The Big Bang: Babe Ruth and the World he Created - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062887270 ISBN 13: 9780062887276

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.” — Forbes



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 *, 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.

Edition details

• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0062887270
• ISBN 13: 9780062887276
• Binding: Hardcover