A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

Important ... devastating ... merciless. (New York Times )

We learn many of Rodriguez's secrets in Roberts's meticulously reported psychological profile. (New York Times )

Her reporting is diligent, detailed, and overpowering. This is not a book of conjecture: It's one of bootstrap journalism. (New York magazine )

Product Description

Alex Rodriguez is the highest-paid player in the history of baseball, a once-in-a-generation talent poised to break many of the sport's most hallowed records. In 2007 he became the youngest player, at 32, ever to hit 500 home runs, solidifying his status as the greatest player in the modern game, and months later he signed a contract that would keep him with the Yankees through the end of his career.

His reputation changed drastically in February 2009 when Selena Roberts broke the news in Sports Illustrated that A-Rod had used performance-enhancing drugs during his 2003 MVP season with the Texas Rangers. Her report prompted a contrite Rodriguez to admit illegal drug use during his 2001–2003 seasons with the Rangers, who had signed him to the most expensive contract in Major League Baseball history.

Although he admitted to three seasons of steroid use, the man teammates call "A-Fraud" was still hiding the truth. In the first definitive biography of Alex Rodriguez, Roberts assembles the strands of a bizarre and extraordinary life: from his boyhood in New York and the Dominican Republic through his near-mythic high school career and fast track to the big leagues, the whole of A-Rod's career mirrors the rise and fall of the steroid generation.

Roberts goes beyond the sensational headlines, probing A-Rod's childhood to reveal a man torn by obligation to his family and the pull of his insatiable hedonism, a conflict--epitomized by his relationship with Madonna and devotion to Kabbalah--that led to the end of his six-year marriage. Roberts sheds new light on A-Rod's abuse of performance-enhancing drugs, a practice he appears to have begun as early as high school and that extended into his Yankee years. She chronicles his secretive real estate deals, gets inside the negotiations for his latest record-breaking contract with the Yankees, and examines the insecurities that compel him to seek support from a motivational guru before every game.

In A-Rod, Roberts captures baseball's greatest player as a tragic figure in pinstripes: the man once considered the clean exception of the steroid generation revealed as an unmistakable product of its greed and dissolution.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1ST. EDITION edition (May 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061791644
• ISBN-13: 978-0061791642
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (80 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #21,775 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Feature Article Stretched into a Book, May 22, 2009

By	mw1817 (Buffalo, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This book, if it were to be written at all, would have been far better in someone else's hands. Selena Roberts' treatment of Alex Rodriguez is superficial at best and biased at worst.

If you dislike the Yankees or dislike players that sign long-term contracts for great sums of money, then you'll probably enjoy this book. If you're fairly neutral on both fronts (as I am), then this book won't cast a very long shadow upon your life.

There are two main problems with the book. First, it's abundantly clear that Selena Roberts personally dislikes Alex Rodriguez. She's certainly entitled to feel this way, but this should not come through in a book that is supposed to be the product of serious journalism. Second (and this is connected with the first) Rodriguez's use of steroids is this book's raison d'etre. It's as though Roberts said to herself, "Yes! We caught him using banned substances, now I can write that book."

The rather superficial picture of Rodriguez we get is of a guy who will do anything to win, including making use of stolen signs and performance enhancing drugs. Why does he do this? Roberts lacks the gravitas to tell us. Rodriguez's dad left when he was 10 years old and he was understandably affected by this. But beyond needing approval from others and missing his dad while growing up, how exactly did it affect him? We're never told. Roberts' failure in this regard shouldn't come as a surprise. Her bibliography is mostly composed of magazine and newspaper articles with comparatively few interviews.

Nearly everything in the book is told through the prism of Rodriguez's use of steroids or is only mentioned because it relates directly to steroids. For instance, we're told of Rodriguez's strong desire to win a championship and almost obsessive work habits. Yet when the subject of the 2004 ALCS arises---the closet Rodriguez ever got to the World Series---we're given a total of about two paragraphs. Wait a minute. How did he feel about the Yankees' historic collapse? What about his individual performance? Surely this must have made a deep impression on him. But Roberts doesn't see fit to probe such a significant moment any deeper, even though this book only happens to be a biography of the man.

