Charles LeerhsenRecensioni

Pretty much whipped through this as though I were in the dentist's office. The author is a snappy, clever writer and I do want to rewatch some of the episodes, but it's a sad, difficult tale of mental illness and scorned love.

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.

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...

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.

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.

A biography on the noted outlaw Butch Cassidy, aka Leroy Parker and other names. Made famous of course by the giant hit movie of the 70's, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid". This being the real story. The movie version had parts of it right but of course took license to commercialize the appeal.

Butch was certainly somewhat of a mystery bouncing around changing identity and mixing it up with many on both sides of the law. What we find is that Butch's talent in reading and playing people served him well in getting what he wanted, and that was the money. However like all endeavors on the outside of the law it only really got him a life on the edge, and on the run.

He soon enough found that being on the run was tiring and he makes his "escape" to South America. But despite his attempts to blend in as a legitimate rancher he once again found himself on the outside of the law that led to his eventual demise.

Though he ended his life with Harry Longabough, aka the Sundance Kid it is not as clear in the book that they were really that close. Some light is shed also on the question of Butch's orientation. Yet they do indeed find themselves together at the end. Not as legendary as portrayed in the film; they left this world more in self imposed defeat being finally ingloriously cornered. The final lesson being that crime really only pays in the short run.

It's unbelievable what can happen when a writer only uses quotes that he can properly source. It's even more unbelievable that it'd be more than 50 years after Ty Cobb's death before a writer would choose to do so in telling the story of the Georgia Peach.

In my opinion, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty is the most important baseball book published since Jim Bouton's Ball Four for both the story it tells and the myth it replaces. At this point in time, Cobb's legacy has become so tarnished that even the true story of his life may not save it, but if Charles Leerhsen's work is in vain, it's at least the best effort that could have possibly been put forth.

Leerhsen's greatest strengths are some of the greatest weaknesses of Cobb's previous biographers. Rather than spicing up an already-delicious narrative (e.g. Cobb's mom shot and killed his dad) by assuming the most scandalous version of events to be true (She must have been cheating on him and got caught!), Leerhsen shares all verifiable information about every important moment in Cobb's life, outlines previous misconceptions about each situation, and allows the reader to craft an informed opinion. This not only makes the book more accurate, but it also makes it a more enjoyable read.

I've been waiting for a book like this to come out for a long time, so I'll try not to sound too gushy about it, but it says a lot about the author that he originally intended to write this book about what a despicable man Ty Cobb was. He, like so many others in the baseball world (and the world of sports in general), thought of Cobb almost as a caricature, representing everything bad about sports before a more "civilized" era of decency and diversity swept men like him away. But when you dig deeper, as Leerhsen did, you find, like you would if you looked into just about anyone else, a human.

I went into this book without much in the way of expectations. I can say that after finishing the title Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty I believe this will be on my best of the year list. Very pleasantly surprised with how human author Charles Leerhsen made the iconic Cobb. Is he the monster he's been made out to be or something a bit more real? How great was he on the diamond? Leerhsen has done a great job with the research and killing the myths that have dogged Cobb since the days he was on the diamonds. Great read!

If you are a sports fan, especially a baseball fan, then this is an interesting read. It was great to listen to during the post season as the KC Royals battled the Houston Astros. I love baseball so I really enjoyed this book.

We are in a golden age of baseball biographies. From Jane Leavy's brilliant The Last Boy to Neil Lanctot's sublime Campy: the Two Lives of Roy Campanella, I seem to spend more time these days reading about baseball than watching it.

Add to that list, Charles Leerhsen's new biography of Ty Cobb. And I think I want to put it at the top. Leerhsen manages to enter a crowded field and write something completely original, as well as something as daring as his subject was on the base paths. His biography of "King Cobb," as he was known in Detroit, is subtitled a "Terrible Beauty," but it really should be the "Smearing of Ty Cobb."

Make no mistake. Leerhsen is not a Ty Cobb apologist. He is simply a very competent public defender assigned to the task of taking up the side of the monster. What Leershen finds is that many of the crimes Cobb is accused of were simply made up by hack writers looking to sell a story. Everyone knows Cobb killed three people in Detroit, right? Never happened. Everyone knows that Ty Cobb tried to rape a cocktail waitress in Nevada. Tommy Lee Jones portrayed it in the movie of Cobb. Only thing is that it was simply made up by the screenwriter. Leerhsen even disproves the myth that Cobb sharpened his spikes.

