"Better Than the Best chronicles, with first-person vividness, the often tragic yet ennobling experience of the first wave of African American athletes that helped thwart discrimination in U.S. sports. The interviews provide fresh, incomparable perspective on a cultural history that must never be lost."
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Art Thiel, Seattle sports columnist
"This compelling, heartwarming, gender-balanced collection of interviews across diverse sports fields explores the tangled web of race."
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Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Spelman College
"Perhaps the most important text to emerge for a number of years in the study of race and sport in U.S. society."
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Ian Ralston, Liverpool John Moores University
"An important and inspiring account of an era when the achievements of African American athletes had a social and political significance they no longer have today. Here are the candid and fascinating stories of black athletic heroes whose lives changed American race relations forever and for the good of us all."
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John Hoberman, author of Darwin's Athletes