Ty Cobb - A Terrible Beauty

Charles Leerhsen

Summary

The New York Times–bestselling, award-winning biography of the baseball superstar: “The best work ever written on this American sports legend.” —The Boston Globe

Ty Cobb is baseball royalty, maybe even the greatest player ever. His lifetime batting average is still the highest in history, and when he retired in 1928, after twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics, he held more than ninety records. But the numbers don’t tell half of Cobb’s tale. The Georgia Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: When the Hall of Fame began in 1936, he was the first player voted in.

But Cobb was also one of the game’s most controversial characters. He got in a lot of fights, on and off the field, and was often accused of being overly aggressive. Even his supporters acknowledged that he was a fierce competitor, but he was also widely admired. After his death in 1961, however, his reputation morphed into that of a virulent racist who also hated children and women, and was in turn hated by his peers.

How did this happen? Who is the real Ty Cobb? Setting the record straight, Charles Leerhsen pushed aside the myths, traveled to Georgia and Detroit, and re-traced Cobb’s journey from the shy son of a professor and state senator who was progressive on race for his time to America’s first true sports celebrity. The result is a “noble [and] convincing” (The New York Times Book Review) biography that is “groundbreaking, thorough, and compelling . . . The most complete, well-researched, and thorough treatment that has ever been written” (The Tampa Tribune).

Available since: 05/12/2015.

Print length: 474 pages.

Other books that might interest you

My Father and Atticus Finch - A...

Joseph Madison Beck

The story of Foster Beck, the author's late father, whose defense of a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama foreshadowed the trial at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird.
As a child, Joseph Beck heard the stories - when other lawyers came up with excuses, his father courageously defended a black man charged with raping a white woman.
Now a lawyer himself, Beck reconstructs his father's role in State of Alabama vs. Charles White, Alias, a trial that was much publicized when Harper Lee was 12 years old.
On the day of Foster Beck's client's arrest, the leading local newspaper reported, under a page-one headline, that "a wandering negro fortune teller giving the name Charles White" had "volunteered a detailed confession of the attack" of a local white girl. However, Foster Beck concluded that the confession was coerced. The same article claimed that "the negro accomplished his dastardly purpose", but as in To Kill a Mockingbird, there was evidence at the trial to the contrary. Throughout the proceedings, the defendant had to be escorted from the courthouse to a distant prison "for safekeeping", and the courthouse itself was surrounded by a detachment of 16 Alabama highway patrolmen.
The saga captivated the community with its dramatic testimonies and emotional outcome. It would take an immense toll on those involved, including Foster Beck, who worried that his reputation had cast a shadow over his lively, intelligent, and supportive fiancé, Bertha, who had her own social battles to fight.
This riveting memoir, steeped in time and place, seeks to understand how race relations, class, and the memory of southern defeat in the Civil War produced such a haunting distortion of justice, and how it may figure into our literary imagination.

Show book

Inmate DNA

PBS NewsHour

After spending 35 years in jail for a crime he did not commit, Florida inmate James Bain has become the longest-serving prisoner to be exonerated using DNA evidence. 
A court-mandated DNA test proved Bain was wrongly convicted of sexual assault in 1974. 
According to Innocence Project co-director Barry Scheck, head of the group that helped free Bain, there have been 248 post-conviction exonerations based on DNA evidence since 1989. 
In this interview, Jeffrey Brown talks to Scheck, who describes why wrongful convictions occur, and why it is often difficult to find or use DNA evidence in criminal trials.

Show book

Demand the Impossible - One...

Robert Tsai

In Demand the Impossible, Robert L. Tsai traces lawyer Stephen Bright's remarkable career to explore the legal ideas that were central to his relentless pursuit of equal justice. For nearly forty years, Bright led the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit that provided legal aid to incarcerated people and worked to improve conditions within the justice system. He argued four capital cases before the US Supreme Court—and won each one, despite facing an increasingly hostile bench. With each victory, he brought to light how the law itself had become corrupted by the country's thirst for severe punishment, exposing prosecutorial misconduct, continuing racial inequality, inadequate safeguards for people with intellectual disabilities, and the shameful quality of legal representation for the poor.Organized around these four major Supreme Court cases, each narrated in vivid and dramatic detail, Tsai's essential account explores the racism built into the criminal justice system and the incredible advancements one lawyer and his committed allies made for equal rights. An electrifying work of legal history, Demand the Impossible reveals how change can be won in even the most challenging times and how seemingly small victories can go on to have outsized effects.

Show book

Blindsided - Essays from the...

Dawn Downey

We strive for authenticity, but expediency often demands we suppress our true feelings.Dawn Downey struggles to find her genuine self, as she navigates her white surroundings. She wages an internal war, her intuition recognizing bigotry and her intellect wanting—needing—to deny it. At the end of any given day, she is angry. She is weary. She despairs.“You get to hopeless by sinking,” she tells us.“I sank through dreamlike images of shackles, chains, branding irons, whips, ropes, nightsticks, burning crosses, and fire hoses. Bloodhounds on my trail, police dogs at my throat. I crashed through all the places that are supposed to be safe: school yards, lunch counters, courthouses, and church basements. From nigger to nigra to colored to negro to black to african-american and back again. Strange fruit. Centuries-old images absorbed from textbooks. Civil rights marches flickering across the family television. Labels, passed down from one generation to the next, labels meant to hold me apart, the other.”When a family member transforms a racist artifact, the act of redemption explodes her self-concept. She re-examines old beliefs, and on the other side of hopeless, discovers her Black power. Downey prompts us to consider how we find our authentic selves in the heart of our discomfort.

Show book

The Trees of Pride

G. K. Chesterton

Three trees, known as the Peacock trees, are blamed by the peasants for the fever that has killed many. Squire Vane scoffs at this legend as superstition. To prove them wrong, once and for all, he takes a bet to spend the night in the trees. In the morning he has vanished. Is he dead, and if so who has killed him? The poet? The lawyer? The woodsman? The trees

Show book

The Long Tale of Tears and...

Rana Bitar

The Long Tale Of Tears And Smiles explores an immigrant oncologist’s journey of triumphs and struggles, from growing up in Syria, to the tragic death of her brother, to her experiences as a young immigrant medical student and trainee in the USA. Walk through her anguish witnessing the civil war in Syria and its devastation; see her become a practitioner, watching the field of oncology evolves throughout the years.This narrative-driven case study interweaves the stories of the patients Bitar has cared for with her own life stories; it reflects on how her patients’ lives and the stories of their survival or death inspired and changed her life starting and raising a family. Each patient’s approach to illness and end-of-life is as unique as they are, and each person’s journey contains unexpected lessons.In the space between life and death, Bitar’s profession thrives; and in that space, she can search for the meaning of her existence.

Show book