As Allen Barra, reviewing Charles Leerhsen's "Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty", writes in the
Boston Globe:
Cobb was a loyal teammate and straight-arrow ballplayer, tough but fair, something of an intellectual (or what passed for same in World War I-era baseball), and — please pause after reading this so you can absorb it fully — a racial moderate in favor of fairness for black ballplayers. ...
[I]f veteran sportswriter Leerhsen is correct about Cobb — and his book is assiduously researched and his points lucidly expressed — then "A Terrible Beauty" is not only the best work ever written on this American sports legend: It's a major reconsideration of a reputation unfairly maligned for decades. ...
Intellectually curious, he loved biographies of Jefferson and Napoleon; his favorite fiction was "Les Miserables" ... He was far from the Scrooge-like miser depicted in books and articles. He did a lot of charity work ...
Evidence that Cobb was a virulent bigot is slim to nonexistent. ... Leerhsen has tracked down the famous stories of Cobb insulting and assaulting African Americans, and in some cases discovered that the targets of Cobb's alleged wrath were not black. ...
[M]ost of the stories that sprung up about him were exaggerated or just plain nonsense. No other player in the game's history had a career so clouded by malicious gossip and just plain lies; many of the tales were invented in articles and in a famous biography by a sportswriter who hated him, Al Stump.
See also reviews in the
New York Post and
New York Times.
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Interview with the author:
"I thought I'd find new examples of monstrous monstrosity. Instead, I found a very different person than the myth. I was a little disappointed at first. He's more normal than I thought."
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