The Big Fella audiobook

The author of a wonderful Mickey Mantle biography, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, tries her hand at describing a sports icon and arguably the true GOAT, and not the kind with horns. What characterizes this best is the loose commitment to chronology. If there’s a structure, it centers around the barnstorming tour the Babe and Lou Gehrig took in 1927, just after sweeping the Pirates in the World Series. That was also the year the Babe hit sixty home runs, daring some other SOB to do that. (Took a while, but other SOBs did.) It can be frustrating at first. Sometimes I wished we could just hear a direct story about the tour, sometimes I wanted to hear about St. Mary’s, sometimes I wanted to hear about Helen, or Claire, or Dorothy. It all seemed a bit thrown at me, all at once, like facing a pitcher and having no idea what’s coming next (yes, I made a baseball reference: you’re welcome). That said, I actually learned a few things. I’d read the more dated version by Kal Wagenheim Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend, which by contrast is conventional and good with detail if a little glossy. This gave me a wondrous amount of information about all phases of his life, particularly the early years, and his social and emotional turmoil with the Yankees. There were some descriptions of people in the towns in which he played that were just magical, so heartfelt and earthy. I felt like I was part of his homelife, and sometimes I wished I wasn’t. I had a little more sympathy and understanding. The whole thing smacked of Ron Chernow-like description. Not as long as you might think, although again, the jumping around can seem a little iffy. Another birthday gift from my friend Bryan Robinson. Big step up from a wrestling champion! Overall a very good biography of The Babe, just the fresh and up-to-date version we needed.

Jane Leavy, one of our greatest sports biographers, has taken on the greatest baseball player of them all, Babe Ruth, the Big Fella. Note the subtitle of the book: "Babe Ruth and the World He Created." This is not really a book about baseball. It is a book about baseball as part of the popular culture of the 1920 and 30s and about how the greatest ballplayer of all helped create and dominate celebrity culture. If you are looking for a chronological accounting of Ruth's great baseball deeds, read another book. If you want details about Ruth the pitcher or how he made the decision to play every day look elsewhere. You will find discussions about how Ruth stacks up against the players of today and there is a wonderful chapter about Ruth's hitting philosophy and swing. But overall this is about Ruth the man. It starts with Ruth the boy. Leavy has gone farther into how being abandoned to St Mary's must have affected Ruth. She digs deeper into his psyche, his loneliness, his struggles with authority and shows convincingly that this fact of his personality allowed him to be both a celebrity and a slugger. Leavy's book is only generally chronological. She follows Ruth and Gehrig through October 1927, the best year of Babe's life as his wins the World Series and barnstorms through the United States. He is the biggest star of his generation at the height of his power. Each town in the barnstorming trip becomes a chapter and some story from each town allows Leavy to expound on the many facets of the Big Fella's life or personality. She examines his wealth, his race, his marriages, his desire to please the crowds, his relationships to kids, to authority, to media, to food. All of it is woven throughout the book. For that reason the more you know about Ruth's life the easier it will be to follow. This is truly a new biography. It has a new format, new information, new insights and thus gives us new appreciation for a man who never stops amazing us.

This is a fantastic book. Babe Ruth is a tough subject for biography for a few reasons, including the difficulty of separating myth from fact. This is at least the fifth book about Babe Ruth that I've read as an adult and I was continually impressed by the stories that Leavy uncovered and by her willingness to separate what we know about the man from the record and what we have been told about him through folklore.Babe's origins are a lot murkier than most superstars. We know when he was born, although Babe himself was off on that point by a year and a day for most of his life. We know that he lived most of his childhood in an orphanage, even though his parents lived just a mile from the institution. Babe was very reluctant to share the details of that childhood and a lot of the documentary evidence was lost in a fire. But Ms. Leavy does a tremendous job of spelling out what she can and leaving the reader to fill in the crucial blanks.Ruth was not a complicated or profound man. But his influence on sport and on celebrity is without parallel. He was a rock star two generations before that term existed. And his performance on the baseball field will never be matched, mostly because he was so far ahead of his contemporaries. As of this writing, he is still the all time leader in OPS, a statistic that wasn't even dreamed up until decades after his passing. For good measure, his pitching feats include being 17th on the all-time Earned Run Average and 12th in winning percentage.The book is a perfect balance of historical rigor, amusing anecdotes and relevant anallysis of what the protagnist means for our time, including detailed analysis of his earnings and investments. That might sound dry but consider that Babe's 1927 income was $26 million dollars in today's dollars, if you adjust for inflation and current tax laws.The books is more than the biography of one great figure and it covers many subjects beyond old-timey baseball. It was a joy to read.

