The Big Fella Babe Ruth and the World He Created by Jane Leavy
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER \u2022 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\u2014the man Roger Angell dubbed "the model for modern celebrity."
\nA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR:
\nThe Boston Globe | Publishers Weekly | Kirkus | Newsweek | The Philadelphia Inquirer | The Progressive
\nWinner of the 2019 SABR Seymour Medal | Finalist for the PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award | Longlisted for Spitball Magazine\u2019s Casey Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year | Finalist for the NBCC Award for Biography
\n\u201cLeavy\u2019s newest masterpiece\u2026. A major work of American history by an author with a flair for mesmerizing story-telling.\u201d \u2014Forbes
\nHe lived in the present tense\u2014in the camera\u2019s lens. There was no frame he couldn\u2019t or wouldn\u2019t 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\u2014radios, automatic clothes washers, Brownie cameras, microphones and loudspeakers\u2014Babe Ruth "made impossible events happen." Aided by his crucial partnership with Christy Walsh\u2014business manager, spin doctor, damage control wizard, and surrogate father, all stuffed into one tightly buttoned double-breasted suit\u2014Ruth drafted the blueprint for modern athletic stardom.
\nHis was a life of journeys and itineraries\u2014from 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.
\nAfter hitting his 60th home run in September 1927\u2014a total that would not be exceeded until 1961, when Roger Maris did it with the aid of the extended modern season\u2014he 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 Heraldcalled 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\u2019s life and times.
\nDrawing 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.