Josh and Satch: The Life and Times of Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige | Literary Qualities

Josh and Satch: The Life and Times of Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige Literary Qualities

Most of Josh and Satch consists of chapters focused on year-by-year accounts of the achievements of Paige and Gibson. The focus is on baseball exploits, with the players' private lives sketched in only as background for the players' public lives. One effect this focus has is to make the world outside of baseball seem remote, even World War II seems like a faraway event.

Holway compensates for this by introducing each chapter with a catalogue of important world and national events that took place during the year the chapter covers. Readers of biographies for young adults are likely to be familiar with this technique, appearing as it does in such popular books as Ann Petry's Harriett Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad (1955; see separate entry, Vol 2).

Josh and Satch is full of statistics, presenting accounts of how many home runs Gibson hit in a...
(read more)