Giamatti: Fearless

Posted on May 25th, by admin in Body of Work. No Comments

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Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti and the Battle for Fairness in America

State University of New York Press (2020)

Elria and Bart Giamatti

A.Bartlett Giamatti’s life, how he formed his values, and the principles he lived by—as parent, teacher, president of Yale, and commissioner of Baseball—emerge powerfully in Fearless, A. Bartlett Giamatti and the Battle for Fairness in America. To understand him, you need to understand his parents, especially the discrimination endured by his New Haven born father, his grandparents on both sides, especially his father’s southern Italian immigrant parents, and how Bart came to fully define, embrace, and battle for “fairness.”

Based on more than six years of interviews and thorough, often revelatory documentation not previously disclosed by Yale historians, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Nick Kotz, concluded that in Fearless, “Proto writes with the candor, directness, thoroughness, and passionate pursuit of truth that also characterized Giamatti.” Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro focused on the deliberate destruction and forced relocation of Italian and Jewish immigrant and African American families to serve Yale’s purpose that Giamatti witnessed as a student: “Neighborhoods destroyed. Families displaced. Sterilization justified.” Giamatti declared his own civic and moral imperative to do battle: “Rest,” he wrote, “will come by never resting.”
Giamatti as President elect of Yale University