Biography book on babe ruth

Drugs and Alcohol. Spiritual Content. Buy This Book. Other books you may enjoy. Read the review. At A Glance. Entertainment Score. At stake was not just baseball dominance, but eternal glory and the very soul of a sport. For much of fourteen seasons, the Cobb-Ruth rivalry occupied both men and enthralled a generation of fans. With that being said, Ty and The Babe is the story of their remarkable relationship.

It is a tale of grand gestures and petty jealousies, superstition and egotism, spectacular feats and dirty tricks, mind games and athleticism, confrontations, conflagrations, good humor, growth, redemption, and, ultimately, friendship. Spanning several decades, the book conjures the rollicking cities of New York, Boston, and Detroit and the raucous world of baseball from to , as it moved from the Deadball days of Cobb to the Lively Ball era of Ruth.

Montville explores every aspect of the man, paying particular attention to the myths that have always surrounded him. Was he really part black — making him the first African American professional baseball superstar? As I listened to these pages unfold, I could not help but think how detailed the books of todays greats will be, with all of the social media and technology we now have.

The way public lives are on constant display will make for some good reading to my grandkids. This book also makes me believe more in the curse put on the Red Sox for selling Babe to the Yankees. No No Nannette must have been quite the play to make such a trade. When I visited Yankee Stadium in , the curse accusations was still alive and well.

Lots of paraphernalia suggesting the curse was even growing!

Biography book on babe ruth

When I visited Fenway in , granted the Sox had won a couple of World Series at that point, the curse was hardly mentioned or referred to. Curse or no curse, this book on one of baseball's greatest is a must read or listen-whatever your flavor may be. Especially while we all wait for the next season of MLB to get going. This is what a baseball biography should aspire to be.

It's fun, factual, tells famous stories, corrects famous inaccurate stories, and puts it all in the context of the player being written about. I have no idea if subsequent research has uncovered weaknesses in this book -- it is 50 years old -- but it's highly entertaining and seems to be as accurate as things could be about a legend. If you're a baseball fan, you've heard of Babe Ruth.

If you're an American of almost any age, you've probably heard of Babe Ruth. Perhaps not a year-old today, given that Ruth died in and his baseball exploits were in the '20s and '30s. That might as well be Thomas Jefferson, in terms of how a kid or young adult today thinks. But I think the name is still magical, and this book does a wonderful job of explaining where that magic came from.

The story is out of a novel. A kid is born in Baltimore in the late s. His mom is sickly, his dad runs a bar. They don't have much time for him, and he gets in a lot of trouble, surprisingly dangerous stuff for a kid under age His mom dies, and his dad sends him to a Catholic reform school, where he lives through age 18 with a couple months of release to his family.

It's a grim situation by our standards, though not as grim as Charles Dickens being put to work as an 8-yaer-old to work off his father's debts. Ruth grows up to be big and full of lean muscle, and by age 18 he's the best ballplayer anyone has seen. Within a year, he goes from playing against high schoolers to playing in the minor leagues against adults to playing for the Boston Red Sox, who get to the World Series he doesn't play in it.

A year later, he's one of the most popular players in the game and earning three times what his dad's bar has ever cleared in a year. He's 19 years old. Oh, by the way, he did all that as a pitcher. A dominating lefthander with a temper. But when he bats, everyone notices that he hits the ball further than anyone ever has. His homers become legendary as they literally fly outside the park and land in cornfields, back yards, etc.

And so after a few years as a dominant pitcher, he becomes the greatest hitter the game has ever seen. And the biggest celebrity in America, with teletypes and newspapers recounting his every at-bat or utterance. And this goes on for 15 more years. The book describes this meteoric rise and explains how he changed the game from pitcher-centric battles of singles and bunts and stolen bases, to a slugging matches of homers.

The game we have today isn't very different than the game created by Babe Ruth in the early s. Ruth was at the center of great teams almost every year, and he repeatedly produced when it mattered most -- homers in the World Series, etc. And yet, at the same time he was a drama queen, constantly getting injured and limping off one afternoon and then coming back the next day covered in bandages and hitting two doubles.

He was also astonishingly immature and thoughtless, and the author doesn't let him get away with it too much. I'm sure that a book written today would make a bigger deal out of his hundreds? In this book, the author says Ruth was a man of his time and nowhere near the worst. Who knows if that's true? But some of the anecdotes are timeless and worth retelling for their humor and insight, such as Ruth saying goodbye to Waite Hoyt, a teammate for 11 years, and calling him "Walter.

