Customer Reviews

The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Don't get me wrong: All the bits and pieces we all love about baseball are here--the great games, the odd sets of personalities, the drama of a penant race (or two or three) and, yes. the march toward Ruth's record. But Byrant is a voracious reporter. He digs as deeply into the microfiche of Mobile newspapers from the '40s to track the beginnings of a legendary career. And, in doing so, he paints a portrait of the a time and place as fully dimensional as any proper historic treatment. And, in that sense, this isn't just a great baseball book. It's a great book about America--delivered with a sense of authority, a natural story-teller's comfortable grace and elegance, and a healthy sense of humor.

Henry Aaron was a personal hero during the years the Braves were in Milwaukee. I was a Yankee fan, to the disgust of almost all my friends and family, but I made two exceptions for two National League players, Stan Musial and Henry Aaron.

I once saw Musial near the end of his career in a game in Saint Louis; he pinch hit and as he came to the plate the place went wild with a roar of love and approval that makes the hair on my neck stand up even now as I write these words.

The stories about Aaron -- I never saw him play -- filled the local papers -- many laudatory, many filled with racist comments. But somehow his quiet diginity, his insistence on being treated with respect, shone through all the hoopla and hatred.

Howard Bryant has written an excellent, well researched biography of a true hero, a man who was able to achieve great feats without the use of drugs or alcohol, and to carry himself with great dignity. Bryant's writing communicates that dignity:

"And yet ... and yet ... when the baseball men took a snapshot of the moment the ball met the bat -- the moment that mattered most -- twenty-year-old Henry Aaron was pure gold. He would stand in the box, legs tight in a closed stance, leaning and crouched. And he would strike, catlike, hands back, then bring them forward with a thrusting motion, and at the last millisecond -- everything about hitting in the big leagues was measured in milliseconds -- the wrists that looked too skinny to produce power would snap through the zone, the hips would twist and uncoil, and the ball would just leap ... to left ... to center ... and especially to right field. And the men behind the cage, the ones who would have killed to be able to cut at a baseball like that just once in their lives, to watch it sizzle upon impact, well, they just salivated. These were men who had spent their entire lives in the game, were collectively older than God, and all had seen Olympus in the form of Ruth, Gehrig, Greenberg, Cobb, all the very best. And it was Cobb, of all people, the old racist but inscrutable baseball mind, who seemed to like Henry the best. "Incidentally, Ty Cobb rates Henry Aaron, Braves' Negro newcomer, one of the best young players he has seen in years," reported Al Wolf in the Los Angeles Times. "Calls him a hitting natural.""

This biography appears at about the same time as Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, another well researched biography. There are many similarities between the two men, but they are personally quite different: Mays extroverted, joyous, filled with excitement; Aaron, introverted, reserved, deeply troubled and hurt, apparently, by the emphasis people place on his baseball accomplishments to the detriment of his personal accomplishments.

Both men played in the Negro Leagues, and Aaron helped the Clowns win the 1952 Negro League World Series. Aaron received two offers from by telegram, one from the New York Giants, the other from the Braves. "I had the Giants' contract in my hand. But the Braves offered fifty dollars a month more. That's the only thing that kept Willie Mays and me from being teammates - fifty dollars."

Anyone who loves baseball will enjoy both books, but for me, the depth and scholarship makes this biography a must read, one that captures the complexity of a great player and a great man.

Robert C. Ross 2010

In a rather bizarre article in "Sport Magazine", written over 40 years ago, lamenting the lack of "superstars" in major league baseball, the following assessment of Henry Aaron was given: "He's a star; but he's not a superstar."

Today, we realize that was an inaccurate assessment of one of the greatest players the game has ever known; however, for most of his career, Henry Aaron was widely regarded as merely "a very good player"; certainly no Mays or Mantle. While Mays and Mantle got the national attention, Hank Aaron quietly went about his business, year in and year out; and business was good. For fifteen out of twenty-three seasons in the big leagues, Aaron pounded out 30 or more home runs; eleven times he had over 100 runs batted in, while accumulating a lifetime batting average of .305.

