I normally find bibliographic notes in books fascinating, and that is certainly true for this book, but I rarely find them this frustrating! Overmyer states that the five major sources that Effa left behind (four interviews and a book) "form a comprehensive and consistent account of both her life and the history of the Negro National League." I can see that those sources provide a great history of the Negro National League and the Newark Eagles, but I have seen little evidence that any of Overmyer's sources provided a very good picture of Effa's life. This book certainly doesn't do a terribly good job of describing Effa's life before, after or during, but outside of, baseball. I find his assertion that we have any kind of comprehensive account of Effa's life to be patiently false, deliberately shortsighted or both. I am rather disappointed by this whole thing.

As interesting as the sordid dealings of the Negro League owners is, I'm not sure why it was really in this book. They seem to have been an interesting bunch, but I'm really far more interested in their dealings with Effa than their dealings with the law!

The last few pages of the book (not counting appendixes) raise some interesting questions about what could have been. The image of Effa sitting down to a meeting with a group of white men did not seem as forward thinking in how it was phrased, though. Overmyer describes her with all the paperwork of a minor league owner sitting down with male owners who ostensibly have no more advantages than she does, yet still he sees them not being inclined to take her seriously. If baseball could have been able to accept black owners and managers (which it clearly could not at the time), why couldn't they have accepted a woman in any of those positions? It seems every bit as unlikely, and yet is not given the benefit of even being imagined. That's really very sad.

Although I agree that integration of major league baseball was vitally important, I think that this chapter's focus on the black press' reaction to Effa Manley's fight for Negro League rights throughout the process was unfair. She wasn't doing anything to seriously impede the integration process, but rather demanding that the players be paid for fairly as any white minor league player would have been. She was asking for the black teams to be treated as worthwhile, which they must have been (despite many organizational problems) to have nurtured the talents of players so that they were good enough to play in the majors. I think that she was right to fight for her rights and the book could have reflected that better (or at least discussed it more fairly).

I've been exceedingly frustrated by the organization of this book, but I finally figured out what Overmyer's strength is as a writer - descriptions of games and plays. He has spent very little time talking about actual game play, which makes completely logical sense, but the last chapter (about the Eagles 1946 championship season) had several descriptions of important plays from the important games leading up to that championship win. The chapter is still abysmally organized, but the descriptions just shine! Overmyer gave amazing accounts of important plays so vivid that I could picture them! His ability to evoke movement and tension is amazing (and extremely enviable)! Overmyer clearly should be writing accounts of famous games or series rather than biographies of executives! I still take issue with the organization of this book, but my respect for Overmyer went up dramatically after that chapter.

I liked hearing about the challenges facing Negro League baseball during World War II, but I would have liked to have heard more about Effa Manley's wartime projects and less about who jumped to Latin America and when. Don't get me wrong, the problem of players deserting their teams for Mexico or other Central American countries is interesting, as is the lengths to which Mrs Manley was willing to go to stop them from doing so, but it doesn't need quite as much attention as the book gave it. I would have loved to have heard more about Mrs Manley's war effort fundraising and her support of the black entertainers who performed for the troops. Overmyer mentioned special days and benefits celebrating black soldiers and supporting the war efforts, but he didn't actually talk much about them. I rather wish he had, as I would have been interested in hearing about them!

The Negro Leagues were so disorganized! The inability to enforce player contracts seems like a major problem to me! Players "jumping" all over the place is confusing and seems bad for business on several levels. I'm glad that the Manleys stuck to their guns on the issue and wish that they hadn't been alone in that.

I can't believe how risky Negro League baseball was, and yet how many people were still willing to get involved in it. I'm totally not surprised that the Manleys lost so much money owning a baseball team. I'm impressed at how well the Manleys seem to have made the best of a pretty bad business situation.

It's really interesting to hear about Effa Manley's wonderful business sense in managing and promoting the Eagles. She really does seem to have been great at dealing with publicity and at managing the public opinion of the team. It's kind of amazing that she managed to get the mayor of Newark, the white mayor of Newark, to attend opening day every year. She seems to have had a great ability to keep the team in the black and the players happy, neither could have been an easy feat! Her mothering tendency seems to have been a good and a bad thing. I do like that she generally helped the players out when they needed it, though.

I loved hearing about the charity work, fundraising and community-building events that Mrs Manley set up while she owned the Eagles. I find it fascinating that she did so much with the NAACP and even invited black soldiers to games for free during World War II. Hearing about the players on the team was interesting, but as this is likely the first time that I have heard most of the names, it didn't make as much of an impact as it might have for someone else. Far more exciting for me was the information about the community. I love the image of all the men and women dressed up in their Sunday finery (church hats and all) attending a baseball game every Sunday to share picnic lunches and gossip about who arrived with whom wearing what! I was impressed that the Manleys sponsored (and paid for) a little league team as part of the Eagles family. The whole thing is just really cool. I'm not sure that anything like it could happen today. It's becoming more and more obvious why Effa Manley deserves to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame!

Ok, the organization in this book is infuriating! More than half of the chapter that I just read had almost nothing to do with the topic at hand. When Overmyer finally got back to the point the information was really interesting, but it took forever to get to that information in the first place! The book almost seems to have an identity crisis. It wants very much to be a biography of Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles (and the table of contents appears to support this), but it reads like academic notes on the history of Negro League baseball (mostly in the 1930s) that no one has edited. Much of it simply doesn't belong in a biography, even one of the Eagles! I really want to like this book, but it's incredibly difficult to get through without getting terribly frustrated!

The beginning of this book is a mess. There's a lot of great information there, but it's presented in a very haphazard way. Rather than starting at the beginning and moving forward from there, Overmyer started in the middle, jumped around a lot, touched the beginning briefly before running off into a long discussion about what race Mrs Manley was before deciding it didn't matter and skipping off to the early-middle of the story again. Now, I found the discussion of Mrs Manley's social and economic activist work very interesting, but I would have loved to have gotten a real picture of her childhood, early jobs and lifestyle and her first marriage, maybe. What happened to her first husband? Did they divorce? How long were they married? How long was she single again before marrying Abe Manley? I really want to hear about the woman herself! Barring that, I want to hear about what she did in and for baseball. What makes her worthy of the hall of fame? I hope the rest of the book is a little more focused and jumps around less!

It's always funny when the author of a book states in the introduction that before beginning work on the book he or she knew absolutely nothing about the subject and didn't really care that much about it. I love that the author's wife was offended by the caption of Effa Manley's photograph in the Hall of Fame Museum and asked her husband to write about the truth about Mrs Manley. I always hate dismissive captions like that one and am glad that someone brought it up! I'm really excited about reading this book and hope that by the end of it I have a better understanding of what made Mrs Manley worthy of being in the Baseball Hall of Fame (as the only woman to date).