Ruth needed the attention, and the biographer says that it's unfair to do armchair psychology, but reasonably points out the excesses in his life that seem to stem from the sad, difficult childhood. His appetite for food was unmatched, and his apparent sexual appetite and stamina were remarkable as well fulfilling needs, so to speak.

His two marriages and many affairs were tabloid fodder, and this book takes them off those pages and explains them. The first was to a year-old waitress he met when he was Apparently, she had several miscarriages, which upset her greatly, as did his endless philandering. Eventually, she left him, and he took up with a year-old heiress widow, who had married a rich man as a teenager.

But as a Catholic, he didn't divorce. Three years after his wife left him, she died in a fire, and it turned out she had been living with a man under an assumed name and a pretense of being married. So Babe was able to marry his second love, at which point his daughter from his first wife -- who everyone assumes was adopted -- joined the family.

Babe's second wife adopted that girl, which was only fair because Babe adopted his wife's daughter from her first marriage too. And they lived happily ever after. Our sports and entertainment worlds are full of hype these days, and this book reminds us that it's been that way for more than a century. Is it healthy for us to follow celebrities in this way?

Definitely not. It's sad that we know more about Babe Ruth or Kim Kardashian than we do our next-door neighbor. But that's how we're wired as a culture. At least when it comes to Babe Ruth, he really did earn his fame, and he really did do a lot of the good and great and funny things that were attributed to him. Eileen Carter. If you are a baseball fan?

Or a Babe Ruth fan you will certainly enjoy this book. There is so much information that some is well know while others not so much. It gives you a great look at the great bambino. It states his greatest moments and his lowest moments. Rita Wilson. Written for a true fan of baseball. Very interesting. Interesting story of this baseball legend.

Jane Mackay. Superb biography without hagiography. A good introduction to the life and personality of the great slugger. Readable, balanced without undue speculation or hagiography. Peter Parziale. Author Creamer was a sportswriter, and he crams colorful anecdotes about Babe Ruth gleaned from many interviews with his colleagues, with baseball old-timers, both legends and bench jockeys, and from old newspaper accounts.

The biography devotes ample time to Ruth's youth in a Baltimore home for wayward boys, his evolution from a dominant pitcher with the Boston Red Sox, unquestionably the best lefty in the American League, into a record-setting slugger with the New York Yankees, and his many scrapes with baseball management because of his mostly undisciplined lifestyle.

In many seasons, Ruth missed weeks of action due to various illnesses and injuries -- who knows how many homers he would have hit had he taken care of himself. Ruth played baseball for nearly half his life and remained a feared hitter into his 40's. But colossal home runs were only a part of his legacy. Creamer notes his impeccable record as a World Series pitcher and his exalted.

Creamer notes the records that Ruth still holds, including the longest home runs in many parks. He comments on the many stories embroidered the legend, e. His ego often got the better of him, and he didn't blink in his demands for enormous salary increases as his fame grew. Babe Ruth was supremely popular with the fans of his teams, but also with folks in outlying towns when Ruth participated in exhibitions and barnstorming tours, when traveled internationally, and, indeed, the promise of his very presence in the lineup assured packed stadiums on the road, where fans of the opposing club anticipated another Ruthian blast.

Off the field antics include his carousing into the early morning hours, his massive capacity for food and alcohol, his sexual appetite, and his spendthrift, uhhh, generous nature. I can't note a fraction of the details and anecdotes that Creamer packs into the biography. I enjoyed it immensely, and learned from it. Harold Kasselman. Author 2 books 78 followers.

This is a classic biography of the great bambino. It is a touching but honest account of the man-his faults and his triumphs. The man who needed to be loved by everyone, but who may never have truly loved another is traced from his de facto abandonment by his parents. Babe's zest for life and hedonistic ways seem to have had their genesis in the discipline and confinement of his years at St.

Mary's Home in Baltimore. Once free from that atmosphere, Ruth displayed an ugly resentment to authority figures throughout his life. He fought with owners, GM's, managers and anyone who tried to curb his quest for food, booze, and sex. He even fought with teammates. To be frank, I found the stories of his excesses and boorish behavior to be disturbing.

Community Reviews. Search review text. Displaying 1 of 1 review. Andrew Duncan. Babe Ruth made a big name for himself during his baseball career. He was an all-time famous baseball player who could hit the ball and pitch it left or right. His career started in where he went to school at St. In he got his first home run in professional appearance.

He started to go in contest for hitting and won a lot from homeruns. In Ruth leads his league in home runs with a modest