Returned by Library. A great read not just have Baseball or Yankee fans. As the title Babe Ruth created a new world during his era. Great resource about the era for research and and / or term paper. Enjoy!

This unconventional biography of baseball's most legendary player soars sometimes in ways that make a reader wish every word of it reached those heights. But, hey, even the Babe struck out a lot. It's part and parcel of swinging for the fences.I admired Leavy's deep research. She came up with some revelations and found truth buried in a landslide of lies.I also loved that she tried to arrange all of it around a 1927 barnstorming tour that Ruth and Lou Gehrig took after the Yankees won the World Series. It didn't always work, but it was a valiant effort to break the chronological style of nearly every biography.Mostly, though, I found her book gave me a deeper appreciation for Ruth's place in the American psyche and the era he helped to create, a period that is recognizably our own. I'm still not sure I truly get why it sometimes seems that modern America started somewhere in the Roaring Twenties, but Leavy's book makes it all the more obvious that it did.We're still living in the Country That Ruth Built. So it helps to understand how we got here a little better.

Babe Ruth changed baseball and the meaning of celebrity and did it in a time known as the Roaring Twenties. Jane Leavy, who has penned acclaimed biographies on Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax takes on the Babe and his impact on the world. With thorough research over a span of years and a flair for writing about the big fella, the reader is treated to a revelation about a more complex George Herman "Babe" Ruth than we are used to, worts and all. He lived life to the fullest even as his actions caused trouble for those closest around him. Using a barnstorming trip out west with Lou Gerhig after the 1927 world Series, and the year the Big Fella hit 60 homeruns, Leavy introduces us to fans who participated in the exhibition games with the two sluggers as well as Ruth's early background in Baltimore and his later years when a terrible disease ended his life prematurely. Ruth's financial impact on baseball and celebrity is thoroughly covered as well. A must read for Babe Ruth fans of all ages.

Leavy hits another one out of the park!After reading her fabulous books about Koufax and Mantle, I was eagerly awaiting "The Big Fella", and Leavy did not disappoint. An incredible piece of both research and writing style, the book perfectly captured the Babe's era, career, and personal life. I can only hope that Jane continues writing more baseball biographies....maybe Snider, Hodges, Campy, Reese, Durocher next?

