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Charles Leerhsen

Auteur de Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty

7+ oeuvres 483 utilisateurs 14 critiques 1 Favoris

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Charles Leerhsen has written for Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Money, and other publications. His previous books include Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America, and Blood and afficher plus Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and the Birth of the Indy 500. He is an adjunct professor at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Sarah Saffian. afficher moins
Crédit image: Charles Leerhsen [credit: Diana Eliazov]

Œuvres de Charles Leerhsen

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listening to the Vitale book, then this bio made for a swirl of emotions. We don't know people on tv, got it. However, they are human beings. So initial feeling was, Vitale is writing waaay too soon after his friend's death and speaking ill of the dead. Classy.

So going to the Leerhsen book is a way to test that, see a different angle. It invokes the same feeling, too soon, too negative. The final sentences comment that Bourdain's brother hosted a memorial, but spoke with barely veiled resentment about his dead brother. "You think he was great, let me tell you!"being the gist.

It's beyond comical that Leerhsen ends on this note. His entire book essentially says the same. Is he a straight shooter that's just exposing the real guy? He's just as bitter as the brother. These people write of the dead perhaps, because they dont want to get sued if attempting while the subject is alive. Be Kitty Kelley, say it to their face.

The suicide jokes and faux concern for Bourdain's daughter are appalling. Published a mere four years after his death, and still several years ahead of her being an adult - not likely that this poor child figured into Leerhsen's thoughts.

AA: probably pretty correct on this and probably holding back some of what he could have put in. He's bold in clearly making an accusation, but it still feels like he pulled a punch here. Perhaps, that's the only thing agreeable in the book. Ultimately, people have free will and having so much, yet leaving is indeed a tragedy.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
Elle_Rodd | Aug 14, 2023 |
God this was a chore to get through! It was unentertaining, bland and less about Cobb and more about discrediting and bashing previous Cobb biographers, especially Al Stump. Now I understand Stump was a disgrace to the literary community, largely fictionalizing his work, but the authors constant Stump bashing distracts from the topic at hand, Cobb, and marginalizes his work. This one is going to the used bookstore along with Stump's, as neither are keepers for the library...
 
Signalé
MrMet | 5 autres critiques | Apr 28, 2023 |
Even today, it’s hard to avoid the names Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when traveling around the Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota area like I did back in July, so when I spotted a copy of Charles Leerhsen’s 2020 Butch Cassidy biography in Wall, South Dakota, I was intrigued enough to bring it home with me. Pretty much all I knew about Butch and Sundance to that point came via the entertaining 1969 movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as Butch and Sundance, respectively. We all know not to take movie biographies too seriously, however, and William Goldman, author of the screenplay, admitted that he knew only a handful of sketchy facts about the pair when he wrote the script. As it turns out, Goldman got the basic outline pretty much right and even captured the correct personalities of the two outlaws, but that was pure luck in the movie business of the day. Still, it was all a jumble of a few basic facts in my mind.

Robert Lee Parker, who tried several aliases before settling on Butch Cassidy, was born into a large and dirt-poor Mormon family in Utah on April 13, 1866. Amazingly, the last member of Butch’s “Wild Bunch” gang (a woman who may have sometimes held the horses for the gang while they were otherwise occupied) was not “put into the ground” until December 1961, only eight years before the movie making celebrity outlaws out of Butch and Sundance was released. Butch and Sundance, themselves, were shot down in Bolivia in November 1908. Butch was 42 years old.

A lot happened to Butch in those forty-two years. And Butch was a lot of different things to a lot of different people. He must have been one of the most charismatic men in the West during his day because even his victims often praised the way he handled his bank and train robberies, and the large ranchers who suffered cattle and horse losses to Butch’s rustling ways were often reluctant to charge him with the crime. Butch was just so damned likable, that it was hard for those who knew him to imagine him languishing in a jail cell. The Pinkerton Detective Agency used the threat of being robbed by Butch Cassidy to drum up business for the company, often knowingly attributing robberies to Butch and his gang when they knew the case to be otherwise. Butch refused to rob train passengers or bank customers, and went out of his way to limit violence during the robberies. The movie got that kind of thing pretty much right.

But, surprise, surprise. Butch was almost certainly gay or, perhaps reluctantly bi-sexual. Along with Sundance and Sundance’s partner Ethel Place (who was mistakenly re-named “Etta” on a Pinkerton wanted poster) he formed a threesome that raised a few eyebrows even at the time. Butch was not formally educated, but he was a reader and a natural loner who spent much of his downtime with his nose in a book. And by the time that Butch and Sundance were finally cornered and killed (there is some evidence that Butch killed Sundance before shooting himself in the head) in Bolivia, their celebrity-outlaw status was such that people refused to believe that they could be dead. Butch was the Elvis Presley of his day, and Butch Cassidy sightings in the US were reported for decades after his death.

Bottom Line: Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw is both fun and informative, something that is a little rare in a biography. It explores the Parker family roots in some detail, chronicles the comings and goings of Butch during his forty-two years, speculates on what he was up to during the dead spots in his history, and tries to explain the man’s motivations as he alternated between periods of thievery and trying to go straight for good. Charles Leerhsen uses an irreverently humorous style to tell the story of Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, and he does much to debunk the many myths and legends that have become associated with Butch and Sundance over time. Surprisingly enough, the “true story” may just be even better than the myths.
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Signalé
SamSattler | 1 autre critique | Sep 23, 2021 |
This book does an excellent job of setting the record straight. Like me and many other fans, the author had at the outset a mental picture of Ty Cobb as one of the most malicious people ever to don a baseball uniform. It turns out he didn’t sharpen his spikes, nor is there much evidence to sustain the charge that he was a virulent racist. And those three people he is said to have killed? Just legend.
Leerhsen doesn’t go to the other extreme, though. This is not hagiography. The Ty Cobb revealed in his book has a hairspring temper who did get involved in many fights both on and off the field. The author does the important work of placing this in context, both that of males in the overall society at the time and of the small subset of those males who played major league baseball. Looked at in this way, his violent streak was not atypical.
What was unusual was the intelligence and passion Cobb brought to the game in the pursuit of winning. Or was it personal glory? One telling anecdote comes from late in his life. He was having dinner with Grantland Rice, the writer, and old-time catcher “Nig” Clarke (player nicknames in those days were seldom politically correct). Clarke explained his trick of tagging at a runner barreling across home plate and throwing his glove aside, the sign that he had just gotten the third out of the inning. Umpires routinely called the runner out. “I missed you at least ten times at the plate, Ty—times when you were called out,” he concluded. Soon Rice had to restrain Cobb physically, upset that his (at the time, best) total of runs scored was ten short. To me, it seems that the hunger for personal record-setting is sufficient explanation for the tensions on the Tiger team throughout Cobb’s career; there is no need to allege a malignant personality.
Within a few years of arriving in the big leagues, though, Cobb was the driving force that led a team of perennial losers to three consecutive pennants. The astounding statistics that Cobb compiled over his career tell a remarkable story on their own, but Leerhsen evokes how exciting it was to be on the same field with him or to watch from the stands. His audacity and unpredictability, his boundless nervous energy, set him apart from equally-talented but less charismatic contemporaries such as Honus Wagner.
Trickier than conveying what it was like to watch Cobb is the task of portraying what it was like to be Cobb. Leerhsen sets out to do this as well and succeeds. Cobb had no sooner fulfilled his dream of arriving in the major leagues when his mother was charged with murdering his father, whom Ty idolized. To supplement that, he had to endure a rougher than usual rookie hazing from his teammates. Leerhsen may well be correct in suggesting that his two-month disappearance during his sophomore season was because of a nervous breakdown.
Perhaps the maniacal gleam in his eye, documented in many photos, was not just for show.
But how did Cobb get stuck with the reputation of unsavory ogre? In addition to recounting Cobb’s career dramatically, Leerhsen also documents the lasting damage done by Cobb’s ghostwriter, Al Stump. This prolific but unreliable wordsmith supplemented the inaccuracies in the resulting book with a purportedly tell-all account (mostly fictional) of the last ten months of Cobb’s life in a magazine article. Later on, when the baseball memorabilia market began to flourish, he sold Cobb-related items; how they came into his possession, though, was murky. Then he supplemented genuine Cobb letters with several fakes.
This side-story is an additional attraction of the book. It is evident, though, that Stump merely embellished a mythical Ty who already existed, one nurtured by the player himself from the start of his career. Perhaps more than any other player up to that time, he realized how much of the game was mental. Not only did this mean applying his own sharp, insomniac intelligence to the game nearly around the clock but also in what would now be called getting into the head of your opponent. He may never have intentionally spiked a fielder as he slid into a bag, but having players on the opposite team believe that he might, was unsettling. It was useful to cultivate the image of a maniac as he raced around the bases, but this persona overtook the real Ty who spent evenings after the game listening to Fritz Kreisler recordings and reading books. And scheming of ways to taunt and torment the other team tomorrow.
A very good read.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
HenrySt123 | 5 autres critiques | Jul 19, 2021 |

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Œuvres
7
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3
Membres
483
Popularité
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3.8
Critiques
14
ISBN
26
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