New Satchel Paige biography

Although I posted briefly about this book in the What Baseball Book are you Reading thread, last night I completed Satchel: the Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye. The work was so enjoyable for me that I wanted to give it its own thread. Tye obviously did lots and lots of research and interviews, and he goes as deeply as he can to separate fact from legend when it comes to Paige. The fact that we can't ever know, in places, how successful he's actually been at this is part of the book's charm. When he can't do any better, he simply relates the different versions of particular stories as supplied to him by the different sources he's found. At any rate, legend aside, I learned a heck of a lot about Paige and came to realize just how influential a figure he was to baseball history and how famous he was across the country during his heyday. Just amazing, amazing stuff about Paige, about the history of the Negro Leagues and even about the ultimate integration of the Major Leagues. For example, I was fascinated to learn that Paige and many of the other Negro League veterans had very little use for Jackie Robinson, although they said all the right things to reporters, and he had very little respect for them or all that they had accomplished and endured.