "The Complete Book of the Negro Leagues, the Other Half of Baseball History" came out, the most ambitious project ever undertaken on the Negro Leagues. From 1887 through the early 1950s, hundreds of elite athletes played in the Negro Leagues, banned from the majors because of the color of their skin. The foremost historian of the "blackball" era spent nearly ten years researching this acclaimed oral history, interviewing 17 outstanding players including Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard, and Willie Wells. Over 80 vintage photographs.