In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig
  • Jean Hastings Ardell (bio)
Jonathan Eig. Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. 420 pp. Cloth, $26.00.

Jonathan Eig, a senior special reporter for The Wall Street Journal, had wanted to write about Lou Gehrig as a third grader, when he lost out to a classmate on the coveted book report assignment. Several years ago, as he read Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit: An American Legend, Eig revisited the idea of writing about Gehrig. If Hillenbrand could weave a compelling picture of Depression Era America through a long-deceased racehorse, perhaps he might achieve the same with the Gehrig, whose steadfast dedication as the New York Yankees first baseman over seventeen seasons (1923–39: 2,130 consecutive games played, 493 home runs, .340 batting average, and a .477 on-base percentage) can be summed up in his nickname, "The Iron Horse."

The first two-thirds of the book take us into the world of early twentieth-century New York City. It is a city where impoverished immigrants such as Gehrig's German parents, Christina and Heinrich, fought for survival. Christina worked as a cook and laundress while her husband dreamed of better times in the local bars. It was a time when the children of these immigrants, like Lou, had the run of the city and played sports like baseball without much supervision. Christina lost her three other children at early ages to illness, and Lou became her talisman, the center of her world. His mother, the dominant force in his life, fought his interest in baseball, wanting him to attend college, and he complied. Enrolling at Columbia University, where Christina had once worked as cook and housekeeper for the Sigma Nu Theta fraternity, he was a middling student. Baseball was his passion, and he showed significant promise, moving quickly from Columbia to the Minor Leagues and up at the age of twenty to the New York Yankees in 1923. The introverted Gehrig was rather a misfit in the clubhouse—caught between the rough ways of his teammates and the pleasure-grabbing excesses of the Yankees' star, Babe Ruth. Indeed, Ruth epitomized the Roaring Twenties, when women, speakeasies, and money were easy to come by. Gehrig, quiet and seemingly without ego, was out-of-step with the times. [End Page 146]

Eig is not a baseball writer; while he dutifully records Gehrig's mounting achievements on the diamond, he shines when he widens the lens of his view. Woven into the story of Gehrig's career is the birth of sportscasting and the shift in fortunes as the Yankees replace the Giants as New York's premier baseball club with the opening of Yankee Stadium in 1923 and the Great Home Run Derby of 1927 between Ruth and Gehrig. One of the richer threads to this reviewer was the media's part during this era in the creation of baseball players as celebrities. Ruth offered great copy for the writers hungry for color and story, but when he was traded to the Boston Braves in the winter of 1934–35, New York's sportswriters focused upon Gehrig the following season. "Gehrig's greatest attributes were his steadiness and his all-around decency—fine stuff for a Boy Scout manual, but not much good for filling newspaper columns," Eig writes (p. 204). In 1936, Joe DiMaggio burst onto the scene as the Yankees' rookie centerfielder. Gehrig and DiMaggio shared similar backgrounds and personality traits, but sportswriters quickly flocked to the Italian from San Francisco. Eig continues,

But the same characteristics that made Gehrig seem colorless somehow made DiMaggio mysterious, even sexy. DiMaggio had flair. He had charisma. He had style. He was Fred Astaire in pinstripes. . . . "Joe became the team's biggest star almost from the moment he hit the Yanks," pitcher Lefty Gomez said. "It just seemed a terrible shame for Lou. He didn't seem to care, but maybe he did."

To return to the equine motif, Gehrig, the team's workhorse, was admirably reliable but not compelling. (Even Eig has admitted that had Gehrig's career not ended so early...

pdf