Stan Musial
An American Life
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Veteran sports journalist George Vecsey finally gives this twenty-time All-Star and St. Louis Cardinals icon the biographical treatment he deserves. Stan Musial is the definitive portrait of one of the game’s best-loved but most unappreciated legends—told through the remembrances of those who played beside, worked with, and covered “Stan the Man” over the course of his nearly seventy years in the national spotlight. Away from the diamond, Musial proved a savvy businessman and a model of humility and graciousness toward his many fans in St. Louis and around the world. From Keith Hernandez’s boyhood memories of Musial leaving tickets for him when the Cardinals were in San Francisco to the little-known story of Musial’s friendship with novelist James Michener, Vecsey weaves an intimate oral history around one of the great gentlemen of baseball’s Greatest Generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Great bat, no personality is the conclusion in this genial biography of the St. Louis Cardinals slugger. New York Times sports columnist Vecsey (Baseball: A History of America s Favorite Game) insists that the Hall of Famer s 475 homers and .331 lifetime batting average put him in the company of hallowed contemporaries Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. Alas, where the aloof Yankee Clipper and the cantankerous Splendid Splinter shared a prickly charisma, Stan the Man even a stolid nickname was "the boring one." Vecsey chronicles Musial s enormously successful if oddly uneventful career, his nonracist (though not outspokenly so) behavior as baseball was desegregating, his kind and self-effacing manner, his happy marriage, his cordial relations with umpires, even his lawn-mowing. A coiled, crouching, butt-waggling batting stance is his only eccentricity. A sportswriter to the bone, Vecsey clothes his subject s colorlessness in stirring metaphor and world-historical allusion: if DiMaggio and Williams were "the stormy Himalayas," Musial was "the weathered Appalachians," he rhapsodizes, and caps his account of the Cards 1946 World Series victory with the news that "less than two hours later, ten Nazi leaders were hanged." Unfortunately, no amount of manful writing and extraneous anecdote can redeem the basic dullness of Musial s story. Photos.
