A review by timmens59
The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created by Jane Leavy

4.0

Jane Levy, one of our best sports writers, arrived at an interesting narrative approach and thread -- a grueling barnstorming tour of the country featuring Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig playing in exhibition games between local players -- to examine Babe's life off the field, including his childhood, his relationships, his lifestyle, his ambition, and his massive and magnificent celebrity across the world. In the process, she corrects many of the fictions -- Babe the orphan, for instance, or Babe the spendthrift (He enjoyed the good things in life but thanks to his business manager he had a nice trust to live off in retirement) -- that so many ink-stained wretches made up about him to make their stories and books sell. This had to have been painstakingly researched and the bio's novella of end notes prove this. To be sure, this bio is not centered on his exploits on the field. It's as the title expresses, "The World He Created," a much wider examination of his life and times.