The Big Fella; Babe Ruth and the World He Created

xxx, [2], 620, [10] pages. Illustrated endpapers. Illustrations. Appendix I: The Power of the Man. Appendix 2: The Babe's Portfolio. Author's Note and Sources. Index. Includes the author's essay "Red and Me". Date in ink on an fep. Jane Leavy (born December 26, 1951) is an American sportswriter and feature writer, formerly with the Washington Post. She writes primarily about baseball. She is the author of the 1990 comic novel Squeeze Play, which was called "the best novel ever written about baseball" by Entertainment Weekly. She wrote a best-selling 2002 biography of Sandy Koufax. In 2010 she published The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, an extensive chronicle based on interviews she had with the late Yankee slugger. The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created was named one of the top ten biographies/memoirs for the fall of 2018 by Publishers Weekly. Leavy graduated from Barnard College in 1974 and from Columbia University School of Journalism in 1976. New York Times Bestseller From Jane Leavy, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax, comes the definitive biography of Babe Ruth, the man Roger Angell dubbed "the model for modern celebrity." He lived in the present tense, in the camera's lens. There was no frame he couldn't or wouldn't fill. He swung the heaviest bat, earned the most money, and incurred the biggest fines. Like all the new-fangled gadgets then flooding the marketplace, radios, automatic clothes washers, Brownie cameras, microphones and loudspeaker--Babe Ruth "made impossible events happen." Aided by his crucial partnership with Christy Walsh, business manager, spin doctor, damage control wizard, and surrogate father, all stuffed into one tightly buttoned double-breasted suit, Ruth drafted the blueprint for modern athletic stardom. His was a life of journeys and itineraries--from uncouth to couth, spartan to spendthrift, abandoned to abandon; from Baltimore to Boston to New York, and back to Boston at the end of his career for a finale with the only team that would have him. There were road trips and hunting trips; grand tours of foreign capitals and post-season promotional tours, not to mention those 714 trips around the bases. After hitting his 60th home run in September 1927, a total that would not be exceeded until 1961, when Roger Maris did it with the aid of the extended modern season, he embarked on the mother of all barnstorming tours, a three-week victory lap across America, accompanied by Yankee teammate Lou Gehrig. Walsh called the tour a "Symphony of Swat." The Omaha World Herald called it "the biggest show since Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and seven other associated circuses offered their entire performance under one tent." In The Big Fella, acclaimed biographer Jane Leavy recreates that 21-day circus and in so doing captures the romp and the pathos that defined Ruth's life and times. Drawing from more than 250 interviews, a trove of previously untapped documents, and Ruth family records, Leavy breaks through the mythology that has obscured the legend and delivers the man. Derived from a Kirkus review: Does the world need another biography of Babe Ruth? If it’s this one, then the answer is an emphatic yes. The ever excellent Leavy brings her considerable depth of knowledge of sports history to her latest project. She also brings considerable empathy for a man who, though notably boorish, at least made an effort to be civilized. Much of the narrative is a fine you-are-there reconstruction of Ruth’s big moments, including the 1927 race in which he smacked 60 home runs, led a Yankees four-game sweep of the World Series, and then went off barnstorming with friend and teammate Lou Gehrig. There’s tragic inevitability in that friendship, but Ruth’s end in a terrible death to cancer, is jarring. Fans of the latter-day Yankees should wince at Ruth’s excoriation of the designated hitter. A skilled strategist and nearly pe. …