At long last, Howard Bryant has compiled this wonderfully comprehensive biography of this introverted superstar; in the process, the reader will come away with a better understanding of the man's accomplishments on and off the field. Henry Aaron certainly deserves the recognition; better late than never.

I both enjoyed and learned quite a bit from this book, which provides plenty of historical and biographical context that I did not know, despite being a dedicated amateur baseball historian. If the book does not deeply illuminate Henry Aaron, the man, that seems to reflect less the author's failure but more the simple fact that Aaron was and is fairly guarded, sometimes contradictory, and not (based on what I've read) especially articulate. It's still very much worth reading. I particularly liked the organization of the book into thematic (not purely chronological) chapters.

However, Mr. Bryant's gifts, as represented here, seem to lie more in developing themes than in the nuts-and-bolts of writing proper sentences, and the lack of editing and proofreading eventually becomes a serious distraction. The book contains dozens (if not hundreds) of punctuation errors, grammatical mistakes, ill-formed sentences, confusing and contradictory play-by-play accounts, misused words, etc.

The most frequent example is the consistent failure to use an apostrophe for the possessive form of the word "Braves":
-- "The Braves lead was now six."
-- "In the Braves first test under Haney...."
-- "For more than two seasons, he had been the Braves best pitcher...."
-- "... Perini beamed his gap-toothed smile as the Braves fifteen-by-thirty-seven-foot pennant was raised before the game."
-- "... maybe the Braves routine coldcocking of the Reds was the real reason...."

... and on, and on, and on.

Factual errors include:
-- "In 1952, the Boston Braves had officially become the Milwaukee Braves in between innings of a spring-training game...."
No, that was in 1953, as was clearly described earlier in the book.

Then there are bush-league sentences such as this:
-- "Standing on third, with one out, Bruton lofted a fly to center."
A 6th-grader could tell you what's wrong with that one.

Here's an example of garbled play-by-play, describing the 1956 season opener in which the Braves faced pitcher Bob Rush of the Cubs:
-- "Aaron drove in the game's first run in the fourth and then broke Rush in the sixth. Rush had appeared to be breezing toward the seventh: two quick outs and a 1-0 lead. Aaron took a strike and then roped a long homer to make it 2-0. Shaken, Rush fell apart. Thomson singled. Adcock hit another homer to make it 3-0 , ... and the Braves cruised to a 6-0 win."
Obviously, Rush never had a 1-0 lead, and Adcock's HR made the score 4-0.

These are but a few examples. Most are inconsequential, but they're obvious mistakes, and they disturb the flow of the narrative. Upon reading that "teammates thought of [Aaron] as a gifted hitter, if not a bit aloof," I had to read the paragraph again to be sure of the intended meaning.

Then there is the frequent use of the term "millionth percentile," referring to Aaron and other superstars. I can't find a definition on the web, probably because it's a nonsense term. A percentile scale runs from 1 to 100, and no higher. Here's a definition of "percentile" from Princeton University's website: "any of the 99 numbered points that divide an ordered set of scores into 100 parts each of which contains one-hundredth of the total." Thus, "millionth percentile" has no literal meaning. If it was meant as hyperbole, it should have been used more judiciously; I counted at least seven times that it appeared in this book.

It's a shame that Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, apparently did not consider this biography of one of baseball's greatest players worth spending a few bucks on a good editor and/or proofreader.

