Eva reviews: “You Never Heard Of Willie Mays?”

You Never Heard Of Willie Mays? by Jonah Winter and Terry Widener

The publisher says… Many believe baseball great Willie Mays to be the best player that ever lived. In Jonah Winter and Terry Widener’s fascinating picture book biography, young readers can follow Mays’s unparalleled career from growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, to playing awe-inspiring ball in the Negro Leagues and then the Majors, where he was center fielder for the New York (later San Francisco) Giants. Complete with sidebars filled with stats, here is a book for all baseball lovers, young and old.

Eva says… So I really needed to read some books about BASEBALL, and so I got this one. And it was kind of hard but I got through it. It’s about this guy Willie Mays who used to play baseball for the Giants way back in the old days when everyone’s clothes were all baggy. So I bet Grandpa Rich knew this guy, even though he didn’t play for Boston.

The guy who wrote this one said that black guys used to not be allowed to play baseball with white guys. So I guess that Big Papi and a bunch of the guys on the Red Sox would be out of luck, and a lot of guys on Baltimore too. And you know, that’s just plain crazy. Because what if they had rules like that about people getting married? Because Tanya’s black and Mama’s white, and they wouldn’t be married and we wouldn’t have Mikey!

So I think we’re all glad in this family that they got rid of THAT rule.

So Willie Mays could catch the ball and throw it and hit home runs and he was fast, and that’s all you need to do in baseball, isn’t it?

This one has great facts and the pictures are really COLORFUL. And I love the cover, which was like a movie of Willie hitting a home run! (Note from Tanya: It was a lenticular painting.)

So that was good too.

So I’m glad I got this one even if it WAS hard.