The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created Audiobook (Free)

NEW YORK Occasions BESTSELLER • From Jane Leavy, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Guy and Sandy Koufax, comes the definitive biography of Babe Ruth-the man Roger Angell dubbed ‘the super model tiffany livingston for modern celebrity.’

A Publishers Regular Best Reserve of 2018

“Leavy’s newest masterpiece…. A significant work of American background by an author using a flair for mesmerizing story-telling.” -Forbes

He lived in the present tense-in the camera’s about THE BEST Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created lens. There is no framework he couldn’t or wouldn’t fill. He swung the heaviest bat, gained the most cash, and incurred the biggest fines. Like all of the new-fangled gadgets then flooding the marketplace-radios, automated clothes washers, Brownie cameras, microphones and loudspeakers-Babe Ruth ‘made impossible events happen.’ Aided by his essential partnership with Christy Walsh-business supervisor, spin doctor, damage control wizard, and surrogate father, all stuffed into one firmly buttoned double-breasted suit-Ruth drafted the blueprint for modern athletic stardom.

His was a lifestyle of journeys and itineraries-from uncouth to couth, spartan to spendthrift, abandoned to give up on; from Baltimore to Boston to New York, and back to Boston by the end of his career for the finale with the just team that would have him. There were road outings and hunting vacations; grand travels of international capitals and post-season promotional travels, not to mention those 714 vacations round the bases.

After hitting his 60th real estate run in September 1927-a total that would not really be exceeded until 1961, when Roger Maris did it with the aid of the extended modern season-he embarked around the mother of most barnstorming tours, a three-week victory lap throughout America, accompanied by Yankee teammate Lou Gehrig. Walsh called the tour a ‘Symphony of Swat.’ The Omaha World Herald known as it ‘the biggest display since Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and seven other associated circuses provided their entire functionality under a single tent.’ In THE BEST Fella, acclaimed biographer Jane Leavy recreates that 21-day circus and by doing this captures the romp and the pathos that defined Ruth’s existence and times.

Drawing from more than 250 interviews, a trove of previously untapped documents, and Ruth family members records, Leavy breaks through the mythology which has obscured the tale and delivers the person.