The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created [VINTAGE 2018] [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

As new condition textured white boards/blue spine/silver spine lettering contained in an as new condition non price-clipped photographic dust jacket. Includes List of Other Books by Jane Leavy; Author Dedication; Introduction; Prologue; Epilogue; Acknowledgments; Appendix 1: The Power of the Man; Appendix 2: The Babe's Portfolio; Author's Note and Sources; Index; About the Author and Red and Me, an essay by Jane Leavy. Illustrated with a section of black-and-white photographic plates and black-and-white photographic front and rear endpapers. "Does the world need another biography of Babe Ruth? If it's this one, then the answer is an emphatic yes." - Kirkus, starred review. "Jane Leavy could write the biography of a tube of toothpaste and I'd be the first in line to buy it. Jane Leavy on Babe Ruth? Home run! Think you know the Babe? Not a chance - not until you read The Big Fella." - Jonathan Eig, author. "Leavy has cleared the bases with a compelling account of the game's greatest, Babe Ruth. Leavy brilliantly describes the complexities that accompany an elite talent and the blessing and curse of stardom while documenting the essential role of an attorney to provide vision, create a protective umbrella, and facilitate the most important goal for a unique athlete: self-understanding." - Scott Boras, attorney for Major League Baseball Players. "Jane Leavy writing a book about Babe Ruth is the biggest thing that has happened in my life since Santa Claus visited my classroom in the second grade. This is Babe Ruth off the diamond and out of uniform, a very flawed human being but still very much a hero, a man who could lift an army of beggars and wannabes onto his back and carry them to their dreams." - Bill James, baseball writer. "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 newfangled gadgets then flooding the marketplace - radios, automatic clothes washers, Brownie cameras, microphones, and loudspeakers - Babe Ruth expanded notions of the possible. 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 journey's 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 sixtieth 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 re-creates that twenty-one-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." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps. …