Lou Gehrig started his professional baseball career at a time when players began to be seen as national celebrities. Though this suited charismatic men such as Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, Gehrig avoided the spotlight and preferred to speak with his bat. Best known for playing in 2,130 consecutive games as well as his courage in battling amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a disease that now bears his name), the Iron Horse that emerges from this book is surprisingly naïve and insecure. He would cry in the clubhouse after disappointing performances, was painfully shy around women (much to the amusement of some of his teammates), and particularly devoted to his German-immigrant mother all his life. Even after earning the league MVP award he still feared the Yankees would let him go. Against the advice of Ruth and others, he refused to negotiate aggressively and so earned less than he deserved for many seasons. Honest, humble, and notoriously frugal, his only vices were chewing gum and the occasional cigarette. And despite becoming one of the finest first basemen of all time, Jonathan Eig shows how Gehrig never seemed to conquer his self-doubt, only to manage it better.

The Reason Gutenberg Invented Movable Type!

The whole history of printing has been leading to this ultimate achievement in publishing. "Luckiest Man" is a masterpiece for the ages. This book makes me understand just how fortunate we are that Gutenberg invented movable type. If it weren't for the existence of the King James Bible, "Luckiest Man" just might be the greatest book ever written in the English language (and, even then, it is still a close contest).

This book is so brilliant it made even a dedicated sports hater (or at least dedicated sports ignorer) such as myself actually care deeply about an athlete. The writing is so sharp and incisive that that it turns Gehrig's story into a modern day epic, rivaling Homer's Iliad in scope and importance.

Most poignant are Eig's vivid descriptions of how Gehrig (as well as his teammates, doctors, and family) were originally clueless to why his physical powers were slipping away, day-by-day. The book made me cry more than "Terms of Endearment."

If Hemmingway had ever written a sports biography, he would have regretted not writing one as great as this.

Even thouugh I am generally a tough critic, I regret that, having a choice of only five stars, I can't give this book a six or seven.

Well-framed account of a life derailed

Gehrig has reached such iconic status in baseball lore that for biographers he has become something like George Washington or Robert E. Lee --- almost impossible to write about without slipping into hagiography. I only reluctantly picked up this book because I was afraid that I would have to endure more hero-worship. Happily, this was not the case --- Eig has presented a well-balanced, well-written account.

Eig's writing style struck me at first as being a little term-paperish, but by and large I found this to be easy to read. He is especially good at constructing the book in such a way that there is little foreshadowing of the onset of Gehrig's ALS...he really captures the feeling of a life that is moving along smoothly, business as usual, only to be suddenly derailed by an unexplainable ailment that changes as priorities. This was indeed the best feature of the book.

Eig also --- thankfully --- avoids the typical traps of a sports biography. While he does discuss a number of Gehrig's on-field performances in some detail, his book does not simply read like an extended sports column. He has also done much better research into primary sources than a lot of sports biographers, and does cite his sources conscientously. He does not make Gehrig into a saint, nor does he treat Eleanor Gehrig with kid gloves. The reader gets to see Gehrig as a relatively colorless baseball star (if he had not died young, I think we would remember him today much as we remember Rogers Hornsby), but a man with driving ambition both on & off the field. Eleanor Gehrig, while not coming off as a gold-digger, nonetheless is portrayed as a wife who recognized her husband's unexploited potential and who worked hard to make her husband more marketable as a star athlete. The marriage was not a perfect one, and Eig does not try to over-romanticize it.

Eig is not trying to be controversial, nor is he trying put Gehrig up on a pedestal. Instead, he has written a well-crafted biography which will probably stand as the definitive account of Gehrig's life for quite some time to come.

A bio of the man, not just the ballplayer

This book is unusual among biographies of baseball players in that the focus is more on the man in all his complexity than on the baseball career. The book is very well written, not afflicted with lots of baseball jargon. Whereas most sports biographies focus extensively on the on-the-field exploits of their subject, this book focuses on the subject's character and personality, and his relationships with those around him. While hardly a psycho-biography, it is a rare attempt in the field of sports biography to try to probe beneath the surface and figure out exactly who this man was and how he operated. As such, it is constantly fascinating. My only adverse comment is that I felt perhaps there was not enough of the more traditional account of on-the-field heroics. Here is a man who played 14 full season with the NY Yankees, appearing in every scheduled game for 13 of those seasons, whose hitting abilities were truly extraordinary and who developed into a first-class field player as well, and who participated in many extroardinarily dramatic moments. And yet I had the feeling at times that the author was rushing through some of the Yankee seasons and not giving as much of the flavor of the ballgames as one might like. In other words, I could have done with a book that was 50-100 pages longer with more detail. But then that might have taken away from the very effective portrait of the man himself, so I can understand why the author decided to be selective with that kind of stuff. (And, after all, one can easily seek out earlier Gehrig biographies that do give lots of that kind of thing.)
At the end, a truly superb achievement by the author and his editor.
And - just to reflect a moment, consider that during his last full year with the Yankees, 1938, when Gehrig was struggling under the early symptoms of ALS - he managed to appear in every scheduled game (albeit just briefly in a few toward the end of the season), bat .295, hit 29 homeruns and bat in 114 runs. His on-base average that year was over .400. These statistics are comparable (indeed a bit better overall) to his achievement during his first professional season with the Yankees back in 1925. And, more astonishingly, compare these final year statistics to the average then or today. Gehrig seriously compromised by a fatal illness played better than the average fully healthy ballplayer of his own time and better than many who would be considered star players today. Amazing!