Howard Bryant's biography of Henry Aaron is a wonderful, moving story of a man who overcame the injustices of racial segragation to become one of the icons of the great American pastime. Bryant researched Aaron's early life, family and acquaintances to piece together a man who is proud, complex and driven to suceed in his chosen profession. Bryant also gives considerable space to other black stars such as Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Frank Robinson and Willie Mays and allows the reader to draw his own conclusions, especially about Aaron's relevence to the social and political issues of those times. The National League pennant races of the 1950s are detailed here and are a treasure trove of memories to baseball fans who remember those races, the players and the World Series contests, always against the hated and feared New York Yankees. Bryant notes that Aaron's "don't rock the boat" philosophy didn't sit well with many blacks who felt that a player of his stature should have been more outspoken on their behalf. Aaron craved respect, not only from the white press and baseball's brass (especially the Commissioner's office) but also the respect of his peers. Willie Mays comes off in a very poor light in this book and his mistreatment of Henry Aaron does him no credit. Bryant gives us a great story of a man, his family and his legacy.

Maybe it was a question of the right subject, the right time and the right author, but here finally is the essential biography of baseball's essential man. In an era when a player's claims far outstrip his talent, we can't get our heads around someone like Hank Aaron, who let his work speak for itself. Now at last, Howard Bryant reveals the man in full -- the talent, the pressure, the slights and the triumphs that surrounded baseball's greatest achievement -- not yet surpassed in today's tainted era. An exciting, insightful, intelligent portrait of an iconic figure who looms large in sports and in American life.

There's a lot of interesting material here: in-depth discussions of Jackie Robinson's electric career, both in and out of baseball; the history of the Boston-Milwaukee-Atlanta Braves, and all the intrigue surrounding their city-hopping; sharp analyses of such dynamic minority ballplayers as Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, and Roberto Clemente (every time one of those charismatic superstars appears on the page the action seems to suddenly heat up); good character profiles of such integral teammates of Aaron's as the brooding but explosive Eddie Mathews, the enigmatic Warren Spahn, the racist Lew Burdette, the savvy Bill Bruton, and the Braves inept but colorful manager, "Jolly Cholly" Grimm; the fears and misgivings black players such as Aaron had about the Braves' move to Atlanta, deep in the heart of the still rabidly racist South; and the unrelenting bigotry and hatred that accompanied Aaron's triumphant but excruciating chase of Babe Ruth's home run record, and the toll it took on Henry.

The problem is, there just isn't a lot of Henry Aaron here.

Aaron disappears for dozens of pages as Bryant delves in detail into the racist south, the history of the Braves, Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball, the cultural milieu of the 50's and 60's, and myriad other topics. The book is supposed to be about Aaron, but it becomes obvious that there are a whole lot of other things that are more interesting for Bryant to discuss than the apparently bland Henry Aaron, so Henry is too often left behind, and then only tentatively connected to these subjects by Bryant as an afterthought. And while throughout the book Bryant constantly disparages the critics who during much of his career essentially complained that Aaron was rather uninteresting and lacked charisma, Bryant himself is unable to create on the page an exciting Henry Aaron. Probably because that Aaron, from the fan's viewpoint, does not really exist even close to the measure that it did for a Willie Mays or Roberto Clemente. And at times Bryant is forced to admit as much, because for Henry the charisma factor really was non-existent in comparison with those other superstars, or even to his teammates Eddie Mathews and Warren Spahn. Bryant claims on several occasions that Aaron seems not to be happy with the -- in his opinion -- misleading image much of the public has about him, but he hasn't exactly done a lot to rework that image, either. He makes it clear that Aaron himself is very murky and unreliable when it comes to revealing details about his past, and has always been notoriously averse to engaging with reporters. And while Bryant makes the claim that throughout Aaron's career he was keenly aware of and inspired by Jackie Robinson's relentless activism, he remained somewhat aloof from Jackie and reluctant to speak out, although that began to change somewhat later in his career. So the constant emphasis on Henry's admiration of Jackie's crusade has the unfortunate effect of making Aaron appear to be too timid for much of his life. Certainly this aspect of his personality can be attributed in some respects to Aaron's growing up in a hateful South where one loose step or statement by a black person could lead to an instant lynching, and Bryant points this out a number of times. But it also becomes clear as the story moves along that Aaron, seen from a distance, is just not that interesting largely because he kept his own counsel about almost everything, and displayed little flair in that most public of arenas, the baseball stadium.

