Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy by Jane Leavy

I finished reading Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy by Jane Leavy. My curiosity was piqued in Koufax after seeing the SportsCentury documentary that ranked him #42 on the list of the top 100 athletes of the 20th century. I read Leavy's book about Mantle a couple of years ago.

Like the book about Mantle, Leavy takes a somehow nontraditional approach. Levy weaves Koufax's life story in between telling the story of the perfect game that he pitched in 1965.

I am not going to repeat all of the statistics that I included in the posting about the SportCentury documentary, but Koufax had an amazing six year run.

While you get a picture of Koufax's life story from the book, I don't feel like you get much of a picture of who Koufax is. Koufax is a private person and I don't feel that you get much of a peek inside that shell of privacy. I did feel particularly early in the book that there were a lot of quotes from people talking about Koufax. The quotes were one after another… This reliance on quotes diminishes somewhat as the book progresses. In spite of these flaws, I enjoyed the book and recommend it.

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