Cobb: A Biography
by Al Stump
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Book Summary Information
Author: Al StumpEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1996-01-03
ISBN: 1565121449
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9781565121447
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Book Reviews of Cobb: A Biography
Book Review: Engaging bio of the Georgia Peach
Summary: 5 Stars
I like baseball but I wouldn't call myself a huge fan, so I wasn't sure how interested I'd be in this book. Cobb was a well known sourpuss and I figured reading about him would be a dull, downer of an experience. It turned out to be the exact opposite, this book is lively as hell. Cobb wasn't an admirable character, but he certainly was a character (possibly crazy) and the book is filled with compelling anecdotes about his life and times. It's a powerful and entertaining book about a man possessed.
The author of this book was hired by Cobb to ghost write his autobiography, which he did. He spent time with Cobb and got to know him. (Once Cobb threw a bottle of whiskey at his head.) They worked on that book at Cobb's California mansion, which was lit by a single bulb using power stolen from the neighbors with a power cord. Cobb thought the power company had tried to rip him off on a bill so he stopped paying them.
In brief Cobbs life goes like this - Cobb was born in the South after the Civil War. He was an excellent baseball player back at the turn of the 20th century. He was fanatically competitive, grudge holding, and abrasive. He was the first person inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Note - don't confuse this book with the movie. I thought the movie was terrible even though I love the book.
Summary of Cobb: A Biography
A New York Times Notable Book; Spitball Award for Best Baseball Book of 1994; Basis for a major Hollywood motion picture. Now in paperback, the biography that baseball fans all across the country have been talking about. Al Stump redefined America's perception of one of its most famous sports heroes with this gripping look at a man who walked the line between greatness and psychosis. Based on Stump's interviews with Ty Cobb while ghostwriting the Hall-of-Famer's 1961 autobiography, this award-winning new account of Cobb's life and times reveals both the darkness and the brilliance of the "Georgia Peach." "The most powerful baseball biography I have read."--Roger Kahn, author of THE BOYS OF SUMMERNot long before his death, Ty Cobb, as complex and haunted a human being as ever stepped onto a diamond, tapped a young writer named Al Stump to collaborate with him on his autobiography. The result, My Life in Baseball: The True Record, never came close to reaching first base; with Cobb (holder of the game's highest lifetime batting average and lowest lifetime reputation) calling the signals, it was an antiseptic whitewash, as false as its titular claim would have you believe otherwise. Hidden between the lines was the living hell that Cobb--reclusive, bitter, ravaged with cancer, in great pain, and shunned by the baseball community--put Stump through to make sure his demon-filled story was properly sanitized.
Some 30 years later, Stump brilliantly wrought his revenge with the best tool a writer can wield: absolute honesty. In Cobb, he rectifies his earlier cover-up and paints an unforgettable portrait of an unforgettable character: The Georgia Peach--pits and all. Not only does Stump painstakingly assemble the disparate pieces of Cobb's tangled personality and storied career, he also recounts in scrupulous detail the literal wild ride that comprised his months in the company of the dying baseball legend. It is, from its opening inscription ("To get along with me," Cobb told Stump, "don't increase my tension"), a tour de force, as good a sports biography as exists, and an altogether riveting telling of a riveting life. --Jeff Silverman
Cobb, Ty Books
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