Aaron is a quiet hero, who obviously possesses tremendous depths of character and has no deep-seated urge to blow his own horn, and that is admirable. But, again, Bryant spends much of the book trying to insist that Henry is much more interesting than he actually seems to be. Far too often, after Bryant picks up on what could be an interesting thread that, if pursued, could reveal something of the inner Aaron, he suddenly veers off into some other non-Henry story or episode -- as when he relates the sad story of one of Aaron's twin sons, born prematurely, struggling to live but dying in the hospital. Bryant says that the event had a profound effect on Aaron and his wife, but doesn't say in what ways. He just leaves the story there, and moves on to something else. Later he says that Aaron has never really spoken about the event. So while we can all easily surmise that such a tragedy would have a deep and lasting effect on the Aarons, we don't learn specifically the ramifications for them as a couple.

As other reviewers have pointed out in detail, the book is also somewhat clumsily written in parts, with weird sentence structure and some bizarre game descriptions. It's also a bit sloppy with the facts; for example, Ted Williams did not hit a dramatic, game-winning home run in the 1941 World Series. It was in the All-Star game. There are several mistakes like that, fortunately many of them just minor details. On the other hand, Bryant does a meticulous job of re-creating the racial history and tensions of the deep south where Aaron grew up, as well as the reasons for the Braves move to Milwaukee, the raucous greeting the team received there, the rise of the Braves as a powerhouse in the 50's, the decline of the team in the 60's, and the search by the Braves owner's for even greener (literally) pastures, which culminated in their move to Atlanta despite still turning a profit in Milwaukee. He also handles Aaron's chase of Ruth's record well, as well as several aspects of Aaron's life after baseball, which has been perhaps more significant and fulfilling to Aaron than anything he ever did on the field. Of course, he wouldn't have had such an opportunity to be involved in so many things if he hadn't had the great career that he did. And what a phenomenal career it was: 755 homers, 3,771 hits, '57 MVP, '57 WS championship. And the list goes on. But the race to pass the Babe was not a joyful one for Henry, as he was vilified in vicious language by so many race-hating idiots that it was more a melancholy triumph that left a bad aftertaste than anything else.

Aaron's life has been one of solemn dignity and overcoming overwhelming odds as a poor youngster rising from the very depths of the racist South to attain the heights of heroism in the eyes of, by now, most of the American public. But if you want to read a more interesting account of all of these events, one that reveals more of the inner thoughts and motivations of Henry Aaron than Bryant's ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying effort, I would recommend reading Aaron's memoir, I Had A Hammer. In that book, co-written by Lonny Wheeler and generously supplemented with recollections and anecdotes by some of Aaron's friends and teammates, Henry Aaron does -- surprisingly, given his prior reluctance to share much of himself with reporters and the public -- what Bryant strives to do but doesn't really accomplish. He makes Henry Aaron interesting and vivid, and the center of the story throughout the book.

This biography of Henry "Hank" Aaron will surely go down as one of the best baseball books of all time; an incredible look at an incredible man. But the book is really SO much more than just a book about baseball and so much more than just a book about one of (if not THE) best baseball players of all time. It is a sensitive and important look at a time in American history where inequality prevailed and where an individual had to battle under incredible odds not only to succeed but to succeed in a way that transcended society.

Henry Aaron grew up in abject poverty in Mobile, Alabama and lived through one of the most oppressive periods in American history. The racism that he and his family and friends lived through made the reader want to cry out "How could this happen" even though you knew about this period and you knew how unfair and terrible it was. Like many players, there were times that Aaron wanted to hang up his cleats and just go home but fortunately for us he did not. He persevered and became who he is today.

