Babe Ruth book
 

Looking for a good ruth biography book..any recommendations?

The Life that Ruth Built, by Marshall Smelser is very good

I enjoyed The Big Bam.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-...=9780767919715

I think I've read them all, and "Babe, the Legend Comes to Life" by Robert Creamer is IMO the best.

I read the same one as Mike. It has the reputation of being the definitive book on The Babe. He gives an impartial look at Ruth and does not dilute the story with a lot of fluff.

By the time you finish the book you will have a much better understanding of the man.
IMHO, it's definitely worth the read.

Great picks by everyone, the Smelser and Creamer books are considered the best ever but THE BIG BAM isalso a great read.

A book that doesn't get enough publicity is Bill Jenkinson's book THE YEAR BABE HIT 104 HOMERUNS, it takes his 1927 season from Spring to Fall barnstorming.

I have read just about everything I can find on Ruth and have watched every documentary that I could find but the one thing that has eluded me is his levle of intelligence. I think Babe may have been smarter than he is given credit at times. The counter weight is that the baseball leaders around him never seemed to value his opinion much, could that have been out of jealousy?

Either way, he is so far ahead of the next best player of all-time that there really is no contest in my mind. I am also a huge fan of Wagner, Cobb
and many others but there was only one Babe!

Do any of the books report that "The Babe" was shot by a woman, as indicated by the HBO documentary mentioned on another thread ( I didn't see the HBO documentary ) ?

Im not sure but on the documentary it says Ruth was dating some latin chick and he told her he had to break it off with her because he was going to be on the road for training and she caught him at some bar with another woman. They go on to say she started walking towards him pulling out a gun and shot him in the calf. He was sitting next to tony lazzeri at the time and from what the guy said they just laughed about it and kept on drinking..lol

Wasn't there a story about a prank they pulled on one of their team mates. I am trying to go by memory, so this may be trouble.
The story goes they had it all planned that they took one of their team mates over to a house, and the plan was a husband, or boyfriend, or something, arrived at the house and grabbed a gun, Babe yelled to the team mate to run, which he did and soon after he got out of the house, the guy inside fired a couple of shots. This team mate didn't stop until he got back to the hotel.
In the meantime, Babe drove back to the hotel, got into bed and continued the prank, pretending he was shot. And that was all I remember. I believe I read it on a Babe Ruth thread on Baseball fever site.

lol...wow I never heard that before but thats a funny story. Im sure that was one of hundreds of crazy things he did. Sounds like he lived a pretty crazy life

He lived it large, all the way. One of these days, I would like to see a photograph thread of Ruth, "outside the chalk lines". All his photos off the field, I think it would be cool.