Book Report Friday: Luckiest Man

Hey, do you remember when I used to write these? And then I just kindof… stopped?

Yeah, life got a little busy.

I’ve been reading a lot of fantastic books lately and I’ve felt the overwhelming desire to share them with all of you. So, I’m reviving this little feature of mine. And I’m assuring myself that this isn’t a terrible idea by telling you that I will only be writing these when I feel like it. Which could mean every Friday or it could mean once a year.

(Yeah, maybe I should have kept the blog name Randomness).

The book that inspired me to start reviewing books again was Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrigby Jonathan Eig. The irony of it is, I know that a good chunk of my blog readers aren’t really sports fans. Which means that you might not enjoy reading about baseball very much. Fantastic book choice there, Hope. It’s a multifaceted book, so maybe you’ll like it despite the baseball focus. At any rate, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

For those of you who didn’t know this, Lou Gehrig was a baseball player who had the misfortune of having a deadly disease named after him. If you’re not a doctor of some kind, having a deadly disease named after you is… not such a great thing. It pretty much always means that you suffered from said affliction. And, well, it was deadly. Lou Gehrig’s Disease, medically known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), causes the body’s muscles to atrophy, inducing weakness, then paralysis and eventually death. It has no effect on the brain, which means that you slowly become trapped in your own body, completely aware of your own limitations and suffering.

Forget the Human Centipede, ALS is a true horror story.

I knew that Lou Gehrig was a great baseball player and an even greater human being. I knew that ALS shortened his career and his life. And I knew that the whole story was extremely sad and completely awful. But I never really understood what all of that meant when put together. Luckiest Man does an excellent job of helping you to really comprehend what it means to be a professional athlete, someone who makes a living with their physical talents, whose self image relies on strength and power and what happens when it all just sortof… fades away.

Gehrig was struck with ALS just after his physical peak. Which meant that, in the very early stages, he and everybody else thought that he was simply facing the inevitable physical decline that catches up to us all. And then, slowly but surely, it dawned on everyone that something was profoundly wrong. Gehrig was one of the last people to admit that there was a problem. And, until the disease had truly ravaged him, he held out hope that he could get better. Some of this was his own innate optimism, some of it was that nobody knew much about ALS at the time. And a lot of it was his doctors and his wife working rather hard to keep the full truth from him.

Which was, if you ask me, complete and utter BS on the part of the people who should have been upfront and honest with him.

Reading some of Gehrig’s letters excerpted in Eig’s book is really and truly heartbreaking. You get the sense that, deep down inside, he knew what was happening to him. But he just keeps talking about when he’s going to get better. After reading this book, I had a better understanding of just what Gehrig went through. I also came away from it feeling completely impressed by his dignity and stoicism.

Luckiest Man follows a pretty standard trajectory for a biography. We’re introduced to Gehrig as a small child, told about his upbringing and his early years, given a sense of what shaped him as a person. Eig follows Gehrig’s baseball career, interspersing it with enough personal details that you really start to understand Gehrig’s character. It is a testament to Eig’s nuanced portrayal that this die-hard Red Sox fan found herself silently rooting for Gehrig’s Yankees to win. Which (spoiler alert!) they did. A lot.

Then things start to fall apart and we learn about Gehrig’s struggle with ALS. We learn about visits to the Mayo Clinic, a desperate search for a cure (or at least something that would slow the disease down), snake oil, medical trials and the eventual acceptance of the inevitable.

It’s a profound story, one that’s more than a little bit sad, but which also (in some weird way) reaffirmed my ideals about human dignity and poise. I would have liked to have met Lou Gehrig. He seems like he was a complicated but incredible man. In reading this book, I feel like I at least got a rudimentary idea of what he was like.

In other words, if you like baseball and you don’t mind getting bummed out, I would definitely recommend this book.