Inspired by real events in 1948, the story describes eight-year-old Stephen Satlow's life in Brooklyn, New York, and his obsession with the Dodgers baseball team. When Stephen's all-Jewish neighbors protest the arrival of an African American family to their neighborhood, Stephen decides to befriend the new neighbor who turns out to be Jackie Robinson himself. The friendship that develops teaches Stephen many lessons and binds the Christian and Jewish...

In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as...