The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Hardcover – December 3, 2013

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, December 2013: In an age of performance enhancing drugs and a culture of wealth and deceit in professional sports, it's refreshing to revisit the feats of one of baseball’s best: the last man to hit .400 in a season, with a lifetime .344 batting average, who played remarkable baseball until age 40 and who reigns as the best all-around hitter in history. What sets this exhaustive exploration apart from other Ted Williams biographies is the author's finesse at maintaining a fan's enthusiasm for his remarkable subject while confronting the warts-and-all reality of an imperfect hero. Boston Globe reporter-editor Ben Bradlee Jr. admits at the start that Williams was, indeed, "my hero." Still, Bradlee never shies from dark side of the Williams myth: the insecure immigrant's son; the imperfect father and husband; the raging hothead, who flaunted his disdain for the press and a few teammates. Bradlee spent a decade investigating every detail of Williams’s 83 years--and beyond. He even uncovers gruesome tidbits about the strange aftermath of Williams’s death in 2002, when his body was taken to a cryonics facility, his head severed and then frozen inside a Tuperware-like container. Passionately researched and artfully told, this is much more than a sports story; it's the sprawling saga of a talented, tenacious, tumultuous, one-of-a-kind American man. --Neal Thompson

"Bradlee's sumptuous biography details an extraordinary American life while showing us how that life morphed into legend. The Kid reads like an epic, starting before Williams's birth in 1918, outlining his Anglo and Mexican heritage growing up in Southern California, and continuing after his death in 2002 to the present. Bradlee has given us the fullest exploration yet of his monumental ego and the best explanation for his vast inferiority complex....The book is packed with great moments." ---Allen Barra, Boston Globe

"What distinguishes Bradlee's The Kid from the rest of Williams lit is, its size and the depth of its reporting. Bradlee seemingly talked to everyone, not just baseball people but Williams's fishing buddies, old girlfriends, his two surviving wives and both of his daughters, and he had unparalleled access to Williams family archives. His account does not materially alter our picture of Williams the player, but fills it in with much greater detail and nuance....Bradlee's expansiveness enables his book to transcend the familiar limits of the sports bio and to become instead a hard-to-put-down account of a fascinating American life. It's a story about athletic greatness but also about the perils of fame and celebrity, the corrosiveness of money and the way the cycle of familial resentment and disappointment plays itself out generation after generation." ---Charles McGrath, New York Times Book Review

"Superb....Ted Williams hated what he considered invasions of his privacy, but perfectionist that he was, he would probably have to concede that the work ethic that underpins The Kid is exemplary. Mr. Bradlee, who was a reporter and editor at the Boston Globe for 25 years, spent 10 years researching and writing this book; he interviewed about 600 people and seems to have read everything about and by Williams. But research alone doesn't make The Kid a first-rate biography. The author was able to organize the great mass of data into a lucid and readable whole and-most important-bring his subject and the people around him to provocative and stormy life. When I began reading this book, I thought that only baseball fans would find it interesting. But after finishing The Kid, I suspect that even those indifferent to the sport might find its human drama absorbing." ---Howard Schneider, Wall Street Journal

"Fun to read....The prose is breezy, the research and reporting are impeccable....This book very much sets out to be the definitive document of a great, complicated, fascinating person and ultimately, it succeeds....The context Bradlee provides---the heavy detailing, the quotes and anecdotes---brings the reader inside Williams's psychology, to the extent that that's possible....You're happy for everything you've learned in this giant book. Because it has portrayed the man in full." ---Dave Bry, Slate

"Fans seeking a complete picture of the beloved star who inspired a slew of nicknames now have but one place to turn. This complex figure comes to life in The Kid, an absorbing 854-page biography by longtime Boston Globe reporter and editor Ben Bradlee Jr. Based on some 600 interviews that reflect more than a decade of research, this is surely the definitive Ted Williams book....Bradlee's brilliant account is required reading for any Red Sox fan. It's also a fascinating portrait of a complex character that a baseball agnostic or even a Yankees fan will find hard to put down." ---Jerry Harkavy, Associated Press

"A work of obvious journalistic muscle and diligence, The Kid provides documentary evidence on every page to bolster the book's presumption that Williams was, to use the cliché, larger than life....Mr. Bradlee writes a graceful sentence and crafts a cogent paragraph. His authorial attitude is one of restraint, generally letting the flood of his facts and quotations from interviews speak for themselves." ---Bruce Weber, New York Times

"Required reading." ---Billy Heller, New York Post