Books for Christmas

The Brooklyn Dodgers’ immortal Number 42 was a man of no less courage than Oswaldo Payá. In True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson (St. Martin’s Press), Kostya Kennedy is especially effective in helping us imagine life in Montreal in 1946 (Robinson’s Triple-A stop before the big leagues) and baseball-mad Brooklyn in 1949. The author lapses into wokery by questioning Robinson’s criticism of Paul Robeson before a congressional committee. Notwithstanding that nod to political correctness, Kennedy paints a moving portrait of one of the great American heroes: a man committed to racial equality in a colorblind society. Would that 42 were with us today.