The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

Amazon.com Price: $21.65 (as of 10/10/2019 23:42 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , ,

Description

At long last, the epic biography Ted Williams deserves–and that his fans have been waiting for.

Williams used to be the best hitter in baseball history. His batting average of .406 in 1941 has not been topped since, and no player who has hit more than 500 home runs has a higher career batting average. Those totals would have been even higher if Williams had not left baseball for nearly five years in the prime of his career to serve as a Marine pilot in WWII and Korea. He hit home runs farther than any player before him–and traveled a long way himself, as Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s grand biography reveals. Born in 1918 in San Diego, Ted would spend most of his life disguising his Mexican heritage. All over his 22 years with the Boston Red Sox, Williams electrified crowds across The us–and shocked them, too: His notorious clashes with the press and fans threatened his reputation. Yet At the same time as he used to be a God in the batter’s box, he used to be profoundly human once he stepped away from the plate. His ferocity came to define his troubled domestic life. At the same time as baseball might have been straightforward for Ted Williams, life used to be not.

THE KID is biography of the highest literary order, a thrilling and honest account of a legend in all his glory and human complexity. In his final at-bat, Williams hit a home run. Bradlee’s marvelous book clears the fences, too.
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, December 2013: In an age of performance enhancing drugs and a culture of wealth and deceit in professional sports, it’s refreshing to revisit the feats of one of baseball’s best: the last man to hit .400 in a season, with a lifetime .344 batting average, who played remarkable baseball until age 40 and who reigns as the best all-around hitter in history. What sets this exhaustive exploration with the exception of other Ted Williams biographies is the creator’s finesse at maintaining a fan’s enthusiasm for his remarkable subject At the same time as confronting the warts-and-all reality of a less than perfect hero. Boston Globe reporter-editor Ben Bradlee Jr. admits at the start that Williams used to be, indeed, “my hero.” Still, Bradlee never shies from dark side of the Williams myth: the insecure immigrant’s son; the imperfect father and husband; the raging hothead, who flaunted his disdain for the press and a couple of teammates. Bradlee spent a decade investigating every detail of Williams’s 83 years–and beyond. He even uncovers gruesome tidbits about the unusual aftermath of Williams’s death in 2002, when his body used to be taken to a cryonics facility, his head severed and then frozen inside a Tuperware-like container. Passionately researched and artfully told, this is a lot more than a sports story; it’s the sprawling saga of a talented, tenacious, tumultuous, one-of-a-kind American man. —Neal Thompson

Related products

Home » Shop » Appliances » Parts and Accessories » Sports and Outdoors » Baseball » The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

Recent Products