Major: A Black Athlete, a White Era, and the Fight to Be the World's Fastest Human Being
by Todd Balf
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Book Summary Information
Author: Todd BalfEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-02-26
ISBN: 0307236587
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Crown
Book Reviews of Major: A Black Athlete, a White Era, and the Fight to Be the World's Fastest Human Being
Book Review: Is There Really An Editor At Crown Publishers?
Summary: 1 Stars
If my comments save at least one person from wasting money and time on this junk, they've been worth the effort. I'd also like to add that I have nothing personal against Todd Balf. I hope he lives to be one hundred and five years old, and is healthy and happy the whole time.
In 1988, Andrew Ritchie published an excellent biography of Marshall "Major" Taylor ("Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer"). Ritchie's book is greater than the current book by Todd Balf in every way. It is still in print, and you should buy it instead. It is researched more thoroughly and accurately and is an infinitely superior piece of writing. It also contains more than three times as many photographs than Balf's unnecessary lump of inked-up paper.
Todd Balf's successful career illustrates the depressing state of contemporary publishing. Being a professional writer no longer requires the ability to write, and publishing houses of today don't seem to employ editors. Balf appears to have attended all the social consciousness courses wherever it was he went to college, but he must have skipped out on the English grammar and composition classes (if they had any). His bad writing is so distracting, it makes enjoyment of the book nearly impossible.
Balf is not merely a lousy writer. He also is afflicted with a terrible case of White Man's Guilt. He is fixated on race to the point of repeatedly discussing the tone and texture of Taylor's skin (and the skin of Taylor's wife, Daisy). He imagines pathetic scenes such as Daisy brooding over the eradication of southwest Africans by German settlers in 1904, a tragic but irrelevant event of which we have no way of knowing she was even aware. Nearly every white person mentioned in the book is a loathsome racist, and even the "white picket fence" of suburbia is dragged out as an icon of Caucasian evil. In contrast, Andrew Ritchie, in his well-written 1988 book about Taylor, discusses racism almost as much as Balf, but reports it in a straightforward manner, without Balf's beard-and-glasses university-campus shrillness. Ritchie presents Taylor as a great athlete and a man of strong character who was a victor, while Balf must keep him a victim.
Balf also reaches deep into the fool's bag of specious psychoanalysis, attributing elaborate, unlikely motives to long-dead people he never met. Taylor's purportedly profound reasons for sprinting at the finish of races, the theoretical identity crisis that made him write his father's name as an emergency contact in his pocket notebook, and Floyd McFarland's apparently insidious motives for taking his pet dog along on a trip are among the subjects that are painstakingly dissected with in-depth psychobabble. Is it possible Taylor sprinted to go fast and win races, or that he just wanted a relative called if he had an accident, or that McFarland merely liked having his dog around? Balf can't abide any such simple notions; nothing resembling his pscho-hooey is to be found in Andrew Ritchie's biography of Taylor.
Then there are Balf's awkward similes: "...like the Holy Ghost rushing in to lay a revivalist out cold," (p. 112), and "Blood poured forth like the fountain at Rockefeller Center." (p. 199) are two examples of silly high school freshman-style writing that represent many. It might not be strictly incorrect, but it certainly feels ill-fitting to read a simile comparing a man's bleeding to death in 1902 to a structure that didn't exist until 1934.
Finally, there is Balf's ridiculous discussion of the 2002 Little 500 bicycle race at Indiana University as an illustration of contemporary racism comparable to what Taylor faced a century earlier. The 2002 protests were over two issues. The first was that Team Major Taylor (TMT) was included in the event without having to go through the same qualifying races as all of the other teams, while a team that had properly qualified was excluded to make room for them. The second was that it was believed one of TMT's riders had previously raced as a professional, which is against Little 500 rules. Balf ignores all of this, and states that the other teams protested because TMT was made up of black riders. The fact that there have been no protests in subsequent years, when TMT has gone through the proper qualifying procedures and has only had riders with unquestionable amateur credentials, proves that Balf has chosen an empty example.
There are those who will disagree with me about what I have discussed above. Many people today share Todd Balf's peculiar type of social and racial obsessions, and might even enjoy a dumb metaphor or simile (or ten or twenty). Well, that's all subjective. They're welcome to believe whatever they can swallow, and can hate me all they want; I'll manage without their love. But then there are his egregious errors of grammar, word usage, logic, and facts--bad writing that cannot be supported objectively and for which there is no excuse. I have listed several examples below for the entertainment of casual readers who haven't yet imploded with PC righteousness, and for the convenience of anyone at Crown Publishers who might want to make corrections for the unfortunately unavoidable paperback edition.
