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The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero
Simon and Schuster
April 2006
416 pages ISBN: 0743217810 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
On New Year's Eve 1972, following eighteen magnificent
seasons in the major leagues, Roberto Clemente died a hero's
death, killed in a plane crash as he attempted to deliver
food and medical supplies to Nicaragua after a devastating
earthquake. David Maraniss now brings the great baseball
player brilliantly back to life in Clemente: The Passion
and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero, a book destined to
become a modern classic. Much like his acclaimed biography
of Vince Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered,
Maraniss uses his narrative sweep and meticulous detail to
capture the myth and a real man. Anyone who saw
Clemente, as he played with a beautiful fury, will never
forget him. He was a work of art in a game too often defined
by statistics. During his career with the Pittsburgh
Pirates, he won four batting titles and led his team to
championships in 1960 and 1971, getting a hit in all
fourteen World Series games in which he played. His career
ended with three-thousand hits, the magical three-thousandth
coming in his final at-bat, and he and the immortal Lou
Gehrig are the only players to have the five-year waiting
period waived so they could be enshrined in the Hall of Fame
immediately after their deaths. There is
delightful baseball here, including thrilling accounts of
the two World Series victories of Clemente's underdog
Pittsburgh Pirates, but this is far more than just another
baseball book. Roberto Clemente was that rare athlete who
rose above sports to become a symbol of larger themes. Born
near the canebrakes of rural Carolina, Puerto Rico, on
August 18, 1934, at a time when there were no blacks or
Puerto Ricans playing organized ball in the United States,
Clemente went on to become the greatest Latino player in the
major leagues. He was, in a sense, the Jackie Robinson of
the Spanish-speaking world, a ballplayer of determination,
grace, and dignity who paved the way and set the highest
standard for waves of Latino players who followed in later
generations and who now dominate the game. The
Clemente that Maraniss evokes was an idiosyncratic
character who, unlike so many modern athletes, insisted that
his responsibilities extended beyond the playing field. In
his final years, his motto was that if you have a chance to
help others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on
this earth. Here, in the final chapters, after capturing
Clemente's life and times, Maraniss retraces his final days,
from the earthquake to the accident, using newly uncovered
documents to reveal the corruption and negligence that led
the unwitting hero on a mission of mercy toward his untimely
death as an uninspected, overloaded plane plunged into the
sea.
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