Spoke: A Biography of Tris Speaker (Sport in American Life)

A little disappointing

Baseball biographies of deadball era players are all the rage now. I was really excited to see that Mr. Alexander had written about one of the true early greats- Tris Speaker- as I was a big fan of his Cobb and McGraw biographies. I was a little disappointed though with this bio, for some of the same reasons I was disappointed in his work on Rogers Hornsby. Speaker almost seems like a ghost in this book, as I never could get a feel for him as a person (in contrast, Hornsby just came off as a colorless jerk). Alexander's text at times almost reads like a play-by-play retelling of every major game that Speaker was involved in. So one gets a feel for his greatness as a player, but at times I felt like I was slogging through play-by-play for chapters on end. That got tiring. I think the problem is that there is just not enough written material available to truly justify a biography of Speaker, the person. That's really sad, as he truly was great and simply had the misfortune of playing in... read more