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

"In Fearless, Neil Proto tells the extraordinary life story and career of A. Bartlett Giamatti as he became a distinguished professor of Renaissance literature, a pathbreaking president of Yale University, and the seventh commissioner of Major League Baseball. Proto writes with the candor, directness, thoroughness, and passionate pursuit of truth that also characterized Giamatti. His compelling biography is a shining achievement." -- Nick Kotz, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America

"Neil Proto's narrative is riveting, thorough, and essential to understanding how unfettered White Anglo Saxon discrimination against Southern and Eastern European immigrants and African Americans--recognized then as 'eugenics' and today as 'White Supremacy'--was taught, supported, and legitimized. Proto especially captures the prejudice and methods intended to repress the aspirations of hard working Southern Italian immigrants--Bart Giamatti's family among them. Government often led the way. Neighborhoods destroyed. Families displaced. Sterilization justified. Valentine Giamatti learned and taught the civic duty of fairness toward others to his son, Bart, as did the parents, including my own and Neil Proto's, among the immigrant and migrant families who came to New Haven. That battle for fairness endures today. Proto's work is like none other I've read." -- Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-New Haven)

"Through the story of the Giamatti family and the focus on A. Bartlett Giamatti, Proto is able to write a microhistory of a significant part of twentieth-century America. The way he interlocks immigration, race, education, urban history, local politics, academic politics, intellectual history, and biography is splendid. It is a magisterial lesson in civic education and the duty of citizenship. The book is a pleasure to read; one does not want to put it down. The research is impeccable and voluminous." -- Samuele F. S. Pardini, author of In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen