On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson, wearing his brand-new Brooklyn Dodgers uniform, walked onto Ebbets Field and changed the face of baseball forever. As the first African-American ballplayer signed to a major league team, he was breaking a color barrier that had existed for many decades.

From the start, Jack Roosevelt Robinson was subjected to unrelenting hostility from both fans and teammates. But he honored the contract he had signed with manager Branch Rickey and ignored it all. After a dazzling first season, he was named Rookie of the Year and for, the next decade, he enjoyed a stellar career while waging a continual battle against racism.

Right beside him all the way was his wife, Rachel, the love of his life, who raised their three children in the hot glare of publicity and during some of the most turbulent years of the Civil Rights Movement. The Robinsons persevered, Rachel says now, because they understood the symbolic importance of Jack’s career: “We believed enough in each other and what we were doing to transcend the immediate.”

As the fiftieth anniversary of that first, momentous game approaches, Rachel, now 73, has written a book, Jackie Robinson, An Intimate Portrait, which tells the private side of the couple’s triumphs and ordeals during their 32 years together.

They met in the fall of 1940 as students at the University of California, Los Angeles and became engqged the next year. Jack went …