The story of Moses Fleetwood Walker, the first African American to play Major League baseball, is an important one to tell but also a very difficult one. Unbelievably poor record-keeping fills his family tree with few leaves and countless question marks. Sports statistics weren't nearly as thorough as they are today, and any existing contemporary analysis of his qualities as a baseball player were run through the lens of his race. It's not easy to tell who Fleet Walker was, but David Zang's work fills in more gaps than I thought would ever be possible.

Zang's research here is impressive, and while he provides quite a bit of supplementary information about contemporary race relations throughout the book, it's all relevant and in no way overbearing. It's easy to forget just how prevalent race theorists (including Walker himself) were, and they remained so far deeper into the 20th century than one would like to think. How can we really blame Walker for believing racial integration to be impossible when just two years prior to the release of his anti-integration pamphlet Our Home Colony, an adult African male was exhibited in the Bronx Zoo in a cage with monkeys? I'd lose faith in white people pretty quickly, too.

Fleet Walker's Divided Heart is a great title for a biography of a man who never ceased to struggle with his identity. He was neither fully black nor fully white, and by the end of his life he resented both his whiteness and blackness to the point of perpetual restlessness and self-hatred. This is not a comfortable read, nor should it be. It's easy to tell the story of Jackie Robinson. That story has a much happier ending. Baseball (eventually) accepted Jackie with open arms, but gave nothing to Fleet and made no apologies for it. You don't see his smile the way you see Jackie Robinson's. You see his pain, his bitterness, his hatred of the color of his skin and of the black and white communities that would never accept him. Moses Fleetwood Walker was a complicated man who wasn't allowed to succeed in a game that was rigged against him, in a country that was rigged against him, in a world that was rigged against him. ( )

By far the best biography of a pioneer black baseball player, or any other black athlete. ( )