Home Run: My Life in Pictures

A quarter-century after beating Babe Ruth's home-run record, the legendary baseball star offers his thoughts on baseball, heroism, and our times, in a visual autobiography. 125,000 first printing. $200,000 ad/promo. IP.

Twenty-five seasons after shattering baseball's sacred standard for career home runs, the game's most overlooked superstar bangs out the kind of celebratory volume his brilliant career deserves. While Hank Aaron is a center-stage contributor throughout this rich testament of words and images, its real power is in the all-star lineup that goes to bat for his achievements--both on and off the field. Names from within and beyond baseball, teammates and opponents alike--Jimmy Carter, Bob Gibson, Warren Spahn, Rachel Robinson, Jesse Jackson, Yogi Berra, Bob Costas, and Willie Mays for starters--all tip their caps to a man of uncanny consistency, persistence, and modesty. He needed all of that, of course, to chase down Babe Ruth.

It would be nice to look back and recall how the nation got behind Aaron in his solitary pursuit. The sad truth, as Home Run inspiringly recounts, is that it didn't. In his quest for the record, Aaron not only came face to face with the ghost of The Bambino; he also had to look squarely into the ugly eye of the specter of racism. Simply by doing his job as well as he could, Aaron stared them both down with his will, courage, pride, and decency. Jesse Jackson sums up the man, and the chase, with marvelous simplicity: "[Aaron] didn't hit a home run to take dignity away from the pitcher. He hit a home run to assert his skill." Home Run is a lovely reminder of that assertion. --Jeff Silverman