Leerhsen does not argue for sainthood. But he passionately and scrupulously makes the point that Ty Cobb is not a boogeyman of whom any random evil dead to spice up baseball history with a villain. Again, Leerhsen never attempts to sugar coat. He just discovers over and over that so many of the Cobb crimes don't stand up when the sources are tracked down. Cobb's greatest moment of infamy, his alleged attack on an African-American groundskeeper, appears to have been simply made up by a player who had been brutally hazing a young Ty Cobb in cahoots with a manager that was trying to convince Detroit's ownership to trade young Ty for a veteran bat.

Leerhsen does not sweep anything under the rug. He goes in search of as much dirt as he can find and continually comes up empty. Was Ty Cobb a virulent racist? Leerhsen can find no primary sources. While Cobb, a product of his era, subscribed to the prevailing notions of white supremacy in his day, Leerhsen finds more evidence that Cobb was slightly better than the norm. HIs father, a Georgia politician, had helped defeat a KKK initiative to de-fund African-American schools. In his later years, Cobb would express unconditional support for Jackie Robinson and called for the fair treatment of the pioneering African-American baseball players.

Leerhsen is the author of Crazy Good, about Dan Patch the champion pacer. It was a thoughtful, well told story. Sadly, Leerhsen abandoned the most straightforward narrative style he used in Crazy Good and in this book he has changed to a sarcastic, at times snarky tone. His style is distracting and at times actually annoying and I only completed the book because I was truly interested in the subject. I read it all the way through in spite of the author's style. I recommend you avoid this book.

While it's not exactly a revelation that there are doubts over whether Ray Harroun was actually the winner of the first Indy 500 (only the first of a number of dubious final results), Leershen does a fine job of demonstrating just what a total mess the result was. The irony is that Harroun may well have been the winner, but the way the race organizers hurried to anoint the man who was their preferred favorite was remarkably seedy. The dubious nature of the enterprise and men behind it (most notably entrepreneur Carl Graham Fisher) is actually the main topic of this book, that and the veritable miracle of how that chaotic day in 1911 transmuted BS into glory and tradition. Again, that Leershen pulls no punches is a particular part of the charm of this book.

This is a good read. I spent 43 years in Lexington, Kentucky and all my sons became racing fans by going to the Red Mile, a stop on the Grand Circuit. They have all long since switched to the thoroughbreds. The biographer gives good insights on how he researched the book, managing at the same time to shed light on the people involved in the story both now and in the past. I am about 2/3's through it and really enjoy it.
6/5/10 Still reading and still like it. Leerhsen is a funny writer. One thing that puzzles me is why he refers to the Breeder's Track in Lexington rather than the Red Mile. The Red Mile was established in 1875. I have found no other reference to it being called the Breeder's Track.
6/7/10 Kind of a sad ending, for both the horse and its owner.

In contrast to Laura Hilldebrand's wildly popular Seabuscuit, Leerhsen's tale of Dan Patch is hardly on anyone's must read list. It's a shame because while the two author's styles differ, the subject of the latter is just as interesting as the former. Fewer folks are familiar with trotters and pacers, but a hundred years ago they were as or more popular than thoroughbreds eventually became decades latter. Leerhsen relates not only the story of Dan Patch but also the rise of the trotters and pacers, the racing world and how Dan Patch for a time became the most well know horse in the world. An excellent social history as well, the book's only failing is when the author injects his own first person stories recounting his efforts to research the story. They just aren't all that interesting and break the flow of the narrative. However, they constitute only a small part of the whole book and some people might actually like them.

Born in 1896 in the small town of Oxford, Indiana, the horse that was to become a cultural icon was almost put down immediately due to a crippled rear leg. The offspring of an obscurely bred, lame mare and nasty-tempered stallion with a decent harness racing record, Dan Patch went on to become the first horse to pace a mile in 1:56 seconds. He eventually lowered that record, albeit under slightly dubious circumstances, to 1:55.

Dan Patch paced naturally, no hobbles required. (If you've ever seen a trotter race, and it's rare to find a track still in operation anymore, you'll likely have seen horses race in hobbles & assorted other paraphenalia intended to keep them from breaking gait.) He was something of fluke in other ways, too - traveling exceedingly well, handling crouds with equanimity, and taking almost every publicity event in stride.

The story Leerhsen writes is at once less and more than the simple biography of a great horse. It's a chatty, sometimes catty, account of a horse's life, of the lives and personalities of the men who surrounded him, and also a window into another time.