Reggie Jackson: The Life and Thunderous Career of Baseball's Mr. October
While this is a fairly pedestrian biography of Hall-of-Fame slugger Reggie Jackson, it appears to be the first published for adult readers since Jackson retired after the 1987 season. Perry, a columnist for FoxSports.com, touches all the bases, including Jackson's tough but not racially or economically oppressive Pennsylvania childhood, his baseball career at Arizona State University, and his great if tumultuous years with the Oakland A's and the New York Yankees—along with his bitter feuds with those teams' owners, Charles O. Finley and George Steinbrenner, respectively. Perry teases out the combustible, contradictory, provocative aspects of Jackson's personality—not to mention his talent for demolishing a baseball—that still make him such an irresistible personality to this day. A solid companion to last year's well-received Sixty Feet, Six Inches, a book-length conversation between Jackson and Hall-of-Fame pitcher Bob Gibson. --Alan Moores