Don Rhodes

This is a very peculiar book which sets out to describe Cobb's personal and family life, as well as his businesses, investments, and comings and goings around Augusta, Georgia, something of an adopted home town for the baseball great. To match or even supplement the many biographies, most of them very good, of Cobb is a big ask. The author's foremost tool is a series of interviews with the Cobb descendants, and, although these are valuable and interesting, they inevitably deadend with some of them saying that they sort of liked him and the other half saying that they sort of didn't. Past that, despite a lengthy bibliography, the reader gets very little sense that the author did much research beyond looking through the back issues of Augusta newspapers. And one doesn't have to be a Cobb-hater to resent the author's lengthy (and tedious) attempt to excuse Cobb's personal shortcomings by the undoubted liberality of his charitable contributions. The parts of the book which are useful could have been fit quite easily into an article or booklet, and we could have been spared wading through a great deal of small-town newspaper tittle-tattle about minor league spring trainings and trophy presentations.… (altro)