Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig

By Jonathan Eig

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs

Jonathan Eig's 2005 biography follows Lou Gehrig, the Manhattan-born son of German immigrants, through Columbia University to seventeen seasons at first base for the Yankees. Eig traces the 2,130 consecutive games that made Gehrig the Iron Horse and his partnership, and rivalry, with Babe Ruth. Drawing on about two hundred pages of unpublished letters between Gehrig and his Mayo Clinic doctor, Eig recounts his fight with ALS, his July 4, 1939, farewell at Yankee Stadium and his death at thirty-seven.

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