Summary: A biography of Babe Ruth, with the narrative of his life connected with a day by day account of a barnstorming tour of the country after his home run record-breaking 1927 season.He was big in so many ways. He could probably have been a Hall of Fame pitcher. He not only held one season and lifetime home run records for decades, but his day in, day out hitting and slugging percentages and many other statistics place him at the very top of all time hitters. He was physically big, in height and girth, in hands. He not only hit a lot of home runs, but hit with a much heavier bat than most players used, and with a swing studied for its efficiency. He had huge appetites, for food, for women, for clothes, for adulation. He not only negotiated record salaries (and Leavy suggests he could have received more) but earned record amounts on appearances and endorsements.Leavy tells this whole story from the loveless marriage of his parents that ended in divorce, with George, Jr. at St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, and later St. James home, where he met Brother Matthias, who was probably the closest thing he really had to a father, and who taught him baseball. It is even thought that Babe modeled his swing on Brother Matthias. Leavy traces his career from the minors, his time in Boston and transformation from a pitcher to a hitter who played every day, his trade to New York.She shows us a Ruth who tried to have a different life in his first marriage to Helen, yet whose appetites led to carousing and many women, and an increasingly distant relationship with Helen, who spent more and more time hospitalized or as an invalid, while Babe developed an extra-marital relationship with Claire who he married after Helen's death.One of the most fascinating aspects of the book was the role Christy Walsh played in making Ruth "big." Long before agents became commonplace, Walsh worked tirelessly with Ruth to get him to amend his ways enough to stay out of trouble, play the game, endorse products, and make a fortune on post-season appearances. Walsh was the one who understood, in a way Ruth never quite grasped, how much Ruth was worth to the Yankees, and the limited time he had to capitalize on it.Ruth, having not found love in his family, seems to never have been content with a family. He tried to keep playing when his body no longer could sustain it. Traded by the Yankees back to Boston, he hoped to manage a team, but was never given a chance. He got involved in a movie project that produced an inferior "B" movie. Then the cancer came. Ruth's last years were hard and the "big fella" was reduced to 150 pounds by his tottering farewell appearance at an Old-Timers game at Yankee Stadium. A few months later, he was dead.Leavy uses the device of a 21 day barnstorming tour across the country with Lou Gehrig following his 1927 season, the peak of his career. Each chapter covers one day of the tour and advances Leavy's narrative of his life. The tour captures in miniature the story of his life from the game to the crowds including the kids, the after hours, and the adulation.This was the one aspect of the book about which I was ambivalent. It captured an aspect of Babe's life often overlooked in the accounts. But it also seemed distracting and one had to pay attention to when Leavy was writing about the tour, or moving forward the larger narrative of his life. It was an interesting device, but I'm not sure it worked for me.However, Leavy gives us a portrait of both the power and pathos that were part of the Babe's story. She helped me realize how extensive his accomplishments were long before today's technology enhanced game, and how his presence changed the game. Christy Walsh anticipated the role agents would have in looking out for players' interests, changing a game where the owners held all the power. It also raises the fascinating question of whether any of this would happen without the mentoring of Brother Matthias. One thing was sure. Ruth never forgot. And perhaps neither should we.

Let me preface my review by saying, without hesitation, I love baseball books. There's a wide range out there - some focusing on very specific games and players and then there's this book. Sure it's about Babe Ruth (and Moby Dick is about a whale), but it's about the rise of the celebrity, the ascendency of pop culture, the cult of personality, abandonment, and yes, baseball. Specifically the evolution of the game from the Ty Cobb slap hitters to the Babe's gargantuan home runs. The writing is spectacular and the book is framed within the context of Babe and Lou Geherig's barnstorming tour after the 1927 World Series. Each chapter focuses on a stop and an aspect of the Babe's life. Myths were debunked (I always thought he really was an orphan - he wasn't) and the author brought a larger than life character literally to life. I've already read Jane Leavy's Koufax biography, and despite my loathing of the Yankees, it seems I'll need to read her Mantle biography next!

Sometimes less is more. Yes, it was a chiseled look at the Babe, right down to the shine of his shoes and his ability to spit tobacco. But What Jane Leavy gives us in 'The Big Fella' is, at times, over the top. The number of characters, major, minor and a slew of ultra-minors, is at times both overwhelming and irrelevant. Even the layout of the book resembles an experience in time-travel.Having pointed out those negatives, I highly appreciated the human aspect of a national hero, not much different than any hero--both angelic and devilish--that Leavy gives her readers. For someone like myself, who was born the year the Babe died, his very ghostly presence was very much there growing up with a steady eye on baseball. Even moving through the years, with my own heroes--Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and later Reggie Jackson--the shadow of Babe Ruth was still ever-present. And so he remains, thanks to Jane Leavy.

Leavy's work is more tome and tribute than book. She does a ton of homework here and clearly has affection and admiration for 'The Big Fella'.She never embellishes his heroics and takes you to the ball park and on his barnstorming tour.Leavy tells Ruth's story through the lens of his tour with Gehrig which is a new angle for the slugger, but for what it gives it also takes away.When Leavy tells of Ruth's cancer, you see him. You feel for him. Her descriptions are eerie.But as you prepare yourself for his death, Leavy takes us back to the barnstorming tour. The emotional roller coaster for the reader is hard. Having read, Leigh Montville's The Big Bam and enjoyed it; I can't think of any Ruth fan who would not love this book.

