Stealing Home: Intimate Family Portrait by the Daughter of Jackie Robinson, An - Hardcover

Robinson, Sharon

3.97

30 ratings by Goodreads

9780060171919: Stealing Home: Intimate Family Portrait by the Daughter of Jackie Robinson, An

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006017191X ISBN 13: 9780060171919

Publisher: Harper, 1996

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An intensely personal and candid memoir of a father by his daughter discusses life with the legendary Jackie Robinson, the responsibilities of being part of an African-American family in the public eye, and the impact on her and her family. $50,000 ad/promo. Tour.

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Review:

This memoir by the daughter of one of America's most beloved sports heroes appears just in time for the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of major league baseball. Those expecting to find a darker side of the taciturn, dignified Jackie Robinson will be disappointed: Robinson, according to his daughter, was a devoted father and a civil rights activist whose messy rifts with more outspoken black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are barely mentioned here. Robinson was evidently a complex, deeply reserved man, and it seems likely that even his daughter, whose affection for her famous dad is obvious, did not know him well.

From the Publisher:

In so many ways, Sharon Robinson's childhood in the 1950s was typical for the Connecticut suburb where she grew up -- she lived in a beautiful home, went on shopping trips to New York to buy expensive party dresses, joined exclusive social clubs, even had a pony. However, in at least one important respect, her life was utterly extraordinary: Her father was the great Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the color barrier in baseball. Stealing Home is her story of growing up in the shadow of a hero, and it offers a remarkable portrait of an African-American family who embodied the American Dream of the 1950s.

This also is a story of a man who changed the world, and of the deeply complex reality beneath the superficial perfection of the family immortalized in the pages of Life magazine. Sharon Robinson reveals how even the Robinsons weren't able to buy a house in the exclusive suburbs of Connecticut without the intervention of white friends, and the often painful alienation of living in two worlds, black and white. Candid and loving, Robinson writes of her father's tireless work for civil rights, as well as his seemingly contradictory political associations and his eventual disillusionment with a system that used him for its own purposes. She also describes the anguish of her older brother, struggling under the weight of being "Jackie, Jr.," who sought escape first in the army, then in heroin. And finally, she tells her own story: how, like so many women of her generation, she left her father's home for her new husband's, only to find that somewhere along the way she lost her own identity.

Moving and dramatic, Stealing Home traces Sharon Robinson's search for success on her own terms, telling the story of a family who embodied the struggles and experiences of a generation.

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