A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez by Selena Roberts
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(Hardcover)
- Pub. Date: May 2009
- 272pp
- Sales Rank: 18,026
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: May 2009
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Format: Hardcover, 272pp
- Sales Rank: 18,026
- ISBN-13: 9780061791642
- ISBN: 0061791644
Synopsis
Alex Rodriguez is the highest-paid player in the history of baseball, a once-in-a-generation talent poised to break many of the sport's most hallowed records. In 2007 he became the youngest player, at 32, ever to hit 500 home runs, solidifying his status as the greatest player in the modern game, and months later he signed a contract that would keep him with the Yankees through the end of his career.
His reputation changed drastically in February 2009 when Selena Roberts broke the news in Sports Illustrated that A-Rod had used performance-enhancing drugs during his 2003 MVP season with the Texas Rangers. Her report prompted a contrite Rodriguez to admit illegal drug use during his 2001–2003 seasons with the Rangers, who had signed him to the most expensive contract in Major League Baseball history.
Although he admitted to three seasons of steroid use, the man teammates call "A-Fraud" was still hiding the truth. In the first definitive biography of Alex Rodriguez, Roberts assembles the strands of a bizarre and extraordinary life: from his boyhood in New York and the Dominican Republic through his near-mythic high school career and fast track to the big leagues, the whole of A-Rod's career mirrors the rise and fall of the steroid generation.
Roberts goes beyond the sensational headlines, probing A-Rod's childhood to reveal a man torn by obligation to his family and the pull of his insatiable hedonism, a conflict—epitomized by his relationship with Madonna and devotion to Kabbalah—that led to the end of his six-year marriage. Roberts sheds new light on A-Rod's abuse of performance-enhancing drugs, a practice he appears to have begun asearly as high school and that extended into his Yankee years. She chronicles his secretive real estate deals, gets inside the negotiations for his latest record-breaking contract with the Yankees, and examines the insecurities that compel him to seek support from a motivational guru before every game.
In A-Rod, Roberts captures baseball's greatest player as a tragic figure in pinstripes: the man once considered the clean exception of the steroid generation revealed as an unmistakable product of its greed and dissolution.
The New York Times - Nicholas Dawidoff
Ms. Roberts is an enterprising investigator, and her hastily constructed but important account contains enough dispiriting content to make a reader grateful that A-Rod is less a full biography than a first-rate magazine profile…Ms. Roberts's merciless portrait of Rodriguez as a needy, phony, preening, petulant, self-absorbed narcissist…will resonate with readers of The Yankee Years, the recent memoir by Joe Torre, Rodriguez's former manager, and Tom Verducci
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Selena Roberts, formerly a columnist for the New York Times, is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. She lives in Connecticut.
Customer Reviews
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- Ratings: 44Reviews: 18
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An interesting but twisted view on the life of ARODby Mary81
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July 08, 2009: If you're an AROD fan, I suggest not reading this book. Although, Selena Roberts does shed some insight on the life of AROD,she does give it a negative spin. Although I have been a Yankee fan for many years, I thought it would be interesting to read a book to get to know AROD a bit more. Maybe why he doesn't do well in the clutch, or reason why he got divorced. With in every story that Selena tells, she gives it a negative twist. I chose not to believe many of the stories that she wrote about in this book however, there are some that I believe may be true to a certain extent. For all those AROD fans out there, I don't recommend reading this book unless you can differentiate the difference between fact and fiction.
I Also Recommend: The Yankee Years, A Necessary Spectacle.
This story of "A-Rod" captures the life of an enormously talented, but troubled and needyby Servaya
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June 30, 2009: This story reflects an enormous amount of research. The author skillfully grips and holds the attention of the reader until the end. The information presented is not speculation, but rather, reflects information from the emerging data and accounts of events gleamed as the research process evolved.
Upon finishing this book one is left with several impressions: (a) A-Rod is a very talented baseball player who will, someday, most likely be in the Hall of Fame, (b) He is too talented to have needed to become involved in some of the activities he apparently found himself sinking into, (c) Although his actions over the last several years may have been driven by events occuring early in his childhood and subsequently "poor choices," one just hopes this pattern will not continue to the point of serious problems later--problems that could tarnish or perhaps end the career of one of our finest athletes in the baseball world, and (d) There is a kind of completeness to this story, as though it brings closure to a lot of loose ends in the life of this complex individual--even though he is still playing and will most likely expect many more good years.In conclusion, we can only hope that A-Rod will not view this book as a contrived effort to cast him in a negative light, but will rather see it as an honest look at what is happening to his life and use it as a model to begin anew and start making "beneficial choices (1 Corinthians 6:12)" that will be good for him and good for baseball.
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