If you've followed the major events in Rodriguez's career up to this point you're not going to learn anything new or interesting from Roberts' book. What she's given us is nothing more than a drawn out and forgettable feature article.

62 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dislike A-Rod only a little more than Selena Roberts, May 4, 2009

By	J. Wells (Hartford, CO) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a Red Sox fan, I've been giddy about this book coming out. I just wish it had been written by somebody other than Selena Roberts. This is the woman who convicted the Duke lacrosse team in column after column and when it came out that she had used a column in one of the world's most prominent newspapers to heap scorn on three innocent college kid's, she couldn't even admit she was wrong, much less issue an apology.

Even with her past, I was interested to read the book in the hopes that she would do some real reporting and have some real facts to back up the sordid stories. It turns out that we knew most of what she had hard core evidence to prove months ago, and the rest comes from anonymous sources and pure speculation. Given her past history of making up facts in order to sell a story, I'm a little leery.

If you're a baseball fan, I would suggest reading it. If nothing else it's pretty juicy gossip for your bathroom reading time. If you're looking for well-researched facts and good investigative journalism, keep looking. This is the National Enquirer of sports books. Sure it might be true. Some of it actually seems probable. But who knows if it's really true or not? Unfortunately, Ms. Roberts' past reputation and the lack of hard evidence presented in this book cannot answer that question.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An Insult to Journalism, May 4, 2009

By	Brian Brockmeyer (New York) - See all my reviews

It really is an indictment of modern journalism that a book like this could ever even make it to the printing press. In what plays like an intense zeal to blame Alex Rodriguez for seemingly everything from global warming to the current economic crisis, AROD: THE MANY LIVES OF ALEX RODRIGUEZ completely alienates the reader and manages to arouse feelings of pity and indignation for the subject as a backlash to its sleazy tabloid journalism. Making the reader side with Rodriguez in the face of unfair treatment is no small feat, considering his $275 million contract and at times clueless narcissism. Nevertheless, that is exactly what happens as the result of a litany offenses, both petty and outrageous, Selena Roberts lays at Rodriguez's feet without any shred of documented evidence.

Among the more bizarre and/or trite claims contained in the book: Rodriguez wore his Yankee cap to a strip club; he asked a clubhouse attendant to put toothpaste on his toothbrush; he's clumsy with pickup lines; and he's reviled at Hooters because he only tips 15%. Reading these accusations, one half expects to be informed next that Rodriguez is also guilty of using Canadian quarters in vending machines and has been known to leave the toilet seat up on occasion! Of course, Roberts offers no verifiable sources for any of these capital offenses. She does, however, use these handful of trifling, unsubstantiated episodes to engage in pop psychology of the worst kind, inferring fantastic, sweeping generalizations about Rodriguez's psyche -- and even what he was thinking or feeling at a given moment! -- without the benefit of professional psychological insight and as if a third-person omniscient narrator. It is qualities like that which give this book the distinct air of fiction.

More seriously, though, Roberts charges that Rodriguez used steroids in high school and tipped pitches to opposing players when he was on the Texas Rangers as a means of "slump protection." That these claims are uncorroborated and predicated solely on the proverbial "anonymous source" is reason enough to view them skeptically. That the allegations have been strongly refuted by first-hand, on the record sources like Michael Young, Buck Showalter, Doug Mientkiewicz, and Rich Hofman (Rodriguez's high school coach at Westminster Christian) is reason enough to be wholly disbelieving. But that Roberts actually argues that there is "irrefutable" proof that Rodriguez used steroids in high school because he put 25 pounds on in a 6-month period between his sophomore and junior years -- conveniently overlooking the biological fact of puberty -- is reason enough to treat this book and its whoppers with contempt.

Roberts' has a notorious reputation stemming from her abominable coverage of the Duke lacrosse scandal while a reporter at the New York Times, and based on the garbage she produced here, not much has changed. In light of the author's shoddy journalism, the complete absence of documented evidence, the singular reliance on uncorroborated, unsubstantiated anonymous sources, and the strong public refutations by a number of prominent, well-respected first-hand sources, this spurious book amounts to nothing more than gutter journalism of the worst-kind and properly belongs next to the National Enquirer.