This is a book about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a book by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. In short, it is a book about America, about fathers and sons, prejudice and courage, triumph and disaster, and told with warmth, humor, wit, candor, and love.

The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball  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.