Thank you, University of Nebraska Press, for providing this book for review consideration in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Mr. Book just finished Baseball’s First Superstar: The Lost Life Story of Christy Mathewson, by Alan D. Gaff.

This book will be published on May 1, 2025.

I was expecting this book to be a good biography of Christy Mathewson. Instead, it turned out to subpar, mostly uninteresting hagiography. The bulk of the book is the “Lost Life Story of Christy Mathewson”, which was the work of a sportswriter that Mathewson’s widow hired to write a book on him. We already know that baseball writers of that day were prone to making up stories, making up quotes, exaggerating feats and whitewashing any blemishes of their favorites. This particular sportswriter, Bozeman Bulger, showed he was a master of those tasks.

There were a few chapters that were written by Mathewson, that were found in his personal archives after he died. Those were more interesting than Bulger’s work and was the only thing that prevented this book from getting a failing grade.

I give this book a D. Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an D equates to 1 star. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at Goodreads and Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

Mr. Book finished reading this on January 6, 2025.