NEW YORK Occasions BESTSELLER • From Jane Leavy, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Young man and Sandy Koufax, comes the definitive biography of Babe Ruth-the man Roger Angell dubbed ‘the super model tiffany livingston for modern celebrity.’

A Publishers Regular Best Reserve of 2018

“Leavy’s newest masterpiece…. A major work of American history by an writer using a flair for mesmerizing story-telling.” -Forbes

He lived in the present tense-in the camera’s about The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created zoom lens. There was no body he couldn’t or wouldn’t fill up. He swung the heaviest bat, gained the most money, and incurred the biggest fines. Like all of the new-fangled gadgets then flooding the marketplace-radios, automated clothing washers, Brownie cams, microphones and loudspeakers-Babe Ruth ‘produced impossible events happen.’ Aided by his crucial partnership with Christy Walsh-business manager, spin doctor, harm control wizard, and surrogate father, all stuffed into one tightly buttoned double-breasted suit-Ruth drafted the blueprint for modern athletic stardom.

His was a life of journeys and itineraries-from uncouth to couth, spartan to spendthrift, abandoned to drop; from Baltimore to Boston to NY, and back to Boston at the end of his profession for a finale with the just team that would have him. There have been road excursions and hunting journeys; grand tours of foreign capitals and post-season promotional tours, not forgetting those 714 outings around the bases.

After hitting his 60th real estate run in September 1927-a total that would not really be exceeded until 1961, when Roger Maris achieved it with the aid of the extended modern season-he embarked on the mother of all barnstorming tours, a three-week victory lap throughout America, accompanied by Yankee teammate Lou Gehrig. Walsh known as the tour a ‘Symphony of Swat.’ The Omaha Globe Herald known as it ‘the biggest present since Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and seven other associated circuses provided their entire functionality under 1 tent.’ In THE BEST Fella, acclaimed biographer Jane Leavy recreates that 21-day time circus and by doing this captures the romp and the pathos that described Ruth’s life and times.

Drawing from a lot more than 250 interviews, a trove of previously untapped documents, and Ruth family records, Leavy breaks through the mythology which has obscured the story and delivers the person.