"J.K. Starling" [The 19th century bicycle innovator's name was Starley.] (p. 20)
"In 1860, oil was discovered in Wirt County. It was the same year Fort Sumter was occupied by Union troops..." [Fort Sumter was a Union fort. It was occupied by Confederate troops, in 1861.] (p. 35)
"But it was more than just his Amazonian size..." [The noun Amazon and adjective Amazonian refer to mythical females.] (p. 64)
"Harry Sanger" [The inventor of a shaft-driven bicycle was Sager.] (p. 107)
"Taylor had a 23-pound bike and a 108-gear inch sprocket" [This refers to the Sager, a shaft-driven bicycle. Shaft-driven bicycles do not have sprockets.] (p. 107)
"He dashed off a letter to the Stanley brothers in Boston and anxiously awaited their reply [in 1898]. The evolving appliance would run through a host of names, but motorcycle would eventually stick." [Motorcycles had existed since the 1860s. The first motorcycles available for purchase by the public were sold in 1894. The word "motorcycle" was in use at least as early as 1896.] (p. 110)
"At season's end, McFarland would have strode aboard a westbound train ... Out of the window, he would have seen sights hurdling toward him that only a few years earlier were the province of explorers--the Holy Cross Wilderness in Colorado, the rushing Yellowstone River, and the soaring big walls at Yosemite." [Hurtling, not "hurdling". And I don't know about Holy Cross or the Yellowstone, but "the soaring big walls at Yosemite" have never been seen from any train window.] (p. 131)
"Taylor's heroics at Philadelphia had whetted the appetite for more speed-busting efforts--people wanted to know where the barrier lie." [lay, not "lie"] (pp. 132-133)
"It was circular, not oval like other tracks ... `Now spurt,' cried Munger, as they approached the final turn." [If the track was a circle, there was no "final turn."] (pp. 139-140)
"He was proud of his star turn and seemed to enjoy the experience, sharing the stage with Parisian chartreuses..." [Chanteuses. Chartreuse is a color.] (p. 162)
"Daisy Morris' adult life..." [incorrect form of possessive] (p. 164)
"...Daisy Morris's home." [correct form of possessive--a gold star for Todd!] (p. 165)
"She grew up in a small rented wood frame with her widowed grandmother..." [They lived in a frame?] (p. 165)
"...the covetous camera lens fixing on his body..." [The lens was covetous? Since the photos show Taylor from head to foot, how can we know the (covetous) lens was fixed on his body?] (p. 173)
"In the second heat Taylor took a different tact and led on the final straightaway..." [Taylor was a polite fellow, but this should be tack, not "tact".] (p. 175)
"A French newspaperman noted that it had discovered that Taylor's mother..." [It? Was the reporter a robot?] (p. 179)
[Concerning a voyage from San Francisco to Sydney] "He had 15,000 nautical miles to wonder if he'd be welcomed or chased away." [The distance is about 6,400 nautical miles.] (p. 205)
"...the native Aborigines..." [redundant] (p. 206)
"...sank ships and blew homes into a boiling Tasmanian sea." [Tasman Sea] (p. 208)
"...Taylor was already on his short sprinting form and blasting by others as if standing still..." [Sounds like Taylor was standing still. Hard to do if he was "blasting by."] (pp. 208-209)
[In a discussion of sports events of 1903] "Basketball seeded itself [bizarre metaphor] in Springfield, Massachusetts, and found a home in hundreds of newly-built YMCA gymnasiums." [Basketball was invented at the YMCA gymnasium at Springfield in 1891.] (p. 218)
"In yet another fiery immolation, Elkes died instantly." [Fiery? The crash was caused by a flat tire.] (p. 218)
[Referring again to the distance between Australia and the United States] "Taylor and McFarland were some 15,000 miles from where it had started." [From San Francisco, their departure point in the U.S., it's less than half that far.] (p. 233)
"Taylor went straight to the track and prepared for the evening races ... Normally Daisy would've sat in the shade of the classically carved, arched grandstand, out of the brutal southern Australian sun..." [Brutal sun in the evening?] (pp. 236-237)
"Lance Armstrong, who was ushered into the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame the same year that Taylor was, in 1996..." [The USBHOF official website indicates Taylor was inducted in 1989, not 1996. As of June 2008 Armstrong had not yet been inducted. These facts were confirmed during a personal communication with Vincent Menci, curator of the USBHOF, on June 2, 2008.] (p. 249)
"Billy Brady didn't die, but became William A. Brady..." [He is now 145 years old.] (p. 250)
"The populous social movements that rose during the Gilded Age...[populist, not "populous"] (p. 277)
[In a discussion of races held in the year 1900] "The Madison Square Garden Six-Day that closed the millennium..." [Astoundingly, Balf demonstrates that he doesn't know the difference between a century and a millennium.] (p. 282)
"...and finally, thanks to my editor, Kristin Kiser, who in spite of all the things, personal and professional, that occupied her time, she managed to make me feel that this was a project she was going to see through and not let up on." [In this tormented sentence near the end, Balf reveals that he has an imaginary friend; after reading this mess of a book, I can't believe Ms. Kiser really exists. If she does, I'm available to show her how to edit the second printing, if there has to be one. My fee would be reasonable.] (p. 293)
Summary of Major: A Black Athlete, a White Era, and the Fight to Be the World's Fastest Human Being
At the turn of the 20th century, hundreds of handsome, lightning-fast racers won the hearts and minds of a bicycling-crazed public. Scientists studied them, newspapers glorified them, and millions of dollars in purse money was awarded to them. Major Taylor aimed to be the fastest of them all. A prominent black man at a time when such a thing was deemed scandalous, his mounting victories, high moral virtue, and bulletlike riding style made him a target for ridicule from the press and sabotage by the white riders who shared the track with him.Taylor’s most formidable and ruthless opponent—a man nicknamed the “Human Engine”—was Floyd McFarland. One man was white, one black; one from a storied Virginia family, the other descended from Kentucky slaves; one celebrated as a hero, one trying to secure his spot in a sport he dominated. The only thing they had in common was the desire to be named the fastest man alive. Their rivalry riveted first America, and then the world. Finally, in 1904, both men headed to Australia for a much-anticipated title match to decide, beyond dispute, who would claim the coveted title.
Major is the gripping story of a superstar nobody saw coming—a classic underdog, aided by an unlikely crew: a disgraced fight promoter, a broken ex-racer, and a poor upstate girl from New York who wanted to be a queen. It is also the account of a fierce rivalry that would become an archetypal tale of white versus black in the 20th century. Most of all, it is the tale of our nation’s first black sports celebrity—a man who transcended the handicaps of race at the turn of the century to reach the stratosphere of fame.
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