A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez

by Selena Roberts

Overview

The highest-paid player in the history of baseball and widely regarded as the greatest in the modern game, the Yankees' Alex Rodriguez ensured his place in the record books in 2007 when, at thirty-two, he became the youngest player to hit five hundred home runs. But his reputation changed drastically two years later, when Selena Roberts broke the news in Sports Illustrated that he had used performance-enhancing drugs while playing for the Texas Rangers and later with the Yankees.

In A-Rod, Roberts chronicles Rodriguez's extraordinary life, going beyond the sensational headlines to reveal a man torn by obligation to his family and the pull of insatiable hedonism. Ultimately, Roberts captures Rodriguez 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061791659
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/23/2010
Pages:	255
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.77(d)

About the Author

Selena Roberts, formerly a columnist for the New York Times, is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. She lives in Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 The Good Son 15

2 The Phenom of Westminster 33

3 The Number One Hit 51

4 Like a Virgin Client 63

5 The Perfectionist 79

6 Mr. Two-Fifty-Two 99

7 The "B-12" Code 129

8 The Trophy Date 159

9 The Risk Taker 177

10 The "Fuck You" Tour 199

11 The DiMaggio Wannabe 215

Epilogue 233

Acknowledgments 247

Notes on Sources 251

Editorial Reviews

Her reporting is diligent, detailed, and overpowering. This is not a book of conjecture: It’s one of bootstrap journalism. — New York magazine

Important ... devastating ... merciless. — New York Times

We learn many of Rodriguez’s secrets in Roberts’s meticulously reported psychological profile… — New York Times

From the Publisher

Her reporting is diligent, detailed, and overpowering. This is not a book of conjecture: It’s one of bootstrap journalism.

New York magazine

Important ... devastating ... merciless.

New York Times

Her reporting is diligent, detailed, and overpowering. This is not a book of conjecture: It’s one of bootstrap journalism.

New York Magazine

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
—The New York Times

Nicholas Dawidoff