The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and The World He Created

Jane Leavy

ISBN 10: 0062887270 / ISBN 13: 9780062887276

Published by Harper, New York, 2018

About this Item

As new in dust jacket. First edition/first printing. Hardcover. 620 pp. with bibliography, index. Illustrated with photos. Superb biography of baseball's greatest player and possible the most widely known athlete and personality in the world in his time. Leavy uses a framework of the late 1927 "Bustin' Babes-Larrupin' Lous" barnstorming tour to weave the life story of the Bambino; her exhaustive research discovered facts and stories about The Babe that were previously unknown to even the most dedicated baseball historians,

Seller Inventory # E25270

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and The World He Created
• Publisher: Harper, New York
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0062887270
• ISBN 13: 9780062887276
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First edition.
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: as new
• Seller catalogs:
  • Baseball

About this title

Synopsis

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."A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018“Leavy’s newest masterpiece…. A major work of American history by an author with a flair for mesmerizing story-telling.” — ForbesHe 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 loudspeakers—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.