Customer Reviews

The Life That Ruth Built: A Biography

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This biography, although scholarly, is entertaining throughout and easily read. Smelser was a life long baseball fan and his love of the game animates every page. As an undergraduate at Notre Dame, I studied under the author. Now deceased, he was a professor of history. Smelser demanded from his students the thorough research he displays in this book. But he was also a wonderful storyteller. Both qualities are apparent in this work. Like the best biographers, the author has only mild affection for his subject. The Babe's qualities and failings get equal attention. But today, when the word "superstar" is wildly overrused, you see the extraordinary level of fame this man achieved. If you really want to understand the Babe's life, read this book.

Some legends are larger than life. Some legends are made up. Then there's Babe Ruth, than man by which all other baseball players are measured, even today. George Herman Ruth comes to life in this riveting, yet easy to read biography by Marshall Smelser.

You follow the bambino from his early days at St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys to his early days with the Boston Red Sox. You read about his turmoil with the fans, his trade to the New York Yankees, that later became the curse of the Bambino.

Smelser's accounts of Ruth's life from his first wife to the run ins with Yankees manager Miller Huggins to the called shot in the 1934 World Series and so many others, will have laughing on minute and on the brink of tears the very next.

I have always been a great Babe Ruth fan; so reviewing this book was a no brainer. Smelser writing style made it easy for me to read along and finally get a true picture of the man so many either loved or hated. I would highly recommend this book to any serious baseball fan!

It is a book about a hero that evrybody thought was perfect. In this book you get to see the life behind the face. There are so many legend and this book so the truth and tells you the miths.

I have not completed this book, but expect to read it all the way through. While the prose is not sparkling, the research is solid. The conclusions draw from the research are not fanciful, far-fetched, or outlandish. Other baseball biographies might learn from this restraint and from this decorum.

Another Ruth biography I read, which shall remain nameless, mildly derided this volume for being "too scholarly." Which of the half-dozen or so respectable Ruth biographies would The Bambino himself read? Likely none of them, for we have no reason to believe he was much of a reader. But, perhaps, least likely of all this book from a history professor who taught at Notre Dame.

I am looking forward to finishing this book, and glad that "baseball publishing" has room at the bar for all tastes and sorts of literature, from the slapdash popular, to the considered and the "scholarly."

every sentence filled with facts. research done is tremendous. best sports book i ever read.