The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

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 apart from other Ted Williams biographies is the author's finesse at maintaining a fan's enthusiasm for his remarkable subject while confronting the warts-and-all reality of an imperfect hero. Boston Globe reporter-editor Ben Bradlee Jr. admits at the start that Williams was, 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 few teammates. Bradlee spent a decade investigating every detail of Williams’s 83 years--and beyond. He even uncovers gruesome tidbits about the strange aftermath of Williams’s death in 2002, when his body was taken to a cryonics facility, his head severed and then frozen inside a Tuperware-like container. Passionately researched and artfully told, this is much more than a sports story; it's the sprawling saga of a talented, tenacious, tumultuous, one-of-a-kind American man. --Neal Thompson