This book is so incredibly rich with historical lessons and learnings that it is impossible to capture everything in this short review that was so great about this book. However, parts of the book that stood out in my mind included his continuing relationship with Willie Mays who by all accounts had tremendous talent but was surely not a nice guy and didn't treat Aaron with much respect. The run-up to breaking Ruth's all-time HR record and the significant racist behavior exhibited towards Aaron even in 1974 was an incredible read. The continuing discussion about Aaron's skills--his wrists, his ability to see the ball out of the pitchers' hand, his speed, his defensive prowess. His reluctance but eventual acceptance of moving to play Center Field even knowing that he would make less All-Star teams because Mays was already the premier CF of the time. His relationship with the Hall of Fame. His ability to make a great life for himself after baseball. His reluctance to endorse Barry Bonds' pursuit of the HR record. All of these moments and more made the book incredibly good and a must-read.

When you step back and look at Aaron's career merely from a statistical perspective, it is hard to argue that he was the best ever. He didn't break the color barrier like Jackie Robinson and yes he did have many more At-Bats than Ruth but overall his body of work is more impressive than anyone else's.

This book was chosen as one of the NY Times 100 Notable Books of 2010 and is a must-read for a student of baseball and even more important a student of history.

I haven't read any of the several reviews already posted here, but I feel that author Howard Bryant has done a very thorough job in covering the baseball career and life of Henry Aaron. Having been a baseball fan a few years prior to Aaron's arrival in the big leagues I felt as though I was reliving those years all over again. Although I'm a fan of the Detroit Tigers I do well remember Milwaukee Braves' baseball games being broadcast here in Michigan's Upper Peninsula with Earl Gillespie and Blane Walsh doing the play-by-play. Author Bryant covers Aaron's relationship with teammates such as Spahn, Burdette, Adcock, Mathews, Bruton, and so many others that made up those Braves' teams. Aaron's first manager, Charlie Grimm, saddled Aaron with a derogatory nickname and was more interested in being one of the boys with his banjo playing than in leading a ball club. The fact that the Milwaukee Braves won only one World Series was unfortunate when they could very easily have won four. A mere thirteen years were spent in Milwaukee (1953--1965) before a team of whippersnapper carpetbaggers moved the team to Atlanta.

Henry Aaron had established his home in the Milwaukee suburb of Mequon, and didn't relish the move to the south. Author Bryant covers in great detail Aaron's chase towards the hallowed record of Babe Ruth's 714 home runs, his relationship with Willie Mays, and the controversy of Barry Bonds and his eventual breaking of Aaron's record. Aaron preferred to say nothing knowing that a comment against a tainted steroid achievement would appear as sour grapes towards having his record broken while saying anything positive would appear to legitimatize Bonds' record.

We have serious biographies of Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Ted Williams, and now thanks to author Howard Bryant we can add the name of Henry Aaron to the list. If you enjoy baseball books and its glorious history this is another outstanding volume for your library.

As some of the other customer reviewers have indicated, this is a book about America in the 1950s and 60s, just as it's a fine personal account of the great Henry Aaron. I found it exceptionally well-written, with the baseball action always vivid and the cumulative portrait of Aaron across the decades no less riveting in a different way entirely. This is because, even with Aaron's cooperation (a coup in itself), the author had to meet the challenge of portraying a relatively private man who never wore his heart on his sleeve (well, maybe with the exception of his uncharacteristic, in-air fight with Rico Carty). Howard Bryant succeeded admirably -- his analyses of Aaron the man and athlete are clear and penetrating, and the reader comes away with well-rounded pictures of both realms. No matter what cruelties he encountered (including from the press) amid his many triumphs, Aaron stayed true to himself and proved to be more of unassuming role model than people knew when the steroid era dawned. Seeing places like Mobile, Milwaukee and Atlanta through the prism of Aaron's experience, we learn a lot about America (south and north) and baseball in an era when both nation and sport moved slowly to more enlightened levels. The story of the Braves' move from Boston to Milwaukee is fascinating in itself (as are the portraits of teammates Spahn, Mathews, Adcock, Bruton and Burdette). Bryant also gives us deep thematic contrasts between Aaron, Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson. There's a lot of rich baseball history in "The Last Hero," and throughout it towers a class act whose ambition to be the best baseball player alive was matched by his pure strength of character. A genuine page-turner.