NEVER LOSE HEART

A columnist provides dozens of true stories in this volume.

As a standout athlete from Southern Alabama, Black achieved his “dream” when his beloved University of Alabama offered him a baseball scholarship. But after a debilitating injury relegated him to the practice squad, he quit the team in a decision he still regrets 40 years later. Now a weekly columnist for the Monroe Journal, the author has dedicated his life to supplying readers with inspirational tales that he hopes encourages “others to pursue their dreams, and to never give up on them.” In this collection of over 50 stories that average under four pages, Black delivers a relentlessly optimistic montage of individuals who overcame hardships to achieve their goals. With a penchant for simplistic yet moving Horatio Alger–esque tales, the stories range from Harry de Leyer, who turned an “old farm horse” into the 1958 “Horse of the Year,” to George Washington Carver, who revolutionized modern science despite being born an enslaved person and living during an era of intense racial injustice. Given the author’s athletic background, it’s no surprise that many of the tales revolve around sports, with intriguing anecdotes about professional baseball stars and vibrant retellings of famed moments in history, such as Jesse Owens’ Nazi-defying victories at the 1936 Olympics and 1980’s “Miracle on Ice,” when a young United States hockey team defeated the veteran Soviet Union players. Though heavy on Americana, from baseball to Walt Disney, there are a few international figures, such as Renoir and Nelson Mandela, who appear in vignettes. While every story shares an overcoming-all-odds, underdog motif, the book could have used more organization, as the tales are presented in a rather scattershot manner that lacks chronological or thematic order. Although the volume admirably includes both White and Black figures, few Asian Americans, Arab Americans, or other minorities are highlighted except as tangential characters. Women, while profiled in a few chapters, are similarly underrepresented. Cynical readers may scoff at the work’s hagiographic approach to storytelling, but others will find the stirring prose a welcome respite from harsh realities where dreams are too often deferred.

An uplifting, if fulsome, collection of tales.