Veteran journalist Jane Leavy gave baby boomer fans a couple of excellent bios of the heroes of their youth with SANDY KOUFAX: A Lefty’s Legacy and THE LAST BOY: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. Both should be considered among the best --- if not the best --- about their respective subjects. What could she possibly do for an encore?I am happy to report that THE BIG FELLA may be her best work yet. The topic is obviously not as personal to the author; she has been quite frank in her admiration for Mantle (at least until she had the opportunity to actually meet him while working on that book) and Koufax (the most iconic Jewish athlete for her generation), both of whom she had the chance to witness on the diamond. Babe Ruth, on the other hand, preceded her experience by a couple of generations.What she lacks in that “connection” is more than compensated for by her monumental research. In 1995, I delivered a paper titled “The Books on the Babe,” an overview of several biographies about the Hall of Famer, at Hofstra University during a centennial celebration of Ruth. None of the titles I mentioned --- including Robert Creamer’s seminal BABE: The Legend Comes to Life, which generally has been accepted as the definitive work on the subject --- comes close to THE BIG FELLA.There are a couple of reasons for this. For one thing, Leavy does not cover much of the action on the field; those details have been done over and over again. She starts off each chapter with coverage of a barnstorming trip that Ruth undertook with Lou Gehrig in 1927. This is her way of explaining the impact that the Bambino had on the country, which did not have a chance to see him play in the handful of Major League cities at the time. She goes into further detail on his off-the-field antics, including his childhood and upbringing --- the topic of much discrepancy over the years --- as well as his “making up for lost time” in indulging his many appetites.Recall that this was the Roaring Twenties, a time following World War I when the country was letting loose: jazz, flappers, bootleg liquor during a time of Prohibition. And no one was more of a poster boy for that attitude than Babe Ruth, who was the first professional athlete to really capitalize. He engaged what might be considered the first sports agent to negotiate his numerous endorsements and appearances, activities that earned him as much as, if not more than, the salary he received during his peak years with the New York Yankees.Ruth also might be credited with making the sports section a major part of the many newspapers of the day (major metropolitan areas often had several different papers printing multiple editions during the course of the day), and making those who covered the game superstars in their own right. It might be hard to fathom in this post-paparazzi world, but back in the day, the media rarely reported on Ruth’s domestic life, his affairs and the drinking. Nowadays there might be entire cable channels devoted to his exploits. That’s not to say the press didn’t know about them, but it was a more genteel time.Another key note to giving THE BIG FELLA a different perspective is the availability of and access to research materials that have improved tremendously since Creamer’s book was published in 1974. Leavy deserves all possible credit not just in uncovering these gems, but also in presenting them in a lively and entertaining manner.With Mantle, Koufax and now Ruth in her oeuvre, one has to wonder if there’s a fourth legend for Leavy to add to her baseball Mount Rushmore.Reviewed by Ron Kaplan

One of the most enjoyable books I've read in years.It's beautifully researched and written---Babe Ruth comes alive, and for the most part, it's a very flattering picture.

While trying my damnedest to avoid writing things like "Jane Leavy knocked this one out the park!" in my review, let me just say that this innovative and freewheeling biography captures the expansiveness, the minutiae, and the sheer magnetism of The Babe. Leavy's take on Ruth, written in the wake of superb bios by Creamer and Montville, manages to be fresh and filled with digressions into the impact of Babe Ruth on the lives of genuine human beings. This is a book that more than fulfills its lofty promise, and sets Jane Leavy, who has previously written stellar biographies of Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle, at the very top of the heap when it comes to literary baseball biographies.

I've read a ton of stuff on Babe Ruth over the years - and there's a ton of stuff in this book I did not know. Ms. Leavy does a nice job with this. So much is out there on the Babe but this book has more detail.

Very interesting book on Babe Ruth. Story takes you through the 1927 Barnstorming Tour with Lou Gehrig. Goes back and forth in regards to various times in Babe's Life. Not just from a baseball perspective but his upbringing, marriages, and relationships. How much Babe meant to the Yankees not only in winning pennants and WS, but financial. The relationship he had with his agent Christy Walsh, who managed Ruth's finances for 10 years, Walsh's disappointment on not being involved itthe Babe Ruth Story movie. I recommend this book to any Babe